What DID we do all day?

Miniatures Collection: Storage, Acquisition, and Advice

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 13 Feb 2012 04:30:00 +0000

Our miniatures collection is an important part of our learning here at What DID We Do All Day? What started out as a small phonics objects collection has grown to be part of our learning almost across our "curriculum." We use these little guys in sound bins, object boxes, continent boxes, and all over the culture shelves in general. In the near future I see that they will be pressed into service for grammar work, zoology, and who knows what else?

STORAGE:

The miniatures collection is one of those resources I store right in the school room where I can access them at any moment to make changes on the shelves.

You got a little sneak peek at these in our school room tour. The miniatures collection is stored in hardware drawers on top of our geography shelves. I have another pair on top of our music shelves that hold manipulatives. The little, woven basket on the top is a place for me to stash object quickly when I'm too lazy or rushed to sort them into the correct drawers.

Unlike some Montessori Moms, I don't allow the boys to access to the items in these drawers. They get to use the items as they are used in works on the shelves, but they are not to take anything out of the drawers without asking permission. They are familiar with what is in them, and will frequently ask for something when it is just the "right thing" for what they are up to that day.

When our miniatures were merely a "phonics objects" collection I started out with the smaller drawers. We outgrew those rather quickly so they were retired to the manipulatives area and replaced with the larger type.

Together the two cabinets have 36 drawers. Thanks to judicious doubling using drawer dividers I have enough room for all forty key sounds and I've giving some prolific letters of the alphabet more than one drawer. So, some letters (like b, c, s, etc.,) have two drawers and there are also drawers for "th," "ou, oo," and the like. I like to be able to change these around at will so I simply wrote the letter names on the front of the drawers with a dray erase marker. They don't show up well in the pictures (they probably show up best in the first picture on the right-hand cabinet), but they are perfectly legible in person.

WHERE DID I GET OUR OBJECTS?

I occasionally get asked where I found all of our miniatures. They have been scrapped together from a variety of places.

The first place I looked was around my house. You are sure to find things like a "toothpick", a birthday "candle," or a "lightbulb" from a nightlight. Our "oa" sound bin has a ziploc bag full of "oats." I cut a zipper off an old baby outfit for the "Z" bin. I grabbed a "feather" out of our art supplies, a "rock" from the driveway, and "velcro" out of the sewing basket.

The craft store, dollar store, and party store all sell little bags of odd things like miniature clay "pots", wooden "fences", miniature "jars", or "marbles." They will also have collections of things for "party favors" or "wedding decorations." I have a "dove" from the wedding aisle, and a "compass" from the pirate party decor.

A good craft or fabric store will also have 1000's of little collections of themed buttons. I found a ton of miniatures that way.

An obvious source of miniatures are Toob collections. You will get mostly animals this way, but these will do double duty on your "culture" shelves.

At least 1/3 of my objects are small Christmas ornaments or parts of Christmas villages. I went crazy one year when everything was 90% off after Christmas. And now, there is a big trend to decorate little trees for other holidays (Easter, Valentines Day, Halloween). I scored a bunch of new objects one day after Halloween when I bought a pack of miniature ornaments that included: ghost, witch, wizard, werewolf, haunted house, spider, and web. I even found a pack of "cowboy" ornaments once.

Don't forget about Montessori services. I used them to find hard-to-get objects to fill out some of the more difficult letters. I bought a fishing "rod," a "vacuum", and a tennis "racket" among other things.

Another great way to fill out a difficult letter is to make an object yourself. For example, I painted this little "vampire" for the "V" sound bin.

You can use sculpy clay to mold and paint objects as well. I've always wanted to do a "volcano." My mom stitched up a little "quilt" for "qu." My grandmother knitted tiny little slippers, mittens, and hats that are in our collection as well.

I have also had a lot of fun at thrift stores. One of my favorite miniature thrift finds is this "inch" for our "i" drawer.

Finally, don't forget to look at your kids' toys! I routinely hit up the boys' play foods and play farm/zoo among other things. If I had girls their Barbies and dollhouses might be frequent targets.

ADVICE:

1. START by collecting objects that can be used in your phonetic reading work. Whether you plan to use the PBG series or Dwyer, you are only going to be in the pre-reading/I Spy stage for so long. That fantastic "hummingbird" that you found at the craft store will be a lot of fun for playing "I Spy" or doing a sounds sort, but not very useful when your four-year-old is reading and writing his first words. There is a nice list available here at Montessori for Everyone of objects that are useful in either reading scheme. I would collect those items FIRST. Afterward, feel free to have a blast filling out the rest of your collection with whatever you can find. On another note, I like to handwrite my labels for language work in real time in front of the child whenever possible to emphasize the communicative nature of reading and writing. However, I like to save them when I'm done so the work can be left out for independent work. It is easy to tuck such little labels right into the hardware drawers along with the objects for storage.

2. Don't forget your double-letter sounds! You also need to aurally prepare your child for work with the following sounds: ai, ee, ie, oa, ue, ar, er, or, oo, ou, oy, sh, ch, th qu. I sometimes wonder if the reason one child flies through the double sandpaper letters and another gets stuck is because sometimes the doubles get forgotten during the sound games.

3. Don't be afraid to use full-sized objects to do your work if your collection for a particular sound is a little thin. Here is a picture of the objects Me Too recently used to review the letter "y":

4. It's okay to use a few photographs to fill things out. There are some photographs tucked in many of our drawers. They aren't as compelling as the objects, but they are often necessary in the land of double-letters to get your point across. It helps A LOT if you can use a photograph that relates to your child personally. For example, when Me Too recently reviewed the letter "u" one of the photos was of himself "underwater" and his very own "uncle" on a bicycle.

5. Don't limit yourself to initial sounds for the double letters. When you are practicing ending and middle sounds for the single letters you will probably find enough objects among your "initial sounds" collection to get what you need. Double letters are trickier. I pulled a "jeep" out of the boys Hot Wheels last week and a "sheep" out of their farm for extra "ee" practice. I store most of our objects by initial sound. The doubles drawers have objects with the sound in any position.

6. Make reminder slips. Some of my drawers have a little card in them with "reminders." I might write the words "sheep" and "jeep" on that card in my "ee" drawer so I remember to pull them from their respective drawers ("sh", or "j") if that is where they are stored. Or, conversely, I could have a reminder in my "a" drawer that the "ax" is stored in the "x" drawer. I have the word "eggplant" on my "e" drawer so I remember that we have an "eggplant" upstairs in the toy kitchen. I laminated these little cards and use a dry erase so I can move things around at will without having to make them again.

WHAT OBJECTS ARE IN OUR DRAWERS?

If you are looking for a more specific rundown of what is in each of our drawers, you can get a better idea by looking at our Sound Bins by clicking on this link or using the tab at the top of my blog page under the header. That page is a work in progress, but most of the 16 bins featured are among the more difficult sounds to represent. I am adding to that page as I get the time to pull out a drawer and photograph the contents or as the boys use the contents of a particular drawer. If you have a particular sound you are having trouble with and it is not already featured, feel free to make a request by leaving a comment or sending me an e-mail and I'll move that letter to the top of the queue. My sound bins posts will never be a 100% thorough representation of what I have for each drawer because many objects are in use and tucked away in continent boxes or the like. I have enough objects that this is not usually a problem when I am pulling together language work. I do have to have a vague awareness of where things are so that I can pull a "yak" out of the Asia box when I want to.

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School Days

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 19:10:00 +0000

I am so excited about how this transpired today! Leave a child alone in a prepared environment with the right information and materials at their disposal and marvelous things will happen. Despite being a "primary" material I feel like our work with the wooden Montessori maps is just beginning. I have gently presented the maps again and again over the past few years, but the boys just never caught the flame. We've looked at them, talked about them, and transfered a few pieces to the control maps. But, the boys were always very willing to put them away quite quickly.

I have seen some sparks lately when I found Kal-el working with the South America map and the United States map. I have never shown them that they could trace the pieces, pin punch the pieces or draw a map because it wasn't the right time. Yesterday I was pretty hands on during our work time because the boys requested "new information" for hour after hour. Today it seems they had a lot to digest so they didn't ask for me much. I was doing a little laundry when Kal-El came into the laundry room to proudly show me the map he made. All on his own he recreated a perfect map of Australia/Oceania by tracing the puzzle pieces from the map with a pencil and coloring it in. I like to imagine that it was spontaneous work like this by Maria Montessori's own students that led to this work being in the albums in the first place :) It's nice to let them discover things and not show them everything.

He memorized the names of all six Australian states today so perhaps tomorrow he can make some labels.

He also drew a map by hand of the "Capricorn Geotourism Trail" that stretches from the Great Barrier Reef to Ayers rock (along the Tropic of Capricorn, hence the name). He really wants to take a trip and walk this trail. Who wouldn't?...snorkeling, caves, dinosaur footprints, sapphires, petrified wood from a volcanic eruption, and one of the "modern" seven wonders of the world?

His map says, "Start: Great Barrier Reef." Never mind the spelling, but we do apparently need to talk about the difference between a "reef" and a "wreath."

Me Too is a proud little boy today as well having worked with the golden beads for the first time!

He was super excited, but kept asking me when he could "exchange" the whole time. Patience kiddo!

Kal-El worked with the beads yesterday also. I have some particular problems I want us to work through before we do the stamp game (multiplication with the product as zero, division with a remainder, division with zeros in the dividend, etc.,). In this photo Kal-El has done 1000-999 to find and is showing me the remainder of one.

In this photo he is dividing 4269 by 3:

He has been revisiting the 1000 chain a lot. He doesn't want to count it, but likes to fold it into ten 100 squares.

While all this was going on, Me Too spent about 45 minutes practicing the alphabetic sequence with this puzzle:

He also worked with the binomial cube, taking it apart to see all the inside faces and check if the match the outside faces and building it outside the box.

Kal-El is also revisiting the 100 board. He wants to leave it out and build a row a day. I guess I won't be vacuuming in here for a while.

Another new development is that Kal-El is suddenly interested in the names of the shapes he can make with the constructive triangles. In the past, telling him the name of the shape was the quickest way to get him to put them back in the box.

All of this has made me think a lot about my post on the pacing of the math sequence. I am no longer feeling depressed. I am starting to feel like I did things pretty close to right. If the boys aren't ready, so much information just rolls off of them like water on a duck's back. When it's the right time they soak it up like a sponge (absorbent mind anyone?). I think this is the difference between using the Montessori materials in a didactic way versus having the materials available and allowing the child to wonder and seek.

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School Day: Geography

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Thu, 09 Feb 2012 02:19:00 +0000

Geography...geography.

The boys are absolutely on a Geography binge today. After their five-hour work period this morning, Me Too ran around the house in circles holding a miniature Emu while Kal-El chased him holding a miniature Tazmanian devil. Me Too came down from his afternoon rest and immediately asked, "Can we do more geography?" My husband finally made it home at 6:00 and he's been listing to Kal-El give him a presentation on what he learned about Australia today while Me Too has been working with fraction circles.

Phew! Anyway, I took a lot of photos during their work session this morning.

Now that Kal-El is a strong reader, he has been rediscovering the definitions cards we have around the school room. He asked to start his work today by reading the definition of "Geography" to me.

This idea, and the definitions, are from the Karen Tyler albums.

Next, the boys played the "globe game" they invented. They each take one of the globes...Kal-El usually starts with the sandpaper globe and Me Too starts with the continents globe. I get to shout out a continent and they try to be the first one to find it on the globe. After we get through all of the continents they switch globes and we do them all again. Here they are after the switch (Me Too has the trickier sandpaper globe). They have just found South America:

After the globe game they asked me to show them "something new." We talked about the Earth being made up of land, air, and water. Then, they did a land/air/water sort of plants, animals, and transportation.

Here they are checking their work by sorting the photos back onto control cards:

The compasses were taken off the shelf and the boys placed the cardinal directions arrows:

The boys pulled out their laminated "maps of their rooms", hid small treasures for one another to find, and drew locator arrows on the maps.

Me Too had enough geography at this point and chose to work on even and odd with his numbers and counters while Kal-El spent some time exploring the Australia continent box.

I put this photo (above) in even though it doesn't look like much is going on because the boys are so often like this and I want to remember it. They are each doing their own work, but are always excitedly reporting their progress to one another. In this picture Kal-El is looking up from trying to memorize where the rivers are in Australia (he was scouting a good place to put a miniature crocodile) because Me Too is reporting "Hey 'Kal-El', eight is even."

