The sense of hearing

First of all I introduced 'silence'. Maria Montessori writes a lot about the benefits of silence and how her small groups of children really enjoyed tip toeing around avoiding making noise and to a degree my tots are the same. She would write the word 'silence' on the board while I hold my finger to my lips until they have both caught on then I hold up one finger or two depending on whether we are doing one minute or two. It did depend a little bit on the mood to whether Lamb played along or deliberately made as much noise as possible but when he was interested he would ask to do it again and again so that we would tip toe around or eat soup with silly smiles on our faces without making any noise!

Then we practised isolating sounds. One of these activities we added to our 5 senses chart and Lamb isolated the sounds of his breathing and the trickle of the fish tank in another room, the birds outside and things like that. Outside is of course much better.

Then we talked about different kinds of ears and I set up this activity.

I found some pictures of animals and printed out two sets cutting the ears from the second then I arranged them on the paper and Lamb had to match the ears to the correct animal and glue them down. He quite liked talking about the different appearance of the ears especially the lizard ears which are little more than holes in their heads!