Kingdom of the Pink Princesses

Winner - Karen Tyler's Montessori Course Giveaway

2012-02-13T07:06:00.000-05:00

We have a winner! Congratulations Cris!

I will send your email address to Karen and she will get in touch with you! Congrats again!

Giveaway - Karen Tyler's Montessori Training Program

2012-02-03T02:33:00.001-05:00

As many of you are probably aware, I took the Karen Tyler's Montessori Training Program and am going to complete it the end of this month. I cannot measure how invaluable this course has been in implementing Montessori inspired learning at our home. Her culture albums alone are worth the cost of the course! She provides a lot of support as well as answers in detail and promptly any questions you might have, which is a real boon when you are a naive homeschooler!

To know more about this course please visit www.worldwidemontessorionline.com or email Karen at karen@amontessorimarketplace.com.

Karen has graciously offered a giveaway to the readers of this blog and opportunity to take the course that is due to begin, March 31st. All you need to do to win this fabulous course is to leave a comment on this post with your email address. If you choose to follow this blog or if you already are a follower, you gain an extra entry, so leave a comment saying so to be counted. This giveaway closes next Friday, by 2/10 midnight. Good luck!

** This giveaway is now closed ***

Winter Word Study

2012-01-26T10:09:00.040-05:00

Now that D is reading quite well, we moved into Word Study. Currently we are focussing on Syllable Counting and Compound Words. We already covered a few basics while we were going through All About Spelling Level 1, so this work is not new to D.

As part of identifying syllables in words, I put together a few words that were winter themed. D will need to identify and sort 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 syllable words. I don't have pictures of the tray, but you can download this here.

Once she is able to easily sort these, we will move on to breaking up each word into its individual syllables. The plan is to provide a bunch of toothpicks and D will use those to break it into its individual syllables.

For Compound Word study, I created these penguin themed Compound Word cards, that D will match.
You can download that set here. As always these are for your personal use only and if you share it, please link back to this blog!

Antarctica Report

2012-01-24T03:49:00.001-05:00

After our unit on Antarctica, I asked D to illustrate and write about any one thing that she wants from our unit on Antarctica. This is her creation!

Scientist inside snow cave!

I love how she has layered her scientist (Sientest!) with all the warm clothes, boots and eye glasses! This is now saved and is part of the Antarctica box!

New Math Works

2012-01-22T12:21:00.002-05:00

Last week we've had awesome progress with D in Math. In fact I was not that prepared, but somehow managed to pull through and put together trays for her!

We started off by learning to tell time. We've had not done formal Montessori lessons on telling time, but D knows the basics from some of the books we read. I had originally bought a "Classroom Scheduler" thing from Target last September. At that time I wasn't sure how I was going to use it. So, I used that and cut out the clocks and set it up so that D can learn to tell time to the hour.

She caught on quickly and then proceeded to learn to tell time to half past, quarter past and quarter to. She was also very curious to know how to tell time at 5 min intervals. Since she already knew how to skip count by 5s, I put together this tray quickly, using the pumpkin picks I already had.

Till now we've been skip counting by 2s, 5s and 10s, but have never used bead chains. I recently bought the short bead chains, so again, we did an impromptu lesson on bead chains for 10s and 5s.

I need to print out the proper colored arrows and set this up properly for her, so she can continue to skip count the various numbers.

She then started counting and wanted to do the hundred board and proceeded to finish that too!

This is another home-made material I made using a piece of card stock for the board. I drew grid lines 1 inch apart using a marker. I have some foam stuck on this card stock as a border and re-inforced using duct tape. For the number tiles, I used 1 inch decorative glass tiles that I purchased from Lowe's and wrote the numbers with a permanent marker. These tiles have a nice solid feel to them and they do not move!

As you've probably noticed from my previous week's post that we've also moved away from the concrete golden bead materials and into the stamp game. Since I do not have the stamp game I've used the RightStart Material Base-ten cards. We were at the point were D was feeling that the golden beads were a little too cumbersome to work with, so I introduced this and so far D is comfortable using these cards for addition, subtraction and multiplication, both static and dynamic.

I was glad that D was on a roll last week and did so much! I love to "follow the child" at these times! (wink *) We are going to be on a 2 1/2 month vacation starting Feb, visiting family abroad, so any work that gets done this month is awesome!