Later Kal-El, so happy he can read them on his own, worked with a labelled photo glossary of Australian animals and matched them to the miniature animals he has.

Afterward, we explored some photo and information cards (I think from Target, the "Animals of the World" card collection from the dollar section). He specifically wanted to discover which part of Australia his animals were from so he could place them in the "perfect" places on his map.

Today he place the taipan, saltwater crocodile, Tazmanian devil, kangaroo, koala, and emu. He also learned about the great coral reef and asked for a hammerhead shark and green turtle to place in the water just off of the east coast of Australia.

Unfortunately, I didn't get a photo of the map all loaded up before Me Too stepped in to completely dismantle the map and see if he could get everything back in the right place himself.

Kal-El also placed some landmarks today. We have a red rock just about the right shape to stand in for Ayers rock. Our landmark card for Ayers rock (also from Target, world landmarks cards, $1) shows a map of the country for each landmark with a star for location. Kal-El used this to place it on the map. He found a spool to stand in for the Sydney Opera House...

...until I surprised him and pulled out a miniature brass version to replace the spool.

He was SO excited. He couldn't stop telling me how beautiful and special it was. He carried it around for the whole rest of the day. You will see it in our post about the rest of our school day as he carried it around from work to work like a spectator. I have quite a few landmarks like this. They are small brass pencil sharpeners and you can find many on eBay.

After learning about the kangaroo the boys had questions about kangaroos boxing so we watched this great little video from the BBC that shows both adult kangaroos and joeys boxing. Kal-El thought it was sad that kangaroos only live about seven years. Today's work opened a lot of doors for zoology. The cards reported the names of the groups of animals and the names of their young, as well as mentioning the animal family. Kal-El made the connection on his own that the young reptiles (taipan and crocodile) were called "hatchlings" because they hatched from eggs and that both young marsupials (kangaroo, koala) were called "joeys". We haven't done the typical "animal groups" or "animal young" vocabulary works because I wasn't interested in trying that until he could read the labels on his own. It's great that we will be able to do that now right away. We haven't started our "elementary albums" yet, but Kal-El certainly thinks like an "elementary child" now and this is exactly how Montessori elementary is supposed to work. Our work in one area is natural leading to another. The subjects (in this case geography and zoology) are intertwined and it seems like we could just keep going down rabbit holes like this forever. I find that this is changing my planning structure a little bit. I used to just have columns for each subject on a dry erase board and would write in some presentations when I felt I needed a reminder. Now I find I'm definitely needing a reminder so I've switched to a larger dry erase board and my notes are in the form of a cloud diagram or flowchart of some kind. I'll try to get a picture and post about planning sometime soon.

More time was spent with the atlas. Kal-el likes to compare and contrast the types of maps (physical, political, etc.,).

He also likes maps that show other things like temperature, occupations, or in this case, population.

Of course the flags made an appearance.

In the background of this photo you can see that Kal-El pulled out some sandpaper letters to help with his reading. He pulled the "or" because he was having trouble reading "aboriginal". He pulled the "au" just for fun because he says "Australia is my favorite thing that begins with 'au'."

We also read this book today: Look What Came from Australia. It was much better than the continent book that we own from the box, at least for Kal-El's age. Great pictures and just the right amount of information is provided. This book will have us chasing down a few more rabbit holes this week. The boys want to make a boomerang and a didgeridoo. Aboriginal "click sticks" were mentioned in the book and are very similar to the rhythm sticks that the boys have. Me Too wants to compose a didgeridoo and click stick duet. Kal-El also planned an "Australian meal" for us to cook this weekend. My shopping list suddenly includes Vegemite and PVC pipe.

When my husband was home all three of them looked up the size of the saltwater crocodile and used a 12-inch ruler to measure out 24 feet on the floor (saltwater crocodiles range in size from 15-24 feet long). This was coincidentally quite close to the distance a kangaroo can jump (25 feet).

This post is already HUGE, so I might put up some of their other work in a separate post later. Hopefully this isn't too much detail, but I know some of you like to get a feel for what our days are really like when we are working.

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Borrowing Montessori

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 21:59:00 +0000

The boys are sick! Too sick to take to BSF today, so we stayed home. Two little boys, who would have been too sick to go to school outside the home today, completed a FIVE HOUR WORK PERIOD! Three-hour work period, we scoff at you! They started at 8 a.m. and worked until I made them stop to eat at 1 p.m. This is not even counting the hour of art they made from 6-7 a.m.!

Kal-El was in the school room immediately after breakfast calling out..."Mommy...come help me learn all about geography!" Hmmm. That's not what *I* had planned. *I * had planned to start with math today. I even made a list (very unusual behavior for me). I decided to help him with geography because telling him he couldn't do geography but must do math was only going to make him grumpy about the math.

I thought my plans were truly blown when I glanced at the clock for the first time THREE HOURS LATER and realized we were still doing geography. Right about that time, Kal-El started putting away his geography and was literally begging to do math. In fact, "a lot of math" was his specific request.

The flow of our day today is a good illustration of why I am not in favor of classrooms in which any number of children are required to engage in the same activities at the same time; and in which the subjects are categorized, separated from one another, taught by different teachers, and assigned an onset and time limit enforced by a bell.

A lot of time is spent talking about "bad teachers," but I feel the majority of the classrooms have adequate teachers and yet our country is disappointed with the performance of our traditional schools. I argue that the problem is rarely the teacher but rather the way the school is structured. Research shows that Montessori principles work. Montessorians aren't the only ones who have seen the Science magazine article, public school administrators have seen it too and they are making some changes. The problem is that public schools, like our government, are such a machine that it is nearly impossible to make any real changes. What administrators do instead is cherry pick some ideas, pay lip service to the "latest in educational research, while really changing nothing except adding to the list of hoops the already overloaded teachers need to jump through. Later everyone is surprised when the test scores don't really change, or go down.

Here are some classic "borrows" I've seen in our own school district:

They hear: Montessori schools don't separate subjects.
They do: Keep the subjects separate, but ask the teachers to add a few lessons a year that "connect" their subject to a different subject. Another popular variation is to force all of the students to "write" in every subject rather than allow them to "write about other subjects" when in "writing class." Maybe remove the talented scientist who has been teaching science only for 20 years from the science lab and have them teach language arts next year instead so that the kids can have him for a "different subject" magically bringing the two together in their young minds.

They hear: Montessori schools allow children to work in groups.
They do: Require the teachers to make the children to work in groups of the teacher's choosing, on an activity for the most part chosen by the teacher, certainly at the time allowed and for the length of time allowed.

They hear: At a Montessori school a child may work for several hours on a single project. There are no bells and time limits.
They do: Lengthen the class periods of certain subjects to several hours. The subject is still separated and assigned a time limit...it's just longer. Our district cut the amount of hours spent on science and social studies in half so that math and language arts could now be two hours apiece. They will graciously eliminate the bells though...but not the time limits. You still have to change locations at certain times, it's just harder to know how long you have to get there. While they are at it, they may institute "learning targets" to make sure you put your blinders on and don't learn anything extra on accident.

They hear: Montessori school have mixed age classrooms and many different stages of learning occurring simultaneously.
They do: Ask the teachers to "differentiate" but the class structure and resources remain unchanged. This will only allow the teacher to "differentiate" is as much that they are able to offer slight variations of the activity at hand to accomodate different learning styles. They can't truly accomodate different ability levels because the "exit standard" for the time period that they have the students remains the same.

They hear: Vocabulary is best learned when used across subjects.
They do: Require all teachers, regardless of subject taught, to spend a certain number of minutes each day or week drilling vocabulary from other subjects whether or not it relates to the subject they teach. Then, require all teachers to administer a test to the students each quarter and give the teacher an evaluation based on the scores on those tests.

They hear: Montessori students choose their work.
They do: Increase their electives offerings tenfold so that the students can now choose to "yo yo" or "build with legos" for one period a day rather than play in a band, sing in a choir, or learn a foreign language.

This post is completely impromptu today, so these are just what I came up with off the top of my head. I'm sure there are more.

What I didn't do above is explain the true intention and benefits of the Montessori ideas borrowed and compared and contrasted them with the "borrowed" version. I'm sure those of you who have boned up on your Montessori theory were cringing in your seats when you read some of these versions of how the Montessori ideas were actually implemented. Did I use the words "lip service" yet?

In the interest of "making change" in our school districts, the next time your superintendent brags about being on the "cutting edge" of educational theory with their "bell-free" school that advocates "choice", "learning blocks", "differentiated learning," and "integrated subjects" find out what that really means in the classroom.

Is it possible that some of these ideas have to have the support of a certain type of school structure to really work?

Hey! if you just came here to see what we DID all day, I have a ton of pictures! I started to tell you all about it but then I decided to add a few little sentences about how our day didn't conform to a traditional school day. Next thing I knew, my ole' windbag-self had blown myself onto quite a tangent. Stay tuned!

Oh dear, as I finish this the boys came downstairs from their "quiet time" and the first words out of Me Too's mouth were "Mommy, let's do some more geography."

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Music Shelves and Three-Part Card Storage

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Wed, 08 Feb 2012 13:39:00 +0000

After all of those Montessori music posts, I thought I would take a picture and show you what our music shelves look like today. When I photographed the school room for the "official tour" the music shelves were still under construction.

The music shelves are tucked behind our comfy red couch more than a little bit, so I had to think carefully when I decided what to put on the shelves.

The tall shelf at the bottom is a good place to put our basket of rhythm instruments. The slim shelf above is a great place to stash the xylophone. These are the only two shelves that are difficult to reach. These particular items are large enough to both be visible for the boys and use the shelf space efficiently. They are also narrow enough to be pulled out without getting stuck behind the couch.

The rest of our music works are stored on the upper shelves.

We used to have the Montessori bells set up on the window seat...

This is valuable real estate in our little work space so, now that Kal-El can grade the bells, they can sometimes be put away on the top shelf.

The bells all fit nicely on a big tray I found a thrift store our first year doing Montessori. Because I made our bells "boards" out of felt instead of wood, they can be rolled nicely and placed next to the bells.

The second shelf from the top is a slim space we use to store our pitch and rhythm boards. The grey boxes to the right hold the Nienhuis pitch notation materials.

The third shelf from the top holds a green tray with all of our Nienhuis and homemade rhythm notation materials. I gathered these on a tray so that they could be brought to the table all at once rather than taking boxes in many trips, also so that the could be slipped on top of our notation boards if I find I need more shelf space in the future. Once we get further into the pitch notation works, I should put those on a tray as well.

To the right of the rhythm materials are three-part cards for the "parts of the violin" and "parts of the bow" as well as an envelope holding the whole/half step cards I made.

I store my three-part cards in 6x9 business envelopes. When I print three-part cards I print an extra of the labeled, whole card to laminate and tape to the front of the envelope. I bought a bunch of plastic napkin holders at the dollar store one year. I have one on each of many of the shelves in the school room so that when in use, I can store several sets easily on the shelf near the other works they are associated with.

Here is a quick snap of some of my culture shelves (zoology puzzles, insect puzzles, botany puzzles). Each puzzle set has a napkin holder next to it with the envelopes containing the "parts of" cards for that topic.

When not in use, the envelopes can be slipped into one of the many bankers boxes I have, labeled by primary subject, in my basement Montessori storage room.

If you are looking for the rest of my series on Montessori Music, there is a tab at the top of my blog under the header, or they can be found here!

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School Days and Play

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Tue, 07 Feb 2012 15:24:00 +0000

First, a big THANK YOU to everyone who has been commenting on the post about overlap, or lack thereof, in the primary and elementary Montessori math sequences! Keep em coming! If you missed it, there is some good discussion going on in the comments section.

Today I have some glimpses of what we've been up to the last few days, including some play. All of "my men" are obsessed with "mountain biking" or "bike obstacle courses" right now. The boys built some obstacles in our yard this weekend.

Kal-El started with a teeter-totter on the back patio:

Soon he and daddy were trying "synchronized biking" on the driveway, Daddy is on his unicycle.

Me Too liked to pretend he'd "had an accident" and get everyone to rescue him.

With biking such a prevalent theme around here lately, Daddy's birthday cake was a "bike course cake."

I laminated pictures of the family on bikes and stuck them to popsicle sticks. The boys are big wheeling on the wood track, Daddy is on a "pump track" and their uncle is upended in the pom pom "foam pit" in the back corner. There's a big rock pile in the back right. My Montessori manipulatives drawers came in handy making this cake.

