Sunday, January 22, 2012

January Montessori work

I can't believe that the month of January is nearly coming to an end.. January always feels like a long Monday but we have been so busy this month that it flew buy!! Many children have been sick, unfortunately. So I hope everybody is now better and ready for more action!! For those who were out, here are a few of the activities we went through last week.

We have worked a lot on colour recognition with the younger kids in the classroom:

Grading shades of colours

Matching jigsaw


A little bit of work on getting new vocabulary and learning about animal habitats:




The children love working with the peg game I introduced on our shelves last week. This is a great way for them to become familiar with letters and it promotes letter recognition in a fun way:




Lots of work in our sensorial corner. I printed several pictures of work using the Brown Stairs and the Pink Tower, laminated the A4 sheet and hung it on our shelves besides the Pink Tower. We had been using both of these Montessori sensorial materials in a much more conventional way so far and introducing these little variations have proved very successfully.


Some of their work as you can see are not exact but let's not burst their little bubbles!! They were so proud of what they had achieved. As they do it again, they will solve the difficulties themselves, working as a team.


And of course, the metal insets are still very popular. This is a brilliant exercise to teach children to write from left to right, top to bottom, and to improve their pincer grasp skills. A great pre-writing activity.



Last week, I showed them how they could make geometric figures on a big A4 page and starightaway, little fingers got to work. Amazing work here!




A popular math material in my classroom is this Hanging Bead Stair. The child needs to hang the bead stairs in ascending order and correctly sequence the number tiles accordingly to the beads.  Once they have mastered this exercise, we hang the beads in random order on the hooks and have the child match the number tiles accordingly.  This is a variation we came up with last year but I haven't reached that stage yet with any of the children...But I will take pictures as soon as we have a winner!!!!



                                                  

So this is a little overview of what went on in our classroom. Tomorrow, we are staring to talk about winter animals as partof our winter theme. So keep in touch to see what we came up with! And if you have any suggestions, please leave a comment!!