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Category Archives:montessori curious

Dec. 12.

DIY Color Tablets and Classified Cards

By squidmom | Posted in montessori curious |
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Gizmo and I  are still attempting a few Montessori lessons. Today  I wanted to talk a little about the color tablets that I made for her and also a set of classified cards I put together.

For this set of classified cards I cut pictures out of old magazines and glued them onto cut up cereal boxes. I sealed them with a mixture of half glue, half water. First I looked for pictures to represent categories and then I looked for the smaller pictures that went with each category. We have a category for Winter, the Beach, a Garden, a Kitchen, a Bathroom, a Bedroom, a Living room and a Playroom.

  This is a close up of our Winter set. the first time we used these I had to lay the cards out myself and show how to put the cards in the category they went into. Gizmo still likes me to do these with her but she knows where all of the cards go on her own. This is one of her favorite Montessori activities besides pouring beans so far.  

I love the DIY color tablets that I’ve seen around the net. These are usually made with paint samples and  thin strips of wood. I wanted to try painting my own though and I used a material that we have in abundance, canvas stretchers.  Box 1 was the easiest to make because all I had to do was use paint straight from a tube. I used acrylic paints and also painted the ends of the canvas stretchers white.

For Box 2 added orange and purple to the primary colors. These had to be mixed up and I’m not  really in love with the results that I got.

 
For Box 3 I added a teal color and a couple drops of white to get to the variations of the colors. If you chose to paint your own and are going to mix some of the colors you really need to do all of the boxes at once. This is what I did and that made  having the same shades in all of the boxes possible. The tablets in box 3 are numbered in back for self checking. I did not make the 11 colors that are usally presented in a Box 3 set. I may add more colors later but we are still on box 2 so I have a little time to think about that.

There are a lot of examples of how to make color tablets  so I would recommend looking at everything out there before deciding which way to go if you want to try your hand at this. Montessori Helper has a very helpful roundup list with many links for this. For more information on what each box of color tablets consists of and on  how to present color tablets you can look here.  

Would you like to see what we will be sharing this week?

Wednesday: Having fun with Pointillisim

Friday: Fun Snowman Window Stickers

And starting Monday we will have lots of ideas for activities you can do with your child during their Christmas vacation. I’ve had a lot of thinking to do on this because the kid is very ready for Christmas but not looking forward to having three weeks off of school!

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Dec. 07.

Learning about Africa

By squidmom | Posted in Learning Fun, montessori curious |
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One of my favorite aspects of the Montessori method is the focus on cultural studies. I really, really hope to be able to put together a set of continent boxes for my girls. I haven’t even begun to do that yet, but we have begun to learn about the names of the continents and about the animals that come from these continents.

During our time spent focusing on Africa I put together a shelf that contained the items above as well as some plastic and stuffed animals that could be found in Africa.

We were also able to use these in our pretend African safari.

We found the animal cards from Walk Beside Me and they are free of charge to print out. Once I printed them  I cut out the cards and placed them into small plastic candy favor bags for handling and taped them closed. You could of course, laminate them or cover them with clear contact paper. I used candy bags because I had a lot that weren’t being used for anything else. They are being stored in a zebra print traveling case. 

We also explored a website that showed several different masks from different regions of Africa and talked about how and why the masks were used. I let the girls pick which masks they would like trying to make or helping me make.

Gizmo chose to make a Dan mask and that is the one pictured above. We used cereal boxes to make the masks. I drew the image out for her freehand and she painted it and glued the Popsicle stick  to the back. She also glued on the yarn to serve as the mask’s hair. 

The kid chose to make a Bwa mask but took it to her Grandmother’s house and it was lost  before I got to take a picture of it. She’s wanting to make another to replace it and if she does I’ll make sure to update this post.

I’ve since found this website,  which offers print outs that would help a lot if you’d like to make your own masks.

I plan on making a cardboard and homemade puffy paint picture (shown at top of post)  for every continent. I used the Africa image from Walk Beside Me but made it bigger on our computer before printing it out. I then used this to trace the image on to a piece of thick cardboard. I used this recipe for homemade puffy paint and I’m really pleased with the results. I think the tactile aspect of it will help the littles learn their continents. I was a little worried about it breaking a part because I used a very thick amount of puffy paint on Africa and Madagascar to make it well, extra puffy. I guarantee you though, this Africa has been handled a lot and it has withstood it very well.       

Included on our shelf was also a shell necklace that my brother in law purchased in Egypt. We really didn’t focus on Egypt as much as I would’ve liked to but I plan on returning to it in the future.

We also made this recipe together:

Banana Fritters from Madagascar

And looked at the Africa for Kids section at PBS.org. There is a neat Swahili folktale that the kids were able to listen to together.

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foam shape on a window
Nov. 29.

If your DIY Montessori shapes don’t quite work…

By squidmom | Posted in Learning Fun, montessori curious |
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If your DIY Montessori shapes don’t quite work..

Mommy will try making them again but out of cork.

 A while back ago I talked about reading  B-A-S-I-C Montessori, Learning Activities for Under Fives by David Gettman. I’ve since gotten through that book and am looking to read more Montessori books in the future. I’ve also been working on a few DIY Montessori materials for Gizmo. Some have worked better then others. I’m still not sure if this is a method I want to use exclusively.  I’m pretty sure that I’d be incorporating some of the materials and lessons into our day but I’ll also be open to trying other things that I think will work for us. Gizmo is a very creative child, she can literally  turn anything into a toy and does this constantly. This is a little hard to work around when you are trying to teach the Montessori way, which to my understanding discourages the materials being used in other ways then directed. I’m obviously not Montessori trained nor have I done as much research as I would like to have done. I’m eager and I usually go ahead with things before being as prepared as I should be. (Another indication that I’m probably not the best suited for this way of teaching!) That’s okay, I still think that a lot of the lessons can be modified or used without having to apply the method exclusively.

One of the Montessori materials that I would really like to purchase is the Montessori Geometric Cabinet. I can’t buy it yet so I tried to make my own.

  

 I printed out a assortment of  shapes from Microsoft publisher and then cut and traced them onto a large sheet of white foam board.

I cut out the shapes using what I call an exacto knife and what my husband insists on calling a scalpel.(I’m not sure which of us is right but I’m guessing that it’s me, just because a scalpel reminds me of medical shows.)

I then traced the shape spaces that resulted onto a piece of mat board the same size as the foam board that I had painted pink. I also painted the foam shapes pink to match.

The shape’s holders came from a dowel stick I cut into equal length segments. (about an inch long)

I like this set of shapes for a lot of uses but it’s not exactly Montessori for a lot of other reasons.

One, the shapes are not as exact as I would like them to be. I’m not a skilled exacto knife or scalpel user I guess.

Two, all of the shapes in the Montessori geometric cabinet are obviously not depicted here. This was because I used the shapes that I could find and that would fit and also because I didn’t use my book as a reference as I probably should have.

Three, the edges aren’t very smooth which means that they aren’t awesome for serving as a tactile introduction to Geometry, which is kind of the whole point of a Montessori shape cabinet.

  This was probably a Montessori fail but it’s good naming shapes practice and we’ve discovered another cool thing about them which is:

 If you wet them they stick on a window. (Thank you Imagination tree for that suggestion.)

And we have been having a lot of fun using them in this way.

Also,the handles mean that the cat can pull them out of place using his mouth and carry them across the room which is always fun to watch. And I just figured this post would less like an oops moment if I had called it” How to make fun foam stick on shapes!” ;)

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