Super Snow

2012-01-20T07:03:00.001-05:00

If you live in the Mid-west, winter this year has been blessed with such warm weather! It feels like spring actually. But the kids sure miss winter! D's favorite season is winter and this year has been such a disappointment for her. Also how can you do an Antarctic Unit without playing with snow?!!

I found this product called "Super Snow" at one of the teacher supplies store. So we decided to make our own snow. I greeted D with this set up one day.

The process is simple, you just measure one teaspoon of this product and mix it with 4 oz of water.

Stir and stir and stir....

Here is some snow!

We made a larger batch later and D had a blast. I am keeping this away from M as she tends to taste whatever she plays with. I never knew about this product till date, am I the only one?

MPS Giveaway

2012-01-19T11:07:00.000-05:00

Check this awesome giveaway out!

Happy Birthday MPS!

DIY Sound Cylinders

2012-01-18T11:47:00.000-05:00

I wanted to share some of the DIY materials from our homeschool. As you all already know Montessori Materials are expensive and lets face it, buying all the materials for home use, where only one or two children use it seems like a terrible expense, especially in single income households. While some sensorial materials are extremely difficult to make like the knobbed cylinders, some are extremely easy to put together using simple household objects. One such material is the Sound Cylinders. If we were to buy this online, it would cost us anywhere from $20 for a reasonable quality one to $75 for a premium quality. The cost for making this using items from the house, $0!

Here is what you need:

12 Opaque containers, if you are making six pairs. I re-used chocolate pudding containers and made only 4 pairs, oh well! I've seen a variety of other containers throughout the blog world, from painted glass bottles to the toilet paper tubes.
One sheet of red and blue card stock.
Tape.
Items for filling the bottles. I used - large rocks, small rocks, rice and paper.
Stickers for marking the pairs

Once you have the above items, fill each item in two containers measuring out approximately the same quantity. Shake them slightly to make sure they make similar sounds. Cut one piece of red and one piece of blue cardstock to cover the mouth of the container and tape it shut. Repeat this for the remaining items and you are done! Easy peasy!

Iceberg Painting

2012-01-17T06:56:00.000-05:00

Last Friday, we decided to be artists in Antarctica and paint an Iceberg using salt and paint!

Here are two views of the finished product!

After we were done, we put our iceberg out in the snow!

I saw this activity here. It might be a cool thing to do in the summer, but I thought D would enjoy it as part of our Antarctic Unit. I was right, she spent a good amount of time on this activity and we even got to discuss some details of salt, ice and melting point!

Our week

2012-01-16T09:03:00.001-05:00

Lots of Math....

Tons of reading....

In addition to Antarctica study, world puzzle...

Sensorial Explosion...

This post is linked to Montessori Monday.

Our Continent Boxes - Antarctica

2012-01-12T09:14:00.001-05:00

This post is about our Antarctica Continent Box and its contents. In my previous post in the Continent Series about our North America Box, I had posted about the kind of box I used. Since the Montessori color for Antarctic is White, this box was perfect! The front of the box has some White glitter scrapbook paper. We also cut out some Antarctica animals and decorated the box with those. All the pouches for the cards were made using scrapbook paper. Nothing fancy, just a container to hold to the cards.

While deciding the contents of the box I had to keep D's interests in mind. She is at the sensitive period for details on things. So if I included pictures of whales in the box, then I better have details on each whale, how one differs from the other and so on. I learnt so much while creating materials for this box! Now I am well equipped to answer most of D's questions!

There are two major areas of focus on the materials - Animals and Scientists. Here are our animal cards.

Here the focus is mainly on Penguins, Seals and Whales. I also included a bunch of birds and crustaceans that are related to the food chain Antarctica. The Penguin cards are from here. I made the rest using Google and Wikipedia. When I searched through our collection of Toob Animals, I realized that we did not have the Penguins or Ocean Animals Toob. Our local Michaels did not have it either! So for now we just have one penguin and one seal figurine!

From here, I got this interesting book called "Who's Eating Who?" that is a lovely read for my 5 year old. It discusses a lot of details and gives an insight into the Food chain in Antarctica. I put the pages in a folder enclosing them in page protectors.

From here (made by Honey @ http://mondorfment.blogspot.com) I got this wonderful printout of an Emperor Penguin's lifecycle. D loves "March of the penguins" and so these cards are perfect for her.

I printed out a map of Antarctica and some interesting pictures showing the South Pole, Ice bergs, Cruise ships, etc.

For information on Scientists I made this booklet from this website. I got the idea from here.

