Math

A couple of the math activities that we do regularly.

Until now Lamb has been focussing on building a staircase with the cuisenaire rods and learning their progression  by naming the colours.

Today I introduces the concept of naming them by numbers rather than colours so that we can start to do meaningful equivalency activities with the rods. Here Lamb is working out what the number for each coloured rod should be by counting the 'ones'.

We found this book on halves at the library so I set up an activity for Lamb with buttons so that he can work out what the half of a certain number is. Here is placing one button on each semicircle until all ten are placed at the end of which he says "Half of ten is one, two, three, four, five".

I did a few other cardboard circles to introduce the idea of thirds and quarters too and while doing them Lamb ran to get the pieces of his Melissa and Doug pattern blocks to make up the hexagons in the same way.

Whole, halves and thirds.

Lamb's language

 One day a few months ago while going through the sandpaper letters Lamb said to me, "I know all of this already, Mum". I explained that I can't know if he knows it unless he shows me which was fine at that moment but it made me wonder if I wasn't failing to see the cues for 'moving on'.

My husband's take on it was "Just move forward until you can see he's reached his limit". A friend of mine who was a teacher for many years in a whole body school which used Montessori and Waldorf activities said much the same thing except that he focused on the potential harm on not moving on in that you might miss a 'sensitive period' for the next thing or that you might inadvertently teach them that the status quo is where they should sit.

So I still do the odd beginning sounds activity with Lamb.

We used the moveable alphabet to find the beginning letters of each of these pictures (from a National Geographic Little Kids Magazine).

But the focus lately has been on three letter phonetics. I tried to use the picture cards from Montessori Print Shop to help him build the words with the moveable alphabet but he never took to that. He likes to sound them out when building rather than copy them.

We started sounding out some words in a little animal book we have and Lamb was enthralled with the idea of 'reading' so I used the phonetic picture cards to make these...

Flashcards with the word on one side to sound out and then a picture on the reverse so that Lamb can check himself if he was right. I store them in a little cardboard box that I covered with black paper for the sake of aesthetics. He loves these but is reaching the end of this too. He gets the concept so I think perhaps we're ready for blends....

I also got a couple of pre-readers from our local library. The type that repeat "I can" and "I like" and the child can work out from the picture and perhaps a first letter what the noun is. He is very much into these but after reading them twice wanted to know if there were any new ones!

So again, it's me trailing!

Matisse's Snail Trail

We found this book at the library and Lamb loves it!

It's available at Amazon Books.

 I printed off some Matisse art cards from 'Montessori Print Shop' to go with it.

And we did our own collage snail!

Lamb cut all of his own pieces of paper and glued them into position.