The boys have switched their focus from Antarctica to Australia recently. I found this display when I came down stairs one morning earlier this week.

Kal-El probably did this around 6 a.m. There is no rhyme or reason to where each animal is on the continent of Australia...his point was that all of the animals belonged in Australia and I'm pleased he found the right map.

Kal-El has kicked it into high gear with maps lately.

Here he is placing the countries of South America on the control map and practicing some of their names.

Composing...

Sewing...

I put together sewing baskets for the boys. You can see some great examples that I copied on my Pinterest practical life board. Our token Valentines Day activities are these valentines that the boys are sewing. They are practicing a running stitch.

Kal-El is jealous of his online friend, Bunny, who is using a REAL MACHINE. Stephanie, he told me today that he plans to marry her.

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Myself. With a Propeller.

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 18:57:00 +0000

I wanted to post something positive to balance out all the gloom and doom of my other post today. This really made my day, and I really needed it! This is Me Too's FIRST SELF-PORTRAIT! (Grammie, I uploaded this one full quality so you can pull it right off the web for your scrapbook!)

The boys do a lot of artwork in the mornings before breakfast. While I was cooking breakfast today I heard Kal-El say to Me Too "Wow Me Too! What a great picture! That's a really good one! Mommy, come see Me Too's picture...it's different than all of his other ones."

Me Too said to Kal-El, very casually, "It's a picture of myself. Wearing a hat. With a propeller."

Kal-El was right, it is different than all of his other ones. Me Too has been in the "scribbling stage" for a long time. Although he likes to draw letters and shapes, he has NEVER intentionally drawn an particular object before. If he's been drawing mandalas, I haven't noticed.

It really surprised me me and made me smile that his first "human" was "myself" and that he came complete with with a hat with a propeller.

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Depressed and Perplexed

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 06 Feb 2012 17:32:00 +0000

Sorry to bum everyone out out on a Monday with a blog post titled "Depressed and Perplexed." I usually feel pretty good about the job I am doing here at home educating the boys. Recently I began an Elementary Montessori course through Jessica at Keys of the Universe (I won half-off of the course through a giveaway at Living Montessori Now) and what I've been reading has been making me feel really down about the job I did with Kal-El at the primary level.

I was feeling rather good about how he was doing in math even though I knew that we weren't going through the sequence as fast as some children do. He is just about to start the stamp game. For those of you who are not as familiar with the sequence, this means he has done:

number rods
spindle boxes
cards and counters
all of the golden beads work
teens boards
tens boards
100 chain
1000 chain
100 board

For those of you who that don't know what those materials mean in terms of skills:

He can count up to 1000 by either ones or can skip count by tens.
He has not just learned this by rote so that the numbers are "words you say in a certain order", but he understands teens as "ten and another number" and a number like "80" as "8 tens."
He knows the difference between even and odd up to 100.
He understands a number both as a single entity and as a "set."
He can read any number correctly up to 9999.
He can do addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with numbers up to 9999 using beads as counters. In the stamp game he will learn to do it without beads. He has not memorized his facts yet.
He knows his addition and subtraction facts up to 10.

If Kal-El were in public school, this week he would beginning the second half of kindergarten (K5). I know that I couldn't do most of those things when I was in kindergarten and I went to very good public schools. I know that they are not doing most of those things in the kindergarten down the street that he isn't enrolled in.

One of the main reasons I decided to homeschool was because I knew that the boys could learn what the kids were learning in an six-hour day at school in a fraction of that time at home. This extra free time would allow them more time to play and chose Montessori because it allowed them to learn in the same way that they play. The extra free time also allows more time to be involved in other things we wanted to do like sports, violin, and bible study. Despite the fact that many parents who know nothing about Montessori choose it anyway because they have heard about "advanced academics at young ages," I had no ambitions for them to be "way ahead of everyone else." I had a pretty good hunch that they would get more rigorous academics at home than at school whether we intended them to or not, but I have not kept them home for rigorous academics. I kept them home so that all of our lives could have the breathing room needed to be more enjoyable. The only area in which I am intentionally setting out to be more rigorous is in "critical thinking."

The "perplexed" in the title of this blog post has to do with the pacing of the Montessori math sequence. All of my primary math albums (Montessori by Hand, Karen Tyler, Gettman, Montessori for Everyone: Comprehensive List, Primary) go through the large bead frame. The large bead frame is a long way off from where Kal-El is in the math sequence, but I wasn't worried about it because I thought I understood that there was a large degree of overlap between the end of primary and the beginning of elementary. The age ranges for the Montessori classrooms are 3-6 and then 6-9. Ideally whether a six year-old child would be in primary or elementary would be based on their plane of development, but I suspect that in many areas it has more to do with the child's birthdate. I called a local Montessori school when Kal-El was 2.5 to check on tuition and they said that the child had to be 3 by a certain September 1st to be placed in the 3-6 class or wait until the next year. So, in my mind, Kal-El would be in his third year of a 3-6 class and still has a semester and a summer before he starts "elementary." However, as I have been deepening my study of Montessori elementary, I have encountered the idea that there isn't really overlap in math from primary to elementary. If that's the case, we have a lot of work to do before Kal-El becomes an "elementary" child in the fall.

Then, I read the following in my Elementary course materials in a section called "Memorization and How Society Works Against it":

Another big factor in our schools is the age at which the children enter the primary class. Ideally, the children are meant to enter the casa between the ages of 2 1⁄2 and 3 – this way, they have time to get through all of primary level materials, exercises and work. Some schools have problems entering children under age 3 due to licensing policies; many public Montessori programs require age 3 by a certain date (or wait a whole extra year) or even 4. These factors are negatively impacting how much the children can achieve in a given period of time. Children who start primary at ages 4 or 5 are just not going to get through all that they should have gotten in three to three and a half years. We need to look at our goals, and what we can do to get closer to where we should be.

So...at some schools Kal-El would have started primary at 2.5 and would be halfway through his first year of elementary by now. So did we just become an extra year behind? That same section also talks about the importance of the child getting through entire primary math album before elementary:

We hope that the children going through the primary class have the opportunity to work with all of the mathematics materials developed for the first plane of development so that their foundation and factual knowledge in mathematics is as highly developed as it can be. That means that we hope the children are at least in the process of learning the math facts, because that process belongs to the first plane of development when they have the absorbent mind...One thing that is likely to be seen is the struggle that children go through to learn their math facts, if they don’t already know them at age 6. At the second plane of development, memorizing these facts involves an act of the will. They are not just soaking them in anymore, they have to choose. We have to find that motivation that will encourage them to make this choice, if we have children in that situation. We must remember that because the characteristics change, a second plane child cannot be expected to work through all of the primary materials that he might have missed. The materials are designed for children with different characteristics. If we have gaps that must be filled in at the elementary, and usually there are some, the adult will take certain selective pieces of primary material and use them in a different way to help the children learn what they need to know.

Fortunately, the next section is called "How Do We Choose What to Use and How?". The course also provides a large section that we are apparently going to need titled "Remedial Mathematics." Boy, do I feel like I missed the boat. Now Kal-El needs "remedial mathematics"? How did this happen? What happened to my overlap? Gettman divided the primary experience into seven periods and Kal-El sits pretty much in the sixth period of these. I couldn't find the specific spot where it says, but I thought there was some overlap of the sixth and seventh period with elementary.

Most of my other sources implied some overlap as well. My comprehensive list from Montessori for Everyone lists all of the primary math materials on the Elementary list. I have a complete set of 6-9 albums from the Mid-America Montessori Training Institute. Their math album is divided into three books. Book one overlaps my entire Karen Tyler and Montessori by Hand math albums. However, other than tying all the work to the elementary great lessons, the MAMT 6-9 albums seem to eerily contain very little that my primary albums do not, so perhaps that is not something to go by.

The elementary math, language, and geometry albums available at Cultivating Dharma are very different than the MAMT albums and similar in scope to the Keys of the Universe albums. Both CD and KotU have NO overlap from the primary math albums. I looked on the Montessori Research & Development website at the tables of contents for their elementary math albums. Their math album also is a set of three. The first of the three albums overlaps my primary albums by 100%. I happen to own their elementary Language Arts Volume 1 album and it overlaps the entire grammar section of my Karen Tyler album. This also led me to believe that there is some overlap. I'm also influenced by the math materials that I purchased from a homeschooling-mom friend of mine. Her daughter attended a good Montessori school from age three up through the first year of elementary. At that time, they pulled her out and started homeschooling due to health reasons. The first material she had to make for her, for her second year of elementary, was...the stamp game. I also bought from her a complete set of grammar boxes, and the small bead frame. I couldn't buy the large bead frame because, at age 10, she was still using it. The NAMC math guides seem to overlap some of the primary. It seems from the table of contents that their first presentations begin with the addition strip board and I still see the snake games, long and short bead chains, and golden beads mentioned here.

My favorite primary math, language, practical life, and sensorial albums are Meg's albums from Montessori by Hand. These are the albums that I use for the "core" areas to absorb sequence an theory. It matches the Gettman, so I tend to use Gettman for the actual presentations because I can carry one book in my hand instead of four big binders. I do read and re-read the Montessori by Hand albums frequently though so they have likely played a large part in how I think about Montessori. I re-read Meg's math album this weekend and found where she said, "We present the mathematic materials at a very particular time, later than the other areas. There is no rush to start mathematics; it is generally introduced around 4 years of age [my emphasis]." Not the very first, but one of the earliest presentations in her album is for the number rods. Each presentation provides a loose "age" for the presentation. Most albums do with the understanding that those who study Montessori know that in "following the child" these ages can only mean so much. For the number rods Meg's album says: 4-4.5 (after all practical life and sensorial). If you have read this blog from the beginning you may remember that Kal-El showed very little interest in the math presentations I tried to give him until that time. He suddenly "woke up" in math and was ready to go right around that age...at the same time that he finished the bulk of the practical life and sensorial works. If you use the Gettman at all, you may have noticed that math doesn't at all begin until period three (with just the number rods) and doesn't really get going to until period four.

So, I'm perplexed...I find it hard to believe that most children who begin the math sequence around age four would get through the entire primary sequence before age six. I also find it hard to believe that it is inappropriate to wait until age four to begin the math sequence. At the same time I see the argument that these materials are designed for primary, not elementary. Jessica mentions that this is sometimes a matter of switching from AMS albums to AMI albums. However, Meg's training (Montessori by Hand) was AMI as was Jessica's. Both my AMI and AMS albums include all the presentations necessary to get to "the end." I just never saw any indication that I needed to "push to the end" before age six. One of the great things about Montessori is that there IS no "ahead" or "behind" but rather just "right where you are." It doesn't seem likely that in a Montessori environment where every child is working at their own pace that the majority of them would magically reach the end of the math sequence just before their sixth birthdays.

I believe that I started Kal-El on the math sequence at the right time. I also believe I have been "following the child" the best I could. Math is a little different than much of the curriculum in that, as Meg says, "In math, the child can't really discover anything on his own that lies ahead. The teacher's plans are what keep the child moving ahead at an appropriate pace." I did not do daily math presentations when I could have. Should I have? Me Too is currently 4.5 and ready to start the golden beads. If I did something "wrong" the first time, I have an opportunity to do it "right" the second time.

I am depressed because it looks like I've set him up for "remedial" work in elementary. I am depressed because I feel like I held him back from the full benefits of the primary math materials. If it is true that that there should not be much overlap from primary to elementary math we are pretty far off of that mark right now. Jessica specifically states in her albums not to feel like "all hope is lost" but I do feel bad. I never thought I would feel bad about my child not being able to do long division halfway through kindergarten though.

I guess I have a question...IS there any overlap between the primary and elementary? If "no," is that "theoretical" or "a reality." In reality, have most children who attended three years of Montessori primary completed the math sequence through the large bead frame? How closely do Montessori guides control the pace of math work in the third year of primary? Should I do things differently the second time around?

Well, if my imagined "comfort" with Montessori primary led any newer readers to believe I "knew it all" I've certainly blown my cover :) I started out this blog with a lot of questions and in that tradition don't want to hide our "bumps in the road."

Disclaimer: (Added a little later in the day) I had misgivings about posting this not because I didn't want to look bad, but because I didn't want to strike fear into anyone who is in the same place as we are or behind us. I do feel that Montessori IS about following the child and that it will all work out. Please don't let my despair make you feel bad about what you are doing, or Montessori in general. Also, realize that while I quoted from Jessica's albums, I am pulling out just a portion out of pages of what she said. I will make sure she has an opportunity to comment here and please don't let any mistakes I make here reflect on her albums, her thoughts, or her course (which I am enjoying). Seeing quotes like that out of context can never reflect on the actual content of a work.