As an add on to this book and to provide some activities for D, I made this paper doll with the different scientist clothing. It has all the layers a scientist would wear in Antarctica. I got the images from here, colored and laminated the pieces.

D loves cars and enjoyed these Antarctica transportation cards that I made for her. I got the details from here.

I have the map and the paper doll stored in a folder like this.

I made got this post card and stamps from Google.

I also created a few Artwork done in the Antarctica theme. D especially loves the "Ship stuck on Ice" one!

No study of Antarctica would be complete without some info on Snow. Here is a snowflake that we used during this art project we did. The drawing of Snowflakes was done by D and added to the box! I made this easy reader booklet for her with some information on Snowflakes, how it is formed and its types.

For the books that we used for this study refer to this post.

I have a series of activities planned and I will post about those as we get them done. We might add those to the box too. Hope you enjoyed looking through our Antarctica Continent Box. To take a peek at the other boxes, click here.

Snowflakes - Crayon Resist Watercolor

2012-01-10T17:40:00.001-05:00

Here is another winter activity that is popular this season both on Pinterest and the blog world. It fit well with our Antarctica unit too. We had an afternoon of quiet art time today.

This activity is very simple.

You use white or a light colored crayon to draw snowflakes or patterns of your choice on a sheet of paper.
We also did a crayon rubbing of a big snowflake and some confetti.
Cut the paper into into smaller pieces.
Color each piece using water colors.
Assemble your artwork, hang and enjoy!

The pieces we used for crayon rubbing, plastic snowflake ornament and confetti.

Finished work, drying.

Proud display on our Art wall.

This post is linked to Montessori Monday.

Antarctic and Arctic Unit - Books

2012-01-06T14:03:00.000-05:00

We've begun a unit study of Antarctica and the Arctic this week. This has given us a chance to explore our Continent Box (post pending) in detail. For this post, I am posting some of the wonderful books that we read that have inspired a lot of neat activities. We own most of these and we did check out a few from the library.

These two books are about the Continent Antarctica. The first one gives an overview of the continent and it was an easy read for D. The next book is a read aloud with beautiful illustrations and repeating words.

Here are some of the animal books that we own and we've read this week.

These two books, one about a gray whale that describes its journey from the Arctic to the Mexican lagoons and the other about a little emperor penguin's life, were interesting reads for D, as it presented a lot of facts in story form.

The next two are fictional stories that we've enjoyed along with the above. (The "Cow" one is hilarious!)

I also got the following three readers from the library for D to read to herself.

To help myself in answering all the questions D has about Antarctica, in addition to the above, I've also made a ton of cards and books with a lot of information on Antarctic Scientist, animals, transportation, weather, etc. I will post about these in my next post about our Antarctica continent box.

Half Price Montessori Elementary Albums Giveaway

2012-01-05T13:48:00.000-05:00

Enter for the Half Price Montessori Elementary Albums Giveaway @ Living Montessori Now offered by http://keysoftheuniverse.com!

Winter Toddler Trays

2012-01-04T13:39:00.001-05:00

Hope all of you had a wonderful holiday season. My husband was on vacation for the last two weeks and we had an awesome, relaxing time and a lot of family bonding! We were sad to send him off to work today. Since somebody has got to make money, we've got to live with this!

Here are some quick trays that I put together yesterday for my toddler. I added tweezers, tongs and chopsticks where needed so that D can have an additional challenge if she chooses these trays.

Dropping Winter Themed Erasers through the slot

Pouring/Tweezing Snowflake Confetti

Pegs on Strofoam

Dropping Ping-pong balls through Slot using Spoon/Tongs

Credit Cards Insertion into Wallet

New Ring Stacker Toy from IKEA

This post is linked to Montessori Monday.

Amazing Blog with FREE Printables

2012-01-04T10:39:00.000-05:00

I just wanted to share what I discovered today!

Check out http://thehelpfulgarden.blogspot.com.

There are amazing quality Free printables, the whole pink and blue series as well as many more beautiful cards. Check it out and spread the word!

Holiday Greetings

2011-12-24T07:53:00.000-05:00

Merry Christmas and a Happy New Year to everybody!

