Fabric Basket Game

First Daughter shared her fabric basket game with First Son. I think the highlight is wearing the hat.

Montessori Preschool on the Range

Last year, I created a bunch of homemade Montessori materials based on Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Pre-School Years (read my recent review here) and then decided not to use most of them. This summer I expanded our materials a bit and am hoping to use them more deliberately this year.

I've scheduled some "preschool" time into each day. So far (and we're in week four now), we spend a little time four days a week with one of the Montessori activities. (On the fifth day, we attend story hour at our local library which includes work on letters and numbers in addition to running around in the gym and a story.) The activities cover a wide range of abilities; some will best challenge First Son, some First Daughter and some Second Daughter. Mostly I work with First Daughter. First Son watches with some interest (and would be welcome to take part if he likes) while Second Daughter entertains herself. I also read one book I pick specifically for the girls. We read a lot of books together, especially ones Second Daughter chooses every time I sit down, because that of course means I'm going to read to her. The ones I count as "preschool" tend to be my favorites, though, like One Morning in Maine (Picture Puffins), Owl Moon and Bear Snores On.

I decided to put together a single post on all the Montessori materials I made so I can find the links myself. Someday I'll look back and either be impressed with all the stuff I made or laugh at myself for dreaming we'd ever use all this stuff!

Here's a list of what I'm planning for our preschool this year:

1. Practical Life Exercises - pouring rice, dusting, folding, washing dishes, setting a table, washing a table, sweeping, lacing, tying, stringing beads, using a dropper, cutting, puzzles, cardboard sewing cards, dressing frames (see the ones my mom and I made here), bottles and tops (see our lovely box here).
2. Early Sensorial Exercises - tower building, fabric basket, button games, rough and smooth boards (see ours here), silence game, walking the line, mystery bag, scent and sound bottles (see ours here), color tablets (see ours here), geometric insets (see ours here), geometric shapes (see ours here), color circles (a few more pictures here).
3. Reading and Writing Exercises - sandpaper letters (I made some last year), command cards (our commands are here), pictures and sounds (see ours here), movable alphabet (see ours here), tracing letters, sticker series (see our sticker pre-reading exercise here).
4. Arithmetic Exercises - number rods (see mine here), spindle box (see ours here), sandpaper numbers (which I made the same way as the letters), tracing numbers, number progression (I just cut up one of our extra hundreds boards like this one), measuring exercises.

Our Color Tablets

I think this is the last post on our home-made Montessori materials, at least for a while. I finished these up the night before Second Son was born.

I loosely followed the instructions in Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Pre-School Years to make these. Kansas Dad and I were at a superstore and I picked up oodles of the paint cards from the home improvement section. I had come prepared with a list so I knew how many of each card I'd need. At home, I trimmed them so only one color was showing and glued them (with a glue stick) to roughly square pieces of poster board I had left-over from another project.

I placed them in plastic bags marked as Box 1, Box 2 and Box 3. I wrote the "box" numbers on the back of each card so it should be easy to sort them again if the kids mix them up. (Ideally, only one set is out at a time, but I've seen how my children play.)

This project was a little more time consuming than most because I had to cut the poster board, cut all the colors and then glue them together. It is, however, something an older child could very easily complete entirely alone. It was also very inexpensive.

Rough and Smooth Boards

I mentioned there were a few Montessori materials I made the night before Second Son was born. These rough and smooth boards took about fifteen minutes -- certainly a lot less time than we spent at the store buying the sandpaper. I modified the design a little from what I found in Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Pre-School Years because I couldn't find a fifth sample that wasn't black. (I put them on cardboard rather than the nicer balsa wood, but I wouldn't want to mar the looks with black sandpaper! Oy, I'm silly sometimes.)

These were ridiculously easy and practically free if you already have four kinds with graduated levels of coarseness. I just used glue sticks to adhere them to the cardboard.

Easy Graduated Shapes

Another Montessori activity suggested in Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Pre-School Years is working with graduated shapes. There aren't any templates for these in the back and I couldn't find anything online, so I spent about fifteen minutes in Word and created some myself. Just in case anyone else is searching and wants to use my fancy document, I'm posting it here. (Always happy to save someone else fifteen minutes of time!)
Graduated Shapes

I just used the shapes in Word and decreased them by 25% each time. I think the particular shapes used depend on what you want your child to know the best. I chose oval, hexagon, diamond, triangle, square, circle and rectangle. I printed it out on card stock (a different color for each shape) and cut it out. Done! (I considered laminating them, but they were so easy to make I decided not to bother. If something happens, I can always print them again and ask First Son to cut them out for me.)

