Workin'

We've been working, working, working! Or as Cameron would say, "we've been playing, playing, playing". It makes me laugh when I think of montessori and explaining it to people. When people come in to visit at school and we explain that we have work time, it sometimes freaks people out. We could call it play because for the kids that is what it is but with montessori they call it work time.

Here is some of the new things that we've made to work with. We made a snowflake numbers mat. The kids can use these with a friend or alone. I couldn't find any white glittery puffs so we had to use colored. The kids roll the dice and whatever number they land on they put that many snowballs on. I put stickers 1, 2, 3 on the dice. Cameron is almost 3 so we are only able to recognize those numbers.

We brought this to school and the kids really seem to enjoy this. They really enjoy finding a friend to play "work" with this. A little girl in class wanted Cameron to play with her so she took him by the hand and lead him over to it. He just adores this little girl and will do anything she asks of him but when they got there he didn't want to so he started acting like a putz. Sometimes I feel bad for him because the work at school isn't anything new for him. Since I've made or done a lot of the stuff at home, he's already seen it and worked on it at home.

We also made these really cool matching mittens. We used felt and cut out two of each color. We used them during group time. We give each child a mitten, turned on some soft music and the kids had to find their match. We've done this with other items also and they seem to understand what they are suppose to do now. In the beginning, they would hold their item so no one could see it and they could never find a match. They are really starting to have fun finding their partner and talking about their items that are the same and what is the same about them. We made 1-10 but when we put them out on the shelf we put 1-5 and 6-10 together. This way we don't overwhelm the younger ones.