A new title to our blog: The Guilletots Playful Learning

So, I have been thinking.... And thinking...

Those of you who read this blog regularly will remember when in 2013, I found myself wishing for more room to manoeuvre within the Montessori curriculum, wishing for more flexibility .... Wishing for more freedom!!

Creating naturalistic play areas - Part 1: ADDING SAND AND GRAVEL

Creating a natural playscape for a childcare setting can be quite an investment. As tempted as we may be by all the ideas swarming Pinterest, the reality is that many of us cannot afford such fantastic features or don't have the time nor the skills to design them. That's why I've started writing about easy, simple and cost-effective ways to implement outdoor play ideas using mainly natural materials or recycled materials.

Welcome to Part 1 of our new series "Creating Naturalistic play areas": Adding sand and gravel.

Creating naturalistic play areas

We all know that letting children play outside is a must.

Learning French in the classroom

Over the past few weeks, I have started teaching a few words in French to the children in my classroom. The response from the children was actually quite amazing and I never expected them to take to it so well and so easily. I used the format of our circle time to start teaching them how to say hello, good-bye, "my name is.." and at the moment we are learning numbers.

To make it more interesting and to enrich the learning experience, I started researching the web for resources or ideas And I thought "why not sharing it with you all"?

Free download - spring flowers 3 part card game

And because today's weather was glorious but exceptionally cold for a 29th April, I felt like sharing one of the 3 part-card game we are currently using in our classroom for our study on Spring. The children line up the cards then need to match pictures to pictures (remembering the names of each flower if possible). For those a bit older, we add another difficulty by matching the word cards to the pictures. So just click right here to view file for free. And please, if it doesn't actually work, please let me know in the comments below. I am quite new at that "game" and I am a slow learner as far as technology is involved.

daisies

daisies

Transition bags (also called "quiet" bags)

Transition times in our classroom have always been an exercise that required tact organisation, patience and swiftness. What are transition times I hear some of you ask?Transitions are those periods of time when the children are moving from one activity to the next. In our setting the main transition causing chaos is usually the one after snack time when we need to clean up the tables and help the children putting their snack boxes away in their bag and put on their coats in preparation for our outdoor activities. Well, let me tell you that kids at that time especially get quite excited about going outside.

Geometry in Art & Craft

  

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.

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Animal Atlas

Over the past few weeks we have introduced the children to the map of the world. They have learned to differentiate land shapes from oceans and have learned the names of each continent. Each continent is colour coded in a Montessori classroom. This helps the children to remember which is which a lot easier and they now can point at each of them on the map at circle time without any hesitation. The next step was to teach them some characteristics unique to each of the continent.