First Son did work with graduated shapes in his kindergarten math curriculum (and so First Daughter did as well). We'll see if they are interested in them for next year, but if not, I'm sure Second Daughter will be soon.

Making Some Early Sensorial Exercises

I thought I'd post a few pictures of the even-easier-to-make sensorial exercises for our Montessori preschool next year. It's been nice having something to keep me occupied while I wait for baby to finish growing.

First, we have a fabric "basket." In the past few months, I've started saving bits of fabric for our craft area. I had thought we would use them for something fun like clothes on paper bag puppets or collages, but so far the kids haven't been interested in using fabric much. I went through the box and cut "squares" from some of the materials I thought would feel interesting. I think this exercise will be most useful if I put the squares in something like a bag that will hide its color so First Daughter will be forced to really feel it. For now, though, I'm storing them all in that little holiday box I picked up for about a penny last holiday season.

One of the things that's really fun about using bits of fabric like this is remembering where the material came from. The white in the back is extra material from my wedding dress. The blue in front of it is from the material used to make the bridesmaid dresses. The blue striped material and the pink next to it were both from favorite outfits the girls wore when they were babies. I saved big chunks of them after I couldn't get them stain-free.

Here are pictures of the mystery bags my mom made for us last summer. We picked up the material from the scrap bin at the local hobby shop. She very nicely made the ties for me, but sewing a little bag is so simple even I could have done it. (I'm very thankful she did, though.) I can use these with the fabric squares above, but also with just about anything from around the house. We'll put some items in there and see if the kids can guess what they are feeling. Seriously, how is that not fun? I can't believe I forgot about these last year.

Finally, here are the very simple color circles I made for Second Daughter. I used a sour cream lid to trace identical circles on a few pieces of construction paper and then cut two or three together. (I always save our plastic containers because they're so great for glue and paint when we're having craft time.) I put some address labels on and wrote the color names. I punched holes in them and put them on a ring, because we had one. She can't play with this by herself because it can't handle her kind of playing, but she needs someone to talk to her about the colors anyway. Luckily, that "someone" could be First Son while I work with First Daughter on something else. Or wash the dishes. Or help First Daughter wash the dishes.

Very Simple Geometric Insets

My Montessori book (Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Pre-School Years) suggests using geometric insets to help with coordination and learning the names of shapes. We have some shapes puzzles, but I decided to make some insets anyway because they seemed pretty simple and I had some stuff lying around.

Though the book didn't say to enlarge the shapes, I think the author assumed I would. I did not. I just copied the page right onto card stock (because I had that and did not have different colored poster board). I cut out the shapes, traced them onto blue card stock and then cut the shapes out of the blue.

It was very easy to cut the yellow shapes, but much harder to cut the blue card stock to exactly match (even with the tracing). I especially had trouble with that rounded cross or x-shaped one. (What would you call that? And why is that shape one of the six? I could think of a lot of other shapes that would be more common.) I'm sure we'll use them a bit, but I think you might do just as well with puzzles without all the hassle.

Smells and Sounds

I'm almost done with all the activities I wanted to prepare for our preschool. I am pretty excited about sharing these with First Son and First Daughter. I made the sound and scent bottles from Teaching Montessori in the Home: Pre-School Years. They were very easy (certainly under half an hour in time), but required I actually purchase something I couldn't find easily in my local stores: the spice bottles. I wanted plastic so I wouldn't have to worry about cleaning up glass if they were dropped. I also wanted them all exactly the same size. I often save our bottles to use around the house, but it would have taken a long time to get 24 bottles exactly the same. Plus, with the scents, I wanted new bottles that would not have any residual scents.

When they arrived, I cut 24 strips of construction paper to wrap around (to hide the contents). I used purple and the lighter blue, because those are the colors we have never used so we had a lot of them.


I just wrapped the construction paper around the bottom and taped the edge.

For the exercises, First Daughter will match the sound from one bottle with the matching sound, or the same for scents. So we have 12 bottles for each exercise, with two bottles holding the same scent or sound. The book suggests different colored lids, but I found it was cheaper to order all white lids and just used some extra stickers I had to indicate the groups.


I pulled things from the kitchen to fill our bottles.

Sound:
brown rice
cornmeal
lentils
oatmeal
popcorn
salt

It turns out the cornmeal and salt sound very similar, so I'll switch one of them out if we have too much trouble with it. Of course (and you may have noticed this), my nice bottles have a bit of space at the bottom uncovered by the construction paper (because of the shape of the bottles) so there's always the color to use as a guide.

Scent:
basil
caraway seed
cardamom seed
ground cloves
oregano
whole black peppercorn

If we have time, we're going to pull these out on the first day of homeschooling. So far, I've kept them a surprise and I hope the kids enjoy them.