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Letter "U" Sound Bin

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Sat, 04 Feb 2012 18:37:00 +0000

The letter "U" is really tough to make a sound bin for. Remember, things like "unicorn" and "uvula" don't count because we are looking for the short-O sound. I still managed to pull together a respectable five-object collection with only one photo filling it out. We have the following: underwear, undershirt, underwater (are you noticing a theme here?), uncle, and umbrella. The photo is actually a photograph of Me Too himself swimming underwater. He thought it was neat that he found himself in a sound bin. The "uncle" is a popsicle-stick puppet of his own uncle. The miniature sound book has photo duplicates of everything you see as well as some things that are hard to represent as "objects" such as "upside-down" and "up."

The Alphatales book (AlphaTales Box Set) for this letter is easier to use than some of the other vowel's books. It was titled "Umbrellabird's Umbrella" and other than a unicorn or two, we didn't have to ignore a slew of long-vowel words. The book uses a lot of short-u adjectives which was helpful.

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School Days

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Fri, 03 Feb 2012 19:00:00 +0000

Here are just a few of this week's activities that I happened to take pictures of...

Outside the school room, the blocks have been used every day...one of our best purchases ever!

Kal-El completing a "Reading Folders" sort.

He can check his work by flipping the cards over (see the cards on the far right).

Our Antarctica continent box contains an aerial map of the man-made structures of McMurdo Station. Kal-El came up with the idea to build McMurdo Station out of legos. He would LOVE this relief map.

Token Girl (my niece) stayed with us for a few days. Doing her hair was a great reminder of why God blessed me with boys. Poor kid! I'm sure she's glad to be home!

Kal-El and I read a "team poem" called "The Long-I Line" together (from The Ordinary Parent's Guide to Teaching Reading). It uses all of the "I" sounds: ie, i-e, y, and igh. It also contains the sight words "eye" and "I." Me Too listened along.

Afterwards, we all colored a train to match the descriptions Kal-El read in the poem. I usually avoid coloring pages like the plague, but liked the "recall" purpose of this one.

We were blessed with warm weather this week so the boys spent a lot of time outside riding bikes and planning an obstacle course they want to build this summer. When the weather is not as great, the boys spend a lot of time climbing on the big climber in the basement and riding their big wheels in circles.

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Music Appreciation

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Thu, 02 Feb 2012 16:06:00 +0000

Classic Tunes & Tales

I strongly believe that a well-educated person should, upon hearing, be able to identify the top 100 or so classical masterpieces. That sounds like a lot, but once you start naming pieces they add up quickly. Obviously that number may need to be adjusted up or down to mesh with your own expectations on this subject matter. However, it stands to reason that most of us would like our children to recognize Beethoven's 5th when they hear it and know who wrote it. As you read through this post, I will mention a few others, and I bet some of you will be saying "yes, I want them to know that one too!" I have used Classic Tunes & Tales for years and feel it provides an excellent jumping off point for that kind of music appreciation work. This book is designed to be used with the child across many years (K-8). If you took them through the whole book, they would be familiar with 50 classical masterpieces before they started high school.

There are many things I like about this book. The two most important are the provided lyrics and stories.

While there seems to be no limit in sight to the number of sung pieces a child can remember, bear in mind that most of these classical masterpieces are instrumental. This lack of words seemingly eliminates singing as an important physical connection to the piece and memory device. Hands down, my favorite thing about this book is that it writes out a recognizable chunk of each piece as a melody and provides lyrics to go with it. The lyrics are cleverly written to include the name of the piece, the composer, as well as a fact or two about either the piece, composer, or both. Here is a glimpse of the page for Beethoven's 5th Symphony (left click will make it larger):

These little tunes and lyrics are VERY effective. I remember teaching second graders Swan Lake and later showing them a children's abbreviated version of the ballet. EVERY TIME the famous theme popped up the whole class would gently sing along. I would be very surprised if they didn't know that tune for life. I noticed the same phenomenon with the "William Tell Overture" when I would show my first graders the video "The Band Concert." (One of my favorite videos of all time.) Be sure to teach both "William Tell" and "Turkey in the Straw" so that they understand what Donald Duck is doing and why Mickey gets so mad!

This book should be a jumping off point, not the end-all-be-all of what you choose to do. There are a few times in which the real lyrics to a piece are better than the false ones provided. I always teach the real words to Handel's Hallelujah Chorus for example...in all four parts. One of my favorite mental pictures in life is that of a group of eight-year-old boys posturing to look and sound like "big basses" to sing the low parts along with the recording. I just feel like everyone should be able to join in whenever the Hallelujah Chorus is sung. Other examples of "real lyric" opportunities are Beethoven's Ode to Joy and the hymn "Goin' Home" (or the Catholic version, "Jesus Christ, Bread of Life") from Dvorak's New World Symphony.

The book provides a complete lesson plan for each piece. It has also imbedded one or more music fundamentals topic into each lesson (for example, the children learn about the "brass family" when they study Clarke's "trumpet voluntary"...the repeat sign when they learn Pachelbel's "Canon in D."). But, what I love about these lesson plans is that each lesson begins with a story. In a very "Montessori Elementary" kind of way, the provided stories help place the piece in the "big picture" and/or spark the child's interest in learning about the piece. There are a lot of great books about music for kids, and sometimes I am familiar with a better story than the one provided in the book. Like I said, this is a jumping off point. I use a better story when I can, and branch out like one would in any other unit study. Regarding the pieces alone, you can find recordings to hear, videos to watch, parodies. You can perform them on instruments (in fact, an appendix at the back has written many tunes out for recorder). You can branch out and read about or watch videos about the composer. After all that, if you choose you can greatly expand on the music fundamental topics included.

An aside regarding the "stories" for each piece: Many times, like Stravinsky's "Firebird" for example, the piece is based on a fairy tale and I would rather read the fairy tale itself. I want to warn you before you check one out and start reading without previewing that different parents have different levels of tolerance regarding the "dark" moments in fairy tales. I personally can't stand the fact that the little mermaid doesn't die in the Disney film. She's supposed to throw herself into the sea and become the foam on the water darn it! Not get married and live happily ever after ruining the whole moral of the story! Anyway, I am not usually bothered by what some would label "violence" in some fairy tales and nursery rhymes. If you are, just choose your version carefully and edit judiciously. There are no "dark" stories provided in Classic Tunes and Tales. I just happen to think it's a little deceptive to teach Scheherazade as a "happy story." At the same time, I was unpleasantly surprised when I previewed a young-children's version of "Ali Baba and the 40 Thieves" a few weeks ago and it described rather harshly many miserable deaths including the stabbing of all the thieves one at a time as they hid in barrels. Rather than change the story, I would rather wait until it is age appropriate for them to read some of the more famous stories from the Arabian Nights and find a more sensitive (but not sugar-coated) version.

Each lesson plan states the objective, lists the materials, provides a stepped procedure, as well as activity pages and answer keys. The supplementary materials at the back include a lot of goodies such as a historical timeline, tunes written out for the recorder, and game ideas. There are also wordsearches, coloring pages, and bulletin board plans if those types of things are your cup of tea. (I'm a sucker for a good timeline myself.) Most of the activity pages are "cut apart and sort" types of things that can be used in a very Montessori way. Very few of them are limited to use in a standard worksheet sort of way (I'm not a fan of those). One activity page can even be turned into a composer "geographical pin map"! There are five "tests" provided in the book as well. I'm not pro-test, but they all can, with very little imagination required, be turned into a fun activity or work instead.

I really wish there was a scope-and-sequence page I could scan for you all so you could see all the pieces, topics, ideas, and music terms covered in this book. Sadly, there these are provided by section and I would have to copy too many pages. If you are unsure, I would highly recommend having your local bookstore order it in so you can take a look at it.

In my mind this is an "elementary" thing; and, also in my mind, we don't start elementary here until "next fall." For this reason, I haven't done these activities with my own boys yet. Writing this post has me really looking forward to doing so, and when we do, I promise to share my unit ideas!

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Music Listening

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Wed, 01 Feb 2012 19:29:00 +0000

We listen to a wide variety of music at our house. Kal-El was a testament to this the other day. He was plucking out tunes on the piano and he created a mash-up of the "March" from The Nutcracker and "Go, Go Power Rangers." I asked Me Too to name his three favorite songs yesterday and he named four: "Holy, Holy, Holy", "Allegro" (Suzuki), "Friday", and "Rumpshaker." NO, we don't let them actually listen to "Rumpshaker"! VERY inappropriate. I won't even link to that. However, my husband teaches them to "rap" and "get funky" when I am out of the house and sadly both boys like to sing "hey shake your rump!" Here is a video of Kal-El and Daddy "getting funky," but I warn you...if you click it is 43 seconds of your life you will never get back. I wish I could upload some of the videos of the boys "rapping" but I don't have any in which they don't say their names.

Fortunately, most of the music listening they do either fits into our "educational plan" or is "clean fun." I've been asked what CD's I would recommend from a music appreciation perspective and some of you might find my answer to that surprising. We have a rather large CD collection but 99% of it was never unpacked after we moved over a year ago. This isn't a result of unpacking laziness, but because we haven't needed it.

We actually use Pandora radio almost all of the time at home. Most of you are already familiar with Pandora, I'm sure. For those who aren't, it is a site that offers free, personalized radio with limited ads. When you go to their homepage it offers a search box where you can enter an artist, song, genre or composer to create a "station" or choose an existing station to customize. As you listen, if you wish, you can give tunes a thumbs-up or thumbs-down. If you don't like something, it will never play it again and it will tailor the songs it does play to what you DO like. Our family has stations created around "Led Zepplin," "Family Folk Songs," "Cat Stevens," "Tchaikovsky,"Bach," "Mozart," "Stravinsky," "Hymns," "Run D.M.C." and "Journey." However, the "Tchaikovsky" station doesn't only play works by Tchaikovsky...but rather works by him as well as the other composers of his time period and genre. It is as if I put all of our CDs of the Romantic era, and then some, into a big CD changer and hit "random." Yes, they have holiday music too! This was very handy for us at Christmas time and we had a lot of fun with it around Halloween.

My husband and I both like it for ourselves because we like having our music mixed and like being surprised and occasionally finding something new or something we've forgotten about. For the boys, what I really like is that this truly lets me follow the child. Both boys, Me Too in particular, are very clear in telling me when something interests them. Me Too will march right up and demand I play certain things "again" which, is sadly something you can't do in Pandora. But, thanks to You Tube, I can usually pull up a "repeat" right away. I choose what CD's to pull out of our otherwise unpacked collection based on what they are interested in.

Kal-El was turned on to The Nutcracker when he heard the "March" on Pandora. I put the CD in our car. We watched the full Balanchine-version of the ballet on Netflix (Macaulay Culkin dances a role, and yes, two little boys gladly sat and digested an entire ballet!) as well the animated dances from Disney's Fantasia (The original, I don't know what's in Fantasia 2000. I'm not a modern Disney fan). It led to an intensive listening experience for them, and they both can identify all of the major dances in a "drop-the-needle" sort of way. Kal-El was motivated to figure out how to play some of the little phrases (like the opening measures of the march) by ear on every instrument he could think of: violin, Montessori bells, xylophone, and piano. He enjoyed exploring the piano, bells and xylophone and transposing it to as many different keys as he could. This was a great natural introduction to the half-step/whole-step lessons on the bells.

I keep a small stack of CD's in the car based on the boy's interests. Currently in our car are the following CD's:

"Peter and the Wolf" (David Bowie)
Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" (Same CD as "Peter and the Wolf." That same CD also has Britten's "Young Person's Guide to the Orchestra" but the boys REALLY don't like it for some reason.)
Suzuki Violin School CD, Volume 1
Sci-Fi Channel - Sci-Fi's Greatest Hits, Vol. 4: Defenders Of Justice

We listen to the Suzuki CD every time we go anywhere in the car (almost daily), and relieve it with the others after we've listened. Whenever possible we also listen to Children's Storytime or "Sailor Sam"/"Ranger Bill"-type programs. They are usually on in the late afternoons and Saturday mornings. Otherwise, we can't listen to broadcast radio much in the car. I'm uncomfortable with what horrid thing they might say during one of the many "news breaks." One minute you can be listening to a nice song, the next second the song can end and the first sentence out of the broadcaster's mouth can be "A man murdered the mother of his children today..." Also, Kal-El dislikes most of the music on the radio. I've cycled through the stations many times over the years and he almost always asks me to change it. The few times he's asked me to stop for a song were for "Justin Timberlake", "Bon Jovi", and "Motley Crue."

