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Archive : February 2010
Thursday, February 25, 2010
Tidy!
Made a start on some spring cleaning today so the homeschool area got a good going over (more on that in a second!) Meanwhile, April and Rosie got on with work as usual including:
Flags of Europe
Rosie working on grammar. My grammar boxes are not exactly the same as the proper Montessori ones but it works for us :)
So, for the cleaning - I did loads! I pulled out all the shelves and cleaned behind them and then reorganised all our materials and put some away that weren't being used.
Here's our much loved nature table with winter slowly retreating and spring moving in :)
One of our thoroughly re-tidied shelf units - geography stuff at the top, followed by April's maths materials, then April's English materials and finally Rosie's English materials
Wednesday, February 24, 2010
A post of few words
.... and quite a few pictures! Just some things we (April mostly) have been doing - collage giraffe, addition tables with gnomes (no, we don't do Waldorf but she loves the gnomes so I sort of adapted it for Montessori), picture card writing, map work .... and so on!
April chose a picture card from the basket, dictated a sentence to me which described it, I wrote it on the story paper and then she copied it and drew a picture.
Rosie - working with my common/proper/abstract/collective noun cards
These are Alphablocks - April adores the Alphablocks which are on the Cbeebies website so I printed off the colouring pages they have REALLY small and she coloured them in. Then I laminated and cut them out to use as a kind of moveable alphabet. I think I printed 2 sets.
Always save your sweetie wrappers - come in very handy for collage! We've got HUNDREDS from Christmas!
I made these happy chappies - cute no? :) I put them in a basket with a bag of "jewels" (beads!) to work out sums with
Put the beads to the left and right of the addition gnome (in this case 1 + 5) and then collect them up and move them to the other side of the equals king to get the answer.
Categories: Crafts, Cultural, Language Arts, Maths
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Saturday, February 20, 2010
My free files
I've put a section in the sidebar with my free Montessori downloads including my latest file - types of sentences.
For the sentence file, you put the coloured dots on the backs of the sentence strips for self checking - the dots are the same as the ones on the description cards. You'll see! :)
Friday, February 19, 2010
Noun cards
Been a while since I blogged here - illness, stuff going on etc!
Anyway, I've made some noun cards for Rosie to do some review work (it's in her year 7 English book!) and I thought I'd share them in case they're any use to anyone else. The file contains sorting cards for common, proper and abstract nouns and sentence strips for collective nouns with gaps to fill in. The first 2 pages in the file contain the control charts and heading cards.
Here's the file :)
Friday, February 05, 2010
Boastful mummy moment!
Woohoo! Rosie did her first end of topic test on Conquer maths and passed with 100%!!!
Since the 19th January she's been studying: expanded notation using 10,100 etc, expanded notation using Powers, expanded notation as a numeral, order of operations (levels 1 and 2) and number of properties. Some of these topics we've only very briefly scraped the surface of in the past so for her to pass with 100% is just AMAZING! I'm so proud of her!
Not all that long ago, Rosie was struggling with even the basic concept of carrying/borrowing and place value to the 100's - now she's tackling sums like these with NO problem whatsoever:
I'm fairly convinced that the reason she got over her "problems" with maths and retained more was because we gave up on the workbooks and did everything "hands on" - a combination of Montessori and more regular maths stuff like Unifix cubes, Cuisenaire rods, fractions circles etc. I really believe now that kids need a concrete way of learning maths before going on to more abstract work.
The Conquer Maths she's doing now works in a similar way - albeit on the computer! The lessons use lots of pictures, diagrams, charts and step by step instructions and examples before moving on to any sums.
By the way, I'm not getting paid to say nice things about this company - I just think it's terrific and want to pass that on to people!
Tuesday, February 02, 2010
Valetine's activities
Here are 2 activities especially for Valentine's Day :)
The first is a patterning activity - just laminate and cut the strips apart and the pieces to finish the patterns. Click under the pictures to download:
The second activity is a set of cards and counters:
See archive index for other posts