Poetry and Christmas Tree

2011-12-15T15:43:00.000-05:00

There are numerous blog posts all over the blog world on decorating a mini christmas tree. It is an awesome fine motor work, appropriate for the holiday season and child approved! We created one for our school too! I hunted and hunted for a decent mini christmas tree that wasn't expensive, but could not find it at any of our local stores. Finally I bit the bullet and bought a live, small tree at our local Walmart for $8. (Since it was live, I was kind of ok!) Since our tree was really tiny and the branches were thin, I bought some mini ornaments from Michaels and luckily they were 50% off, so got a good deal on those! After spending close to $10 total on this work, I had to get more value out of it for sure! So, I hunted for a nice poem to go along with this, got it from google and created our poetry tray. As always poetry is a big hit at our house! So here is the tray and some action shots!

Both M and D worked on decorating this tree.

Here is the little tree after they were done with decorating.

Poinsettia, Free Downloads and More Holiday Works

2011-12-14T14:31:00.001-05:00

I added a small unit on "Poinsettia" on D's shelves. I placed a live Poinsettia plant and the following tray on our culture shelves.

The tray holds "Parts of the Poinsettia" 3-part cards and a small booklet that D can read by herself. The booklet is my test to see if she would be ready for the Classified Definition work.

You can download both the 3-part cards as well as the booklet here. If you end up using these cards, you will have to color in the parts and the booklet is meant to be printed back-to-back.

I created this tray so, she could also make her own booklet. The tray contains 4 Poinsettia pictures and blank labels. The basket contains stuff she can create and color her booklet with.

You can download the page to make the booklet here.

I had to help her punch holes and create a label for the book. But she was able to complete the rest by herself. Here is her finished booklet and an page from inside.

We followed this culture work with the reading of "The Legend of the Poinsettia", to understand the significance of Poinsettia and Christmas.

Here are a few more new trays on D's shelves. D is free to choose any work from M's shelves, so these are just a couple of new trays for her.

Shape Tracing and Pin Punching those out

Some Christmas themed Sticker Work

This post is linked to Montessori Monday.

My Little Angel turns 5 today!

2011-12-09T13:25:00.001-05:00

Covered in cake and icing,

Your smile stretched ear to ear.

Five candles celebrate,

The joy of your fifth year.

We sing Happy Birthday,

You play midst wrap and bows.

We marvel at how you touched our lives,

Just five years ago.

I remember the first time I held you,

whispered your sweet precious name.

You've changed our lives forever,

Our hearts will never be the same.

As a child you'll love this day,

For all the sweets and presents too.

As parents we'll love your day,

For the gift we got was you.

Each year we'll add another candle,

So proud to see you grow.

But always with the memory,

Of your first day long ago.

On your birthday, special one,

I wish that all your dreams come true.

May your day be filled with joy,

Wonderful gifts and goodies, too.

On your day I wish for you

Favorite people to embrace,

Loving smiles and caring looks

That earthly gifts cannot replace.

I wish you fine and simple pleasures.

I wish you many years of laughter.

I wish you all of life’s best treasures.

I wish you happily ever after!

(Adapted from a poem by Jamie Sidwell)

I still can't forget the image of my 5 lb. 6 oz baby, the day she was born! Those huge eyes and dimpled cheeks keep me going even on worst days. I can't believe my little baby is becoming a little girl. I wish her all the happiness in the world! Happy 5th Birthday my love!

Some of her favorites from her 5th year: Pink, Swimming, Pizza, Vegetables, Canada (!), Math and Hannah (her friend!). She wants to be a "Ballet Dancer" when she grows up!

Check out the Mom Bloggers eBook @ Living Montessori Now

2011-12-08T10:25:00.000-05:00

Mom Bloggers Talk Montessori: Favorite Ideas and Activities e-book has been published, thanks to Deb @ Living Montessori Now and John Bowman who wrote Montessori at Home! To get the e-book you need to subscribe to the newsletter from Living Montessori Now. You will not only receive this free e-book, but also Karen Tyler's 3-6 Geography Album! I've added a "Contributor" button to my sidebar that is also below, that will take you to this post, that has the instructions for getting the e-book. Be sure to check it out, it has tons of great ideas from all the wonderful mom bloggers out there! Once you get the book, let me know how you like it!

Toddler Holiday Trays

2011-12-08T10:05:00.005-05:00

Here is a look at some new holiday themed trays are on M's (18 months) shelves.

Sparkly fuzzy sticks into a cheese shaker

Spooning beads (think berries!) onto paint palette

Popsicle sticks into Moon Jar

Pouring star and bow buttons

Transferring bows (M tried the tweezer, but it was meant for D)

And here are some action shots!