I also think it is important that my children learn to recognize the top 100 classical pieces. I will blog more about that in the future. However, if you are looking for a good music collection to use for that purpose I have been pretty happy with the "101 Greatest Classics " collection. We own all five volumes and there are very few pieces that I have to pick up elsewhere. Usually it is more the case that I want to teach "more" of a particular piece and need all of the movements so I have to supplement (like, Scheherazade, great for fifth graders!).

If you are looking for the rest of my series on Montessori Music, there is a tab at the top of my blog under the header, or they can be found here!

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School Days: Language work

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Tue, 31 Jan 2012 19:50:00 +0000

Today I have a little overview of what each child has been working on in the language area with a little question at the end regarding Me Too.

Kal-El has been accomplishing a lot of word study. This is probably too much detail to be interesting to most. But, some of you with kids at the same stage are sure to be wondering what "word study" means for Kal-El. For that reason I made a little list.

In recent weeks he has done:

"ie" as a long-e (field) versus "ie" as a long-i (pie) versus "ei" as a long-a (vein). He also studied some words in which the "ie" stands for long-e and also ends with a silent e that creates a soft c (piece, niece).
Y plus a silent E as long-i (bye).
The two pronunciations of "wind" (The wind is strong. I must wind up this string.)
List of disobedient words in which a lone-i makes the long-i vowel sound (rind, kind, mind, find, blind, grind, wild, mild, child). He discovered that those words all end in the blend nd or ld.
All of the common spellings of long-i (i-e, ie, y, igh) and reviewed the folder for the long-i sound.
Puzzle words included: friend, eye, by, buy

I am still making several readers for him each week that specifically practice the words he is using in his word study. However, I realized that we might be over the readers versus "real books" hump the other day when he pulled a brand-new card out of his Antarctica continent box and read the first sentence to me: "Crabeater seals are now the single biggest consumers of krill accounting for about 80 million tons a year."

All of this progress means that we are suddenly at the stage where he finds the Montessori definitions cards super-interesting. The classroom has taken on a new meaning as he has realized he can pick up the materials that have been there all along and teach himself new things using the written materials that go with them. For example, he has been memorizing long lists of animals names by reading the labels on photo glossaries. Today he spent a long time looking at a chart of animal footprints and reading the names of animals written underneath.

Me Too showed the first glimmer of readiness for the movable alphabet last week (At 4.5 he might be considered late to get to that material by some. He simply hasn't been ready.) However, he can identify all of the single letters by sound and can identify single and double-letter sounds in any position in the word. Last week he started to manipulate the magnetic movable alphabet on our refrigerator to make some real words and some nonsense words.

I have been holding off on the movable alphabet just a bit because at the same time he suddenly has forgotten all of his double letters and insists on sounding out the letters individually. I want to spend a couple of days this week trying to rectify that situation and then we'll start him on the movable alphabet. Has anyone else run into this before? A child who knew almost all of his double-letter sounds suddenly loses the ability? He literally could almost do them all one day and could do none the next.

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Rhythm Band Kit for Little People

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 30 Jan 2012 16:08:00 +0000

Today I wanted to share a resource with all of you that I loved using with a roomful of little ones. I used this with five and six-year-olds in a typical K5 class. You could certainly use it with kids a little older or a little younger.

It's called the "Rhythm Band Kit for Little People" and it is a great way to give young children the feel of playing "in a band" while teaching them how to read notation for performance. The kids use triangles, sticks, drums, tambourines, bells and cymbals and play along with a CD to 15 different tunes in progressive order. They learn to read charts that look like this:

image from www.music-in-motion.com

The charts are VERY large (24"x18") so that they are easy for a classroom to see and for you to point along with a baton or yardstick.

You don't have to have music experience to use this. It comes with a very clear and almost scripted teacher's manual. The CD has tracks with just the piano accompaniment or with accompaniment and the sound of the rhythm instruments as well. Each song is also available on the CD at two different tempos. The titles of the tunes are really appropriate for the primary age group.

I wish I had the teacher's manual here so I could list for you all of the skills the kids can acquire through these charts and tracks. However, from what I remember they will learn:

the concept of a measure
patterns
beat/not a beat
time signatures (several, at least 4/4, 3/4. Maybe 2/4 and 6/8)
counting skills

I would love to use this with my own kids, but I don't have enough children. Ideally you would have six or more kids in your class to use it. I think you could make it work with four most of the time. This could be a great circle time activity for those who employ circle time in their environments.

After the rhythm band charts, my students would graduate to regular notation reading using BOOMWHACKERS and the Boom-A-Tunes Curriculum. Boomwhackers are fun in a large classroom environment but would not be usable at home with the support materials I've used in the past unless you have eight children or more (if the kids get really good and can double up, maybe four). I see now that they have some support materials that are advertised as being for as little as "one child" but I haven't personally used them so can't recommend them.

This all reminds me that, depending on brand, the colored handbells like the ones I painted to make our Montessori bells, are color coded to match the Boomwhackers. Therefore, all of the Boomwhacker materials could be used with those bells as well. Again, how much of these activities or the types of activities you do are limited by the number of children in your environment. A young child can only really keep track of one bell at a time. More experienced one's can do two. With only two children in our household we couldn't handle any melodies that used all eight-notes of the scale.

At home I think I would graduate instead to the Rhythm Band Concerto Flashcards.

On these, ALL the children play the black or white notes, the other colors can be assigned to particular rhythm instruments. This would allow you to graduate to regular notation while still using the rhythm instruments you already own. (Rather than buy and store Boomwhackers). These will only practice rhythm notation. However, the child in the Montessori environment will be learning pitch notation through the bells and tone bars. Unfortunately, the flashcards do not come with a CD of appropriate music. It is actually more fun to come up with your own because you can follow the interests of the children. My boys have been obsessed with Tchaikovsky's "The Nutcracker" for months. The 4/4 example above could be played along with many of the dances, especially the "March." It could just as easily be played along with the theme from "Thomas the Tank Engine." The 3/4 example could be played along with "America"/"God Save the Queen" or "Carol of the Bells."

I strongly believe that children should be playing real music on instruments at every age. In a traditional school, I would recommend that Kindergartener's begin on the rhythm instruments. Boomwhackers and/or bells can added in first grade. Those things will keep the children very busy until recorders are added in 3rd or 4th grade. It is great if the the children can play recorders for a full two years before the band program starts at their school. (In two years the students can learn to play about 15 notes on the recorder, in multiple parts, and on real music such as Bach duets. I find it terribly sad that most school programs only teach five notes on recorder, do-sol, and some only THREE, do-mi.) A good African drumming program is a great addition in the middle-school years.

All of this, is in addition to singing and music appreciation. I write a lot about the instruments because I think many people do the singing and don't do much with the instruments. Not every child likes to sing, particularly boys in the middle school years, and I think it important to provide a rich instrumental experience to help reach those children. I probably won't post much about the singing, but I will about the music appreciation.

If you are looking for the rest of my series on Montessori Music, there is a tab at the top of my blog under the header, or they can be found here!

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I Finished Pinning!

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Sun, 29 Jan 2012 22:29:00 +0000

I finally finished my Pinterest project! I have been "starring" items in my Google reader since the middle of 2009. All of those good ideas...buried under two-and-a-half years of other good ideas... Enter Pinterest!

I let you know previously that I was transferring over all of those "starred items" to Pinterest. I have been pinning, and pinning, and pinning... And I finally finished! I don't mean I am done pinning forever. I will continue to pin the great ideas that I see everyday on the wonderful Montessori and homeschooling blogs that I read. I just mean I finally ran out of "starred items" in my reader. Phew! My Pinterest boards accumulated 300 pins this way! Not only am I going to be able to find things much more easily, but you can all benefit from from the highlights of two-and-half years of 450+ Montessori blogs.

Follow me on Pinterest and enjoy:

You can click on the red button to follow me and I have also added a Pinterest tab in my upper-right-hand sidebar.

I just want to add: I LOVE IT when you guys leave comments over there! It gives me a little extra burst of motivation to do a project when I see that one of you has commented that you've done it and loved it. My "Books to Read" board is pretty full and all of your "tried and loved it" comment might help narrow things down. Thank you!

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Pitch Notation with the Bells, Part One

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Fri, 27 Jan 2012 21:22:00 +0000

Welcome back to week two of "Montessori Music Week" here at What DID We Do All Day? !

I finally had time to stage a little amateur (very) photo shoot of some of the works that can be done with the Bells Music Signs and Notes material concerning pitch. Last week I wrote about modifying this set to create some rhythmic notation works.

Disclaimer: This is only a blog post. It would be a lot of work and too much typing to recreate full presentations here on the blog for all of these works and for the works I haven't included. I am not trying to provide full presentations or, for that matter, all of the presentations. I'm just trying to demonstrate the general types of things that can be done with these materials. There are a lot of little presentations before and after these works that I haven't mentioned at all. So, please don't get upset if it seems like I've skipped a step or ten.

Sometime after the child has demonstrated the ability to match the bells (Miller states that "This shows that the child can hear the pitches and can distinguish one from another."), we can introduce the names of the pitches. This is similar to introducing the sandpaper letters to the child after they can hear the letter sounds and can distinguish one from another. Just as in the sandpaper letters, you only introduce two or three at a time and use a three period lesson as necessary. Basically, you strike or ring a bell and then say "This is c." or "This is g." White discs with the appropriate note names can be placed in front of the bells.

Other notations lessons involve a set of chalkboards with the staff drawn on them called "green boards" or "staff boards." I have been waiting for mine (on backorder) to come from Nienhuis for several months to no avail. I made my own temporarily out of 11X17 construction paper and a permanent black marker. You want these to be at least 17 inches wide. If you can find something the right size, you could make your own from a white board or chalkboard by drawing the lines on with a permanent marker.

The first board that is used is a simple board that features only the five empty lines of the staff (and sometimes a leger line). If yours can be written on and erased you would use this board to introduce the word "staff" and demonstrate how to number the lines and spaces:

Just in case you don't know the numbering, I snapped some photos of portions of the page in my album:

You can also get a glimpse on those album pages (right hand side) of how a blank piece of paper, chalkboard, or white board will later be used to name the "ledger line" and give a "verbal way to describe the lines and spaces created by the use of ledger lines" (Miller, 18).

Another kind of staff board that is used has numbered noteheads printed directly on it. Its purpose is the "Association of the note names with their proper places on the staff that uses the G-clef" (20).

I made mine from 11x17 construction paper again. I glued on 1" cardstock circles I dug out of the package of collage materials in the boys' art closet. The numbers are stickers from the scrapbook section of the craft store.

A set of 8 black discs are needed with the letters on one side and the number on the other (c=1, d=2, etc.,)

Note: You could make discs like these by spray painting the 1" wooden discs sold in packages at the craft store and applying adhesive numbers and letters from the scrapbook section.

The child first labels their set of bells with the white discs shown earlier. The adult places the eight black discs near the staff board in a cluster. The child chooses any numbered disc and places it on its corresponding number on the staff, turns it over, says its note name, then plays the corresponding bell. They continue in random order until all of the discs are on the board.

numbers up

letters up

Another activity I think is pretty neat is the work involving note names on the unmarked green staff. This work uses the green staff board with the ledger line and also a collection of homemade ledger lines (cut from cardstock and laminated).

The Bells Music Signs and Notes material came with 32 white discs (4 each of c, d, e, f, g, a, b, c) to use on the staff boards in addition to the 8 white discs with note names that are used with the bells directly. Again, the child sets up the white discs with the note names in front of the appropriate bells.

The child picks a white disc, says its name, and looks it up on the c-major scale control strip. Then, the disc is placed upside down on the appropriate line or space on the staff board. I photographed two middle-c's so you could see a disc on both the printed leger line (right) and on the homemade laminated one (left).

Then, the child plays the corresponding bell and does a few more. They could place all of the discs or choose to stop at any point. The board would look like this:

As you can see, this work also requires that the child place the G-clef on the staff board.

