In our classroom, children regularly use the Montessori Constructive Triangles Boxes. These boxes contain various triangles of different colours and they are used to form plane figures. They help children to refine the discrimination of geometric form and prepares them for geometry. I wrote a great post a few years ago about geometry and you can check it out right here if you re interested in knowing more about how children learn about shapes in our setting.
I find that engaging children with geometry through art & craft is often the best way to connect what they learn with the Montessori materials to their surroundings and to their environment. Arts and crafts can make learning hand-on and this particularly true with the next activity I am about to show you.
So, here is what we did as an extension of their work with the constructive triangles (and lets be honest , it also tied in nicely with our current topic "the weather in Springtime : the wind"). We simply got the children to figure out how to make a kite out of several paper triangles I had pre-cut the day before. Believe me, not always as easy as it seems for some!! The children needed a little bit of time to adapt from what they were so accustomed to do with the constructive triangles to this activity requiring them to create an object they could find at home.
Once the kites were finished, we asked the children to tell us where they would like to fly if they were a kite... Some of the responses were quite unexpected 😋 But this made our exercise even more interesting and added value to it as it became a good language exercise : the children used good imagination and expressed their ideas very clearly. Have a look at our display wall.
* note to myself : there is no H in palaeontologist!!!!!!!!!