This post is linked to Montessori Monday.

Drawing Faces

2011-12-07T10:03:00.000-05:00

I recently came across this book about drawing faces when I read a post about it at The Artful Parent. I immediately had to check it out as this seemed like something D would enjoy. I got a copy from our local library and D went crazy drawing faces! It has simple, easy to understand instructions that the child can follow without parental guidance. I had set this book and a few sheets of paper with a marker on D's shelf this week and this book was the center of her school this week!

The book we got from the library is a smaller one than the one displayed above in Amazon, probably a different edition.

Above is a picture of a page from this book, so you can see how easy this is.

D drew all of the above herself and would have done more if she had not run out of paper!

Here are some of my favorites!

Surprised Sam

Proud Paul

Tired Tilly

Puzzled Polly

Since this book was such a hit, I am planning to buy this book and check out the other titles from this author from the library. Here are a few other ones listed on Amazon.

Why are we doing Dwyer and All About Spelling?

2011-12-06T09:47:00.000-05:00

I recently received a question from a reader who is a fellow homeschooler and a good friend, asking me why I would be going through the Dwyer Reading Scheme, when All About Spelling covers all the phonetic rules and wouldn't the same results be expected at the end of the AAS program?

The Dwyer Reading Scheme is exactly as the name implies, a Scheme for Reading. To me, Reading is a different skill that requires different thinking capabilities when compared to the Spelling skill. In our house, the approach to learning is based on Montessori and it is widely believed in the Montessori world and I have found true in our case too, is that writing comes before reading. So D has been in a sensitive period for writing for a long time. With all the exercises that we covered using the Dwyer Scheme, her spelling was purely phonetic. Even with learning the spelling variations (Reading Folders work) in the Dwyer Scheme, I found that the child learns that a phonogram can be spelt differently, but the strategy of when to use what was missing. I can give you two examples to explain this:

Double letters that are used to spell words like "off", "dress", "smell", etc.: Reading these words need no extra knowledge other than knowing the sounds "f", "s" or "l" makes and that two "f"s, "s"s or "l"s still make the same sound. But while writing these words, how do we know when to double and when not to? This is the key that is addressed using the AAS program. In this program there are various rules that the child learns and is taught when to use them.
The sound of "/k/" at the end of a word: "c", "ck" and "k" make the same sound, so while reading this does not make a difference, so nothing special is there in the Dwyer Scheme to address this. Then again while writing and trying to spell a word which one do you use? Again AAS addresses this and teaches the rule.

There are many more examples I can give, but I think you get the point. I personally am a fairly decent speller but my skills come from years of practice. I don't know a lot of these rules for correct spelling and I am learning as we go along with the AAS program!

So, since AAS seems to address all the variations and teaches all the rules, why not stick with just AAS, why go through the Dwyer scheme too? As I have mentioned before you need not know all these rules to read. It is enough if you know the phonograms, their variations and sight/puzzle words. So once you go through the Dwyer scheme, even though the child might not know all the rules to spelling, he/she can explode into the world of reading. This is what happened in our case and D is much more open and confident in reading, now that we have gone through all the reading folders. As for spelling, we completed, Level 1 in AAS and are now a couple of lessons into Level 2.

Hope this explanation clears the need for use of both the Dwyer Reading Scheme as well as the AAS program. I wanted to post my answer to the question on this blog so that it helps other parents having similar questions. I am not paid or compensated by AAS, I bought both the levels from their site! I just love this program for spelling as much as I love the Dwyer Scheme for reading!

I am linking this post up to Montessori Monday.

Another good week at our home!

2011-12-04T19:47:00.002-05:00

We had another great work week at our home with D. She is moving along great with her reading and in Math we have covered all the four basic operations including exchanging at the bank and D loves this work. We will probably work on it some more next week and I will introduce the stamp game the following week. I need to go through Karen Tyler's culture albums and put out more work in that area. I also need to put out some holiday themed work for next week. So much to do and so little time! Anyway, here are a few pictures of some serious work this week!

More Stitching

Writing the different phonogram variations

Tool Box Work

3-Part Matching work

3-Part Card Label Matching and verifying using the Control Card

In addition to Montessori work, we also completed a couple of lessons from All About Spelling Level 2 and proceeded with abstraction using the Base 10 picture cards, which is similar to the stamp game. We baked a chocolate pie for my husband's birthday. All in all we had a fun week!

I am linking this post to Montessori Monday.