When the child is done placing discs, per Miller's instructions, "pick a particular line or space. Turn all of the discs on that line or space over. They should have the same name." (22)

I think (although the presentation doesn't say) that you would turn the discs back over before you check another line or space. If you didn't, the board would look something like this:

As with so many Montessori works, there are three-part cards , matching cards, description cards, and booklets that can be purchased or made to go with all of these works. I haven't made mine yet. As I do I will share whatever downloads I am able.

I have labelled this post "part one" for several reasons. One is that I would like to show you the "parallel exercises" for note names of the C-Major scale (both matching and grading) once I have made the materials. Also, as we move into more advanced work I anticipate that there may be more posts with this title and that having them identified might be useful.

It looks like there will be a third week of "Montessori Music Week" here next week. I have had some requests for information about our rhythm band activities, recorders, and music appreciation. I'm sure some of you have had "enough music" and are ready to see some of our other work again. I do have some projects completed that I would love to photograph before I forget all about them. I also was able to photograph a few more sound bins. Perhaps you'll see a mixture of posts next week. My sister had a baby this week and I am sincerely hoping that my new niece's arrival disrupts our schedule somewhat!

If you are looking for the rest of my series on Montessori Music, there is a tab at the top of my blog under the header, or they can be found here!

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The Major Scale Pattern: Free Download

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Wed, 25 Jan 2012 19:58:00 +0000

Welcome back to week two of "Montessori Music Week" here at What DID We Do All Day? !

The music album I am using, Jean K. Miller's Montessori Music: Sensorial Exploration and Notation with the Bells, includes a series of presentations that help the child learn half steps, whole steps, the tetrachord, and the major scale pattern. (Whole steps and half steps may be called "tones" and "semi-tones" if you are across the pond.) The boys have not gotten to these presentations yet, but I made the materials.

The black and white squares on the Montessori bells boards are similar to, but not exactly like a piano keyboard.

bells board with half and whole steps labelled with cards

a piano keyboard

The white squares on the Montessori bells boards don't touch one another if they are a whole step apart, unlike a piano keyboard in which the white keys wrap under the black. This makes it a lot easier for the child to identify the half and whole steps on the Montessori bells board. After a three-period lesson is given on the half and whole step cards and they are sorted into piles, one can pick two adjacent bells that have a space between them. Play and sing the bells. Then say something like "These bells have a space between them. This is called a whole step." Finally, place the appropriate card. A similar procedure would be followed to introduce the half step. You would continue on until all of the half and whole steps are labeled.

The Montessori bells boards are manufactured in two pieces. The first tetrachord of the major scale is on one and the second tetrachord is on the other. This allows you to take one keyboard on which the bells are placed and move it in front of the other keyboard in order to see that the two tetrachords of the major scale have the same pattern (W,W,H). I will have to cut my one-piece felt board in two in order to do this lesson.

The child will have learned so play and sing the ascending and descending scale in earlier presentations. This is the first time they see that the major scale is built using a particular pattern of whole and half steps. Usually a control chart is provided so that the child can check their work labeling the whole and half steps.

control chart

Whole and half step cards and the control strip are available for purchase through Nienhuis.
I made my own and am sharing the files with my readers via the links below. Due to the size of the control strip I made it was little tricky to create a sharable file. You'll have to print onto legal-sized paper and do a little cutting and pasting. Once you laminate, you shouldn't be able to tell the difference :)

whole step file

half step file

Half Step and Whole Step Control Strip

Miller states that "An understanding of whole steps, half steps and the tetrachord are concepts which prepare children for work with the tone bars during the years from six to twelve." The tone bars provide two octaves of notes and the child will be able to construct any major scale they wish by following this pattern of whole and half steps.

Enjoy! Tomorrow I hope to continue this series and post a little bit about the pitch notation materials.

If you are looking for the rest of my series on Montessori Music, there is a tab at the top of my blog under the header, or they can be found here!

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Dum ditty, dum ditty, dum dum dum...

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Tue, 24 Jan 2012 21:10:00 +0000

Welcome back to week two of "Montessori Music Week" here at What DID We Do All Day? ! Today, I am going to talk about drums and little bit about the Montessori philosophy concerning "care of the environment. Tomorrow we will be back to the bells with some free downloads for your music theory works!

Now, on to the matter of a good drum. As an economical choice for primary and elementary-aged kids I really, really like this drum:

Remo Kids Percussion, Floor Tom, 10 Diameter with Mallet, Rain Forest Fabric, $29

It is unusual in that it it can be played either with the included, soft mallet or with the hands. Only use a soft mallet with this drum.

Remo 10" Black Mallet with Cloth-Covered Rubber Head

Some similar Remo drums come with more of a "stick" which I don't like. Wood mallets will damage the head. It seems to me that those plastic sticks would as well. The other mallets are perfect.

This drum doesn't have to be tuned. It stands on its own feet. If the child is big enough to hold different types of drums properly (upper elementary) there are a lot of other choices. If you have questions about those, ask me. However, if you don't hold a hand drum properly it doesn't sound good. A footed drum like this one makes everything a lot easier on the child.

The diameter on this drum (10") is a good size for hand-drumming. Many of the other Remo choices (conga, bongos) are so small in diameter they are really only good for drumming on the edge. You want the child to be able to experience the low sound they get from drumming with the palm in the middle as well as the high sound achieved by drumming with the fingers on the edge. This drum is made economical by its 7.5" height.

A couple other choices:

My favorite drum, and usually the favorite of kids is a 26" tall Remo tubano.

Remo TU-0514 14" Pretuned Tubano $140

These come in 10, 12, and 14 inch diameters. Kids always pick the 14" and it sounds really cool to boot. The floor tom is $30 though and the tubano is $140. Again, this is a footed drum but its height is perfect for a small child standing or for a larger child or an adult to play seated. The floor tom really is just a short tubano.

At home, we are currently using these:

Remo Kid's Percussion 8" x 14" Pre-tuned Djembe, $54

These are great drums and are my favorite next to the footed tubanos. They take some work to make sure the kids are holding them right. My boys really can't hold them correctly, so they play them standing with the included strap. Ours our "loaners" so you will see I keep them up high so they aren't damaged when I'm not looking.

There are a lot of drum choices in the Remo rainforest collection collection. I like the following: floor tom, tubanos, djembe, and frame drums. The kids do not seem to like the bongos or the conga due to the small diameter of the heads. I had a larger set of tunable bongos in a different brand that they liked a lot better.

I like the Remo rainforest collection because they don't need tuning. However, a permanent drum head means the head can't be replaced when damaged. If you hit these with things you shouldn't or rub them up against wall or furniture while transporting them you can damage the head. I used multiples of every drum in this collection for five years, almost daily, with 200 kids I trusted. I trained them very carefully how to care for them and none of the drums were damaged in the years I used them. I had very high expectations for the kids behavior. I was not a Montessori teacher, but I think I taught them how to use and care for these in a very Montessori way. After I had Kal-El and went back to visit the school, several kids came up to me with tears in their eyes to say that many things had been "ruined" while I was gone because the teacher didn't have those expectations or train new students in the same way. Also, whereas I taught the kids to store them on labelled spaces in cabinets with doors, the new teacher didn't like "wasting time" teaching the 30 kids how to all get an instrument from the cabinets in an organized fashion. Instead, she just left all the instruments on the floor around the perimeter of the room where they were often hit with just about anything by any visiting sibling or outside group that had use of the room. A child who is used to a Montessori lifestyle in which the "care of the environment" is purposefully taught should have no trouble. Time spent teaching the child how to properly retrieve and care for things from the beginning may mean a little extra time spent before you can get started on what an adult might see as the "real work." However, that time is paid back tenfold by quick and appropriate retrieval and use of the materials in the future.

I bring this up because no drum is indestructible and I want to warn families that they will have to teach children what they can and can't hit them with and how to carry them properly. You also want to think about storage. If you put a drum on the bottom shelf and bang the head into the top shelf every time you put it away, your drum won't last very long. The 26" tubanos should not be carried by the head. The head will eventually pop off. They need to be carried with one hand on the handle and the other underneath the bottom. Before being allowed to carry the drum, the child should have developed a good level of body awareness so that they aren't banged into every other piece of furniture, or other kids with drums, on their way to and from storage. All of the "walking the line" activities in the Montessori environment are great preparation for this.

If you are looking for the rest of my series on Montessori Music, there is a tab at the top of my blog under the header, or they can be found here!

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Rhythm Instruments

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Mon, 23 Jan 2012 15:25:00 +0000

Welcome to WEEK 2 of "Montessori Music Week(s)" here at What DID We Do All Day? !

In Friday's post, Rhythm Instruments NOT to Buy, I posted about rhythm band instruments for home or classroom. I talked about kits, such as the one in the picture above (example set from Cascio) that run between $90-140. One of my readers (thanks Mel!) let me know about a Hohner 6 Piece Rhythm Instrument Set that is available on Amazon for about $30 which, if you have your heart set on those types of instruments, is a really good price and a good-sized set for home use. I'm just not that excited about what's in it. Many other sets are 15-piece sets (read: filled in with extra rhythms sticks and many ways to jingle). However, if you read my post on Friday, you know that I think that the instruments included in these kits are generally not fun or sturdy choices.

Today I would like to show you what I chose to put on our music shelf in our home classroom for two children. My own kids have a "10-piece" set if you like to look at it that way. If you are trying to outfit a larger classroom I would recommend that you double or triple the set accordingly. I would also recommend outfitting the whole class with rhythm sticks which, at about $1.30 a pair, are very economical.

My mixed bag of life experiences includes several years in charge of purchasing and using these types of instruments with large groups of adults and children. The recommendations I am making are for specific brands and instruments that I really liked, the children really liked, and that I found both economical and superior to other choices.

Here is some photos of our rhythm instrument basket:

Hmmm...the professional photographer at the instrument company managed to photograph the tiny instruments in their kits so that they look huge. I've managed to photograph my large instruments so that they look small :(

I thought it might be nice if there was one concise description in one place in this post that lists what it contains: One great tambourine, two-pair of rhythm sticks, one pair of 7" cymbals, one excellent guiro, two inexpensive but great triangles, and a couple pair of maracas. I also recommend buying a good drum. We have two on loan from friends. Based on the specific instruments I will recommend, not counting the drum, you can outfit yourself with a similar collection for about $35...WITH the drum, $65. That is a lot better than the $90 set pictured at the top of this post and you'll have great instruments that kids and adults will love.

The most expensive parts of a kit like this (not including the drum) are the tambourine and the cymbals. There seems to be an unwritten rule that states "tambourines must cost a minimum of $20." The tambourine the boys use is identical one I used in the classroom for years and was superior to all of the other 20 tambourines I had. I splurged on it ($18) because of the combination of great sound and fun shape:

Rhythm Band Fish Tambourine

However, I also strongly recommend this tambourine:

Pulse Pro Tambourine Black $10

I've used it, it sounds great, and it is a steal at only $10.

I think cymbals may be so expensive because they are brass. Kids like BIG cymbals. 7" are a good size for the classroom. My favorite economical choice are this pair by Rhythm Band.

Rhythm Band Brass Cymbals, 7" Pair $17

They have a pretty good sound. They are the best I've found. If you are expecting a big beautiful splash like in a Sousa march, you might be disappointed. You would need larger and/or more expensive cymbals for that. (At least $60 for a 14" pair, a couple hundred for a GOOD 14" pair.) In contrast, you can often find really great pairs of finger cymbals (little 2" cymbals) that have a great sound. I used a few great pairs and some duds in the past. I've never purchased any though, so I would recommend trying some out at the music store. Little girls like to choose finger cymbals sometimes. Little boys always seem to angle for the biggest cymbals they can get.

Trophy Rhythm Sticks $1.29

There are some variations on these: smooth or fluted, color, and length. I like each pair to have one smooth and one fluted so the child can run the smooth stick along the fluted to represent longer notes. I think the 8" and 10" sticks feel too short (although they may be good for very young children) but think the 12" and 14" feel great. As I said before, I recommend getting enough of these for everybody. They are fun when everyone has them, but not as fun when the kid next to you has the cymbals.

For children, one usually finds the highly-breakable handled guiros like I talked about on Friday. Otherwise, another common one is a big wooden fish (my students broke three of those over the years). You can find some really cute ones shaped like frogs, grasshoppers or turtles starting at about $10 (price increases as size increases, the small ones are always smaller than you think they will be. Oh, and F.Y.I., the grasshopper gets the best sound). The benefit of those is that they can work double duty along with some continent work.

I thought I was going to get the boys a large grasshopper until I found this guiro:

Hohner Kids 8" Guiro Plastic $5.50

I LOVE this guiro! In my experience, this is a very unusual guiro. It is made of sturdy plastic and shaped like the traditional fish guiros. It has indentations on the bottom to encourage children to hold it properly. At 8", it is a great size. Unlike most guiros this size, it has three different ribbed sections each in a different size and spacing of ribs. You can get a LOT of different sounds on this thing. AND, it has an area where it can be hit rather than scraped so it can double as a wood block (now you can cross "wood block" off your list). I also like that the mallet/scrapper is a little bit flexible which will prevent breakage somewhat (thin, rigid scrapers can be very brittle).

You can pick up a triangle just about anywhere. It is hard to mess up a triangle. My favorite ones have a round ball hanger like in the picture. I picked up triangles for the boys for $2 each at the craft store, they sound great, and they even came with extra ball holders. If you lose your holders, you can order new ones online, or just use a rubber band or loop of yarn. Our $2 triangles are six-inch triangles. As with all things, I find that if given a choice of different-sized children will always choose the very biggest one they can find.

Rhythm Band Musical Steel Triangle (I paid $2)

If you insist on some kind of "jingle bell" instrument (I admit, they CAN be fun around Christmas), I like the jingle "cluster" version the best.

Hohner Cluster Bells

The wrist loops are cheaper than the cluster bells. If you are choosing a wrist loop, get the nylon rather than the plastic because the plastic gets brittle and breaks. None of the wrist loops are adjustable, even though you would think they would be.

We have a few choices of maracas at our house. One is a large wooden handmade pair that are a souvenir from a trip that a family member took. They work really well. We also have a couple of small plastic pair that I found for $1 a pair cheaply at a craft store. Whenever I'm in a craft or toy store I try the various sets of maracas. 99% of the time they are duds, but every once in a while you'll find a THICK plastic pair (watch out for cheap, separating seams) that has a good sound. It is a little more expensive to set out to buy a pair on purpose. But, if you do, these maracas by Nino are really durable and have a great quality, loud sound:

Meinl Plastic Egg Maracas, Pair $5

The egg shaker version is just as good (although kids seem to feel more grown up and authentic with a handled pair), and more economical for a crowd because you get 4 pieces altogether:

Meinl Plastic Egg Shaker (4 pc Assortment) $8

The Remo fruit or vegetable shakes are great also, but more expensive. They look super realistic (like food) are durable, and have great sounds. They are usually sold online in big sets, but you can usually find individuals for sale at a music store. You can buy an individual online, but they are often $10 apiece that way.

Remo SC-ASRT-09 Fruit Shakes Assortment 9 Piece Box

That covers everything that I chose for our basket! There is one item that is not pictured because it was backordered and I'm still waiting. I wouldn't consider it a "staple" but I wanted us to give it a try. It is a pair of claves:

Toca Claves, $7

I've used claves successfully in upper elementary, but haven't tried them in lower. I'll let you know how it goes.

There is one item that is on my wishlist for the future (I don't need everything right away!), just in case you are curious...a mini afuche/cabasa. They are easy for kids to play, particularly in this smaller size.

Mini afuche/cabasa, $18

I know I didn't get into the interesting topic of good drums. This post was getting too long as it was. I have written a separate post about drums and will try to get that up soon!

If you are looking for the rest of my series on Montessori Music, there is a tab at the top of my blog under the header, or they can be found here!

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Letter Y Sound Bin

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Sun, 22 Jan 2012 00:08:00 +0000

I only have one "miniature" item for my letter "Y" sound bin. I pull the rest of the sound bin together using full-sized objects from around the house, and throw in a few photographs.

yardstick, yarn, yam, yogurt (actual tub from the refrigerator, Me Too was very concerned until it was put back), "yellow" paper, and four photographs.

The one miniature item is this yo-yo. I realized it was missing from the collected photo after I uploaded. One of the boys absconded with it.

Here is a closeup of the photographs I used to supplement the bin:

yawn, yolk, yacht, yak

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Rhythm Instruments NOT to buy!

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Fri, 20 Jan 2012 19:44:00 +0000

Welcome back to Montessori Music Week here at What DID We Do All Day? !

Please do not skim the pictures on this post, think that I am recommending the products pictured, and go out and buy them. Today's post is about WHAT NOT TO BUY!

Disclaimer: If you own any of the instruments pictured and are enjoying them, stop reading, cover your ears and chant "la, la, la, la," and disregard this post because I don't want to ruin your enjoyment!

On our music shelves we have a super nice collection of rhythm instruments for the boys to explore. ON MONDAY I have a post planned in which I will show you what kinds of instruments I chose for our family (I still have to take photographs for that one). In this post, I wanted to familiarize those of you with the types of instruments widely available and give you some insider's tips. I have a ton of experience with many brands and styles of rhythm instruments that I've used with large groups of children across many age groups. Today's post is about the types of instruments we chose NOT to put in our basket. You will see lots of little "instruments for children" for sale at toy stores and craft store. Let me warn you, these are NOT great choices. Most of these are not only expensive, but also the following:

flimsy
too loud, or alternatively, so improperly made they barely produce sound
of such poor tone quality you can't stand letting the kids use them.
inappropriate for the age intended
messy
poorly designed, won't last the week (you would think that would fall under "flimsy" but, sadly, some instruments can be both flimsy and poorly designed.)

Many classrooms are outfitted with a collection of rhythm band instruments that you can buy as a collection such as this one:

A smaller set, more appropriate for a single-family homeschool might look like this:

Don't do it! Let me take you through some of the elements here and explain the multiple problems. I'll put up the larger collection again for easy reference:

If you have a classroom full of kids and a box full of instruments like this, the kids who are lucky enough to draw the drums, tambourines, cymbals, and triangles are the going to be the only ones smiling. YOU are going to stop smiling once you here those drums and tambourines. THE KIDS with the drums and tambourines will stop smiling as soon as their mallet breaks through the skin of the instrument. The drums and tambourines in a kit like this ARE toys and the SOUND LIKE toys. They are also too flimsy to stand up to the rigors of actual use by an actual child if you can stand listening to them long enough to let them actually use them. The diameter on the little red drums (tom toms) in particular is so small even the kids know they are ridiculous.

The triangle players ARE happy and will STAY happy. Yea!

The kid who got the pair of cymbals will be happier than the kid who got the single cymbal with mallet, as long as the cymbals aren't (as they often are) 3 inches in diameter. Kids like a good 7 inch cymbal.

The kids who got the other instruments are probably depressed and I don't blame them. Most of the rest of these are just sad unless you are under the age of three and in a "Mommy and Me" class. One exception is the rhythm sticks (the blue sticks along the bottom). These are a very valid, and handy, music learning tool. However, they are fun when the whole class is using them. They are not fun when you are holding them and the kid next to you has a drum, cymbals, or a triangle.

A lot of the remaining instruments have funny names that are very similar to one another so I dug up some pictures of each to make it clear what I'm talking about.

The "jingle tap": possibly the most depressing instrument in this collection. Did you ever notice that tambourines come with many of these silver discs on them? That is because a single little disc or pair of discs makes a pitiful noise by itself. This is a single disc from a tambourine with no second disc paired with it to even clatter against. Sometimes I think these things are designed so the music teacher has something inaudible to give the kids who can't play at the right time in a concert.

A guiro-style tone block. Kits often come with its equally-sad sibling, the tone block (no ridges). The problem with this is the design. Real wood blocks or claves are tricky for the child to hold, so this handled version was invented. The cylinder has to be hollow to make a good sound and is split into two halves with a slight space between them (see the seam down the right side of the tone block running the long way). As soon as the child pushes on or squeezes this too hard (usually when getting up from sitting on the floor with it clenched in their hand) this instrument will be crushed.

The "jingle loop." Like I said, fun when you are two, not when you are six. Plus, the plastic on these gets really brittle and breaks open at some point making it more a "belt" than a "bracelet."

The "jingle cluster." Honestly, how much jingling do we need? Don't the sad sounding toy tambourines have this covered? That said, this is the best sounding and sturdiest option if you feel the need to jingle.

Maracas. Ahh, maracas. Maracas in general are a good addition to a rhythm band collection. The kits usually come with brown ones like these or the purple ones often seen. Don't buy these. They all split apart at the seam eventually spilling their innards everywhere. Innards made in China. My students have found some really weird, creepy things inside of the maracas when they fall apart.

In toy stores you often see the really small wooden ones. Try them first. Most often the wood is too thick, the cavity inside too small and filled with too few "innards" to make enough sound.

Handled Castanets. Handled castanets are really a different instrument than regular castanets and are not very musically interesting...i.e., there's not much you can do with them. Regular castanets with no handle are really very difficult for the child to keep assembled properly or hold properly. I don't think they are an appropriate choice.

Sand blocks and their evil cousin "wood clappers." The sandblocks can actually be fun if you are not playing with such a large group that you can't hear yourself and if you don't mind sprinkling your surroundings with sand. The wood clappers (same exact thing without the sandpaper stapled on) are painfully loud and will damage your hearing.

The last item often found in these kits is a conductor's baton. This is delicate and will be broken in the first week. Usually it is snapped in half by one child after another child pokes them with it.

I apologize for writing such a long, negative post. I don't like to be a Debbie Downer, but I'm good at it. While my pictures address instruments specific to school-type rhythm band kits, I hope you will be able to recognize their colorful plastic cousins out in the toy and craft stores. I promise I will balance out all of this negativity on Monday when I show how you can spend about the same amount money (or a little more if you decide to get fancy) on real instruments that your kids or students will love, can be used by children or adults for a lifetime, and are pleasant to listen to.

If you are looking for the rest of my series on Montessori Music, there is a tab at the top of my blog under the header, or they can be found here!

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Bells Album

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Thu, 19 Jan 2012 15:15:00 +0000

Welcome back to Montessori Music Week here at What DID We Do All Day? !

I purchased the above album from Nienhuis to go with our "bells music signs and notes." It is written by Jean K. Miller and titled "Montessori Music Sensorial Exploration and Notation with the Bells."

If you plan on only doing the bells and not the notation materials and you have the Gettman, the presentations in the Gettman should be fine. His presentations cover many variations of the two main activities done with the bells: matching and grading. Miller's album contains more variations and games but they cover the same ground. The extra variations are very similar knobbed cylinder extensions. Once the child can place all the cylinders do it: from two different rugs, from across the room, from across the room but walk in a circle before getting to the other side, etc., If you have the cylinders extensions somewhere apply those to the bells and you'll have it all.

The Gettman does not have the notation presentations however, and that is why I chose to buy this album. An extra bonus is that Miller's album is heavily illustrated with photographs. I'm not the type who feels that every album or presentation needs to be illustrated. I will say that the bells are one thing that is very helpful to have an illustrated album for. You don't get all twisted around in all the explanations like this one: "take 3 contrasting bells, widely spaced (but not the lowest bell and the highest bell) and place in reverse order in front of the bells at the right end of the bell setup."

Here is a photograph of a pair of pages with a bells presentation:

Here is a photograph of one of the pitch notation pages:

The illustrations are extra important when you plan to make all your own staff boards and print materials. There are nice illustrations of the front and back of every card in a set so you don't have to guess what is on the back, or guess what a whole set contains based on what you can see on the top card. I haven't made my print materials yet but will share when I do.

I am very happy that I purchased this album. I will point out that it has one major limitation. It is very clear upon reading the album that is intended to be the first of a pair of Montessori music albums. The album abruptly stops halfway through the pitch notation exercises before flats and sharps are introduced. On page 9, the author states, "See the next book in this series for a presentation of sharps and flats." As far as I have been able to ascertain, there IS no "next book in this series." I asked for help on Montessori Online and received one reply (thank you Cara!). That person didn't believe a second book existed but gave me a list of all Jean K. Miller's books that she could find. There is another music book written Music Theory with the Bells in a Montessori Environment. That book was published in 1970 and 1989 whereas the album I own has a 1999 date. I am guessing that either a second book was planned and never written, or that the album I own is a "prequel" to the other book. It's also equally possible that the 1999 book is a spruced up and retitled version of the 70/89. I am trying to get my hands on that other book, but it is out of print and I don't want to spend a crazy amount of money on it...particularly when I don't know what's in it! The Keys of the Universe album program I begin in February may contain the needed presentations in the music album. If not, I have seen the table of contents from Elizabeth Papandrea's music album and it appears that the presentations might be included there. If a reader has either of those albums and could comment, it would be much appreciated!

Does anyone have access to a copy of Miller's other book? If so, can you leave a comment and let me know what's in it? There are some copies in college libraries a few states away. I'm going to talk to our library and see what they can do for me. I am missing my PhD candidate days when I could get any book I wanted, for as long as I wanted, ASAP. Miller also has another book "Montessori Elementary School and its Curriculum" that I would love to read. Has anyone read that and would you recommend it?

Gotta run! Kal-El just finished reading Me Too a book and now they are fighting about which of them is the most "funky." (As in "funky music," not as in "smells funky.")

If you are looking for the rest of my series on Montessori Music, there is a tab at the top of my blog under the header, or they can be found here!

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Rhythmic Notation

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Wed, 18 Jan 2012 19:20:00 +0000

Welcome back to Montessori Music Week here at What DID We Do All Day? ! There is a lot more to report than I thought. I think that next week will be Montessori Music Week here as well. I still want to tell you more about the album I'm using (it's great, but has limitations), show you our music shelves, talk about the pitch notation materials I made, talk about instrument choices for the music shelves, and much more. Today I'm going to talk a little bit about our rhythmic notation materials.

The Nienhuis notation materials are primarily intended to be used with several different types of staff boards for pitch notation. Oddly, there are a few beams included as well as both open and closed noteheads. This led me to believe that we would be able to use this material to notate rhythms. When it arrived, I was surprised to see how few beams were included (2) and that there were no flags or rests. I asked about this on Playschool6 and received a few responses. The consensus was that the child learns to notate pitch before rhythm in the Montessori environment; that by the time the child would begin to notate rhythm they would be at the point where they would find this material cumbersome. This is analogous to the way that the child finds the golden beads cumbersome once they are ready for abstraction and we free them from the limitations of the beads with the presentation of the stamp game.

Me Too using the notation materials to invent his own rhythms.

The bridge from the Montessori bells to pitch notation is a very natural and logical one. If the Montessori bells are the child's only or primary hands-on musical experience at this age they will, of course, eventually want to name those pitches and to see how the pitches look on paper. This is much like the progression from sound games to sandpaper letters. However, pitch and rhythm are two very different but equally important and equally interesting elements of music. A child that is learning to play an instrument during their primary or early elementary years will have exposure to both. In that case, it is only natural that they will be interested in rhythm as well. In fact, my experiences with many young children and music have shown me that some children will find themselves particularly drawn to rhythm and others drawn to pitch. Because rhythm and pitch notation can be taught exclusively from one another and either one can provide scaffolding for the other in future lessons I see no reason not to follow the child here.

Kal-El seems to find pitch obvious and somewhat uninteresting. He is (as you could see in yesterday's post) very fascinated with rhythms. He chants rhythms throughout his day in all kinds of unlikely situations. He won't just "rosin his bow"; he has to do it to a "rhythm." When he uses his nail brush in the bathtub he chooses a rhythm to chant and follow with the nail brush.

My album does not include presentations for this. I have seen the table of contents from the Elizabeth Papandrea elementary albums and rhythmic notation appears to be covered. I recently was fortunate enough to win half-off of the Keys of the Universe elementary course/albums. I haven't seen the table of contents from that music album so I don't know what is covered there. I'll let you know when I begin that process in February. Please feel free to leave information in the comments if you know if presentations for this type of thing are contained in any other albums. Despite this, I don't feel like I need a manual to do this. If you know your subject manner, have studied Montessori theory/philosophy, and have taken a child through a number of presentations, you should be able to write your own presentation for anything the child wants to learn. This process in music is so analogous to the process of language acquisition and learning to read that it is pretty obvious what should happen here. If it turns out that the elementary albums do not have presentations for this, I promise I will write mine out and offer them here at a future time. How I am doing this may differ from other sources because I am technically doing this "out of order."

There are several learning steps that take place before the child would reach the point where they can create their own rhythms on paper. Just as we play sound games with the child to introduce them to all the key sounds of their native language, we should play sound games with the child to make them aware of the basic rhythms in music. Just as best practice suggests that we don't tell the child the "name" of the letter sound at that stage, we don't tell the child the name of the rhythms at that stage either.

Once the child is familiar with, and can reproduce, many rhythms with their bodies or with an instrument they will be ready to put a name to the rhythms that they already know. (By "name of the rhythm" I specifically mean how the rhythm is counted. More on that later.) This is a little different than with language, where we don't tell the child the name of the letter until after they have learned both the sound and the symbol. This is because the sound and the letter name are not the same and thinking of the letter name when you look at the symbol interferes with the reading process in which you need the sound and not the name. In music, the counting of the rhythm can sound just like the rhythm itself. In this case, teaching the counting words for a particular rhythmic symbol does not hinder the reading process because they are the same. Here is a rhythm that Kal-El built yesterday:

There are many systems of "counting words" for rhythms. Decide what you are going to use and come up with the words accordingly. A lot of people like Kodaly counting words for young children because you can teach rhythm separate from meter for a while. The words my boys use for the rhythm above would be "ti-ti ta ti-ti." (As an adult I count this "1& 2 3&".) The counting words are different than the "names" of the rhythms. The names would be "eighth note, eighth note, quarter note, eighth note, eighth note." Much like the letter names in early reading, this information is not particularly useful. I've chosen not to tell the boys the proper names of the rhythmic units for now.

After the child is familiar with and can reproduce many rhythms and has learned the counting words for those rhythms the can be give three-period lessons on the "parts of" a written note. Many similar materials produce the notes all as one piece (note head, stem, and flags or beams all attached).It is wonderful how the Nienhuis material allows the child to build the rhythms himself by providing the parts rather than the whole. We used the material to learn the following parts: notehead, open notehead, closed notehead, stem, beam, flag, "ta" rest, "ti" rest.

The material does NOT include flags at all and nearly no beams. If you want to use the material in this way you will have to make your own. In the "popsicle stick" section of the craft store they have all kinds of sizes of wooden sticks and things sold by the bags. I used Woodsies by Loew-Cornell, item number 1021175, "skinny craft sticks."

They were perfectly in scale with the Nienhuis material. I used a clippers to cut them to a few useful lengths and then hit them with my can of black enamel spray paint. Now that they are finished, they look as if they came with the material in the first place.

You will also want some rests and barlines. I printed a variety of rests out on my computer, cut them out, and laminated them. You could probably also do this on a Cricut . Then, laminate them. You have to make some leger lines in this manner for the pitch notation presentations anyways. I also made a non-pitched clef but haven't introduced it yet.

I used a few 11X17 pieces of green construction paper and a permanent black marker to make a few staff boards featuring a one-lined rhythm staff.

The flags are not as professional-looking as the beams. Again, it might be nice to do these on a Cricut with chipboard and then spray paint. I wanted them right away so I made them out of extra-thick craft foam. I drew a shape I liked by hand, traced it onto the foam a few times, and cut them out by hand.

Here is a rhythm that is very familiar to Kal-El that shows one of my homemade beams, eighth rests, and flags.

After the child knows the names of the parts of the notes, you can show them the notation for the units of the rhythms they know. I started, for example, by showing Kal-El what a pair of "ti-ri's" (16th notes) and a pair of "ti-ti's" (eight notes) looked like by building them with closed noteheads, stems, and beams. In a subsequent lesson I showed him that these notes look different in pairs or groups than they do alone. I introduced the "flag." As always, the three-period lesson is your friend. After receiving three-period lessons on enough rhythmic units the child is able to use this material just like they use the movable alphabet, but to write rhythms instead of words.

Here are a few rhythms Kal-El has built with his music "movable alphabet" this week. He likes to point to the notes as he counts them out when he is finished. The boys will often pull an instrument off the shelves and play them as well.

"ti-ti ta, ti-ti ta"

"ti-ri-ti-ri ti-ti"

I hope this gives you an idea of what I bought, what I made, and how we are using it. If I were writing proper presentations I would have to give a lot more detail, define terms, and skip fewer steps.

If you are looking for the rest of my series on Montessori Music, there is a tab at the top of my blog under the header, or they can be found here!

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School Days

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 21:00:00 +0000

This post is just a little break from my "music week" posts to show you some of the non-music work that went on around here over the course of the past week.

Me Too revisiting the geometric solids. Kal-El is practicing dynamic operations with the golden beads in the background.

Kal-El pulled out the sandpaper letters and experimented with some different ways to spell "goofy."
(Note: when teaching the sandpaper letters "oo" makes the sound as in "book" not as in "zoo" but Kal-El now knows several spellings for these sounds.)

Me Too deciding that sound "zig zag" starts with...

...so he could complete a z/i sound sort.

Kal-El chose to work with the thousand chain several times this week. Now that the Christmas tree is down you can see how the chain and rug stretch all the way across the front of the house. I presented finding a single number. He sets up the rug and chain. I wrote a single number (such as 337) on a slip of paper with an arrow and Kal-El's task was to find that specific bead. The first day he had to find it "the long way" by counting to that specific number. The second day he placed all the red arrows first (100, 200, 300, etc.,) and experienced how much faster he could find any number once all of the hundreds were in place.

Kal-El rolling his 1000 chain rug. I cut six or seven pieces from couple of yards of felt and my mom sewed them together end-to-end for me. You could get a continuous rug if you ordered enough felt, but you would also waste a lot of felt that way.

Me Too working with pattern blocks.

Me Too identifying capital and lowercase "Y."

Me Too tracing leaf shapes from the botany cabinet.

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Montessori Music Notation

noreply@blogger.com (My Boys' Teacher) — Tue, 17 Jan 2012 13:00:00 +0000

Welcome back to "Montessori Music Week" here at What DID We Do All Day?.

Me Too and Kal-El have been studying Suzuki violin since June. They know how to count a few rhythms by now, most prominently: tiri tiri ti ti, and ti tiri ti tiri. A couple of weeks ago Kal-El pulled an ornament off of our Christmas tree, brought it to me and told me he found "notes." He asked me what kind of notes they were. It was a pair of sixteenth notes so I told them they were "tiri." (The kids are learning some kind of Kodaly counting at this age. They will learn how to count "properly" later. Yeah, yeah...I know some of you think Kodaly counting is proper counting. Let's not bicker.) He asked me what "ti ti" would look like and I told him the pair would have one beam instead of two.

I was cooking dinner and forgot all about him for a while. I looked up some time later when he exclaimed "Look Mom! I made 'tiri tiri ti ti'!" He had made several trips to the Christmas tree and had brought back a motley assortment of sixteenth notes and icicles. He had laid them out on the kitchen counter to look like this.

See how he tried to use the icicles to make his eight notes? I left him to his own devices and he worked out several rhythms and counted them. (If you are musically literate please note that I realize all of his 16th note pairs needed to be flipped over.) Here is a photo of his "ti tiri ti tiri" (strawberry strawberry, or as I would count it "1-&-a, 2-&-a"):

Wait! There is a proper Montessori material for this (almost) and I suppose this was the unequivocal sign that he is ready!

Sooo...I placed my first ever order from Nienhuis. I felt very hoity toity afterward too :) None of the other Montessori suppliers actually carry the notation materials. What I wanted was THIS:

Bells Music Signs and Notes. Image from Neinhuis.

For once, the Neinhuis prices were somewhat proportional to what I felt I was getting. The only similar material I found elsewhere was this one from Music in Motion (a super-fun catalog to peruse by the way); the MIM material was surprisingly much more expensive. Since the MIM version was felt and velcro rather than wood, more expensive, and didn't suit the activities quite as well I went with then Nienhuis version.

I planned to make my own staff boards from construction paper. However, the wood ones from Nienhuis were also almost reasonable so I splurged on a set. They turned out to be on backorder so I wound up making my own anyway.

Bells Staff Boards. Image from Neinhuis.

I also ordered Jean K. Miller's book "Montessori Music Sensorial Exploration and Notation With the Bells. The Gettman book has enough presentations given for the bells. It does not provide any notation presentations. This is likely because the bells are not considered "music education" in the Montessori curriculum, but rather a sensorial material for auditory discrimination. I'll post more about Miller's album and some other music album options later this week.

Nienhuis offers a few other music materials that I wanted but were strangely unreasonably priced. I made most of those myself as well and you will see them later this week as well.

The Nienhuis "music signs and notes" material is oddly inconsistent about the rhythmic materials it includes. I had to DIY some additions to our set to make it all work for us. This post is already rather long so I will let you know what I added, how I did it, and show you some pictures of the boys using the material tomorrow!

If you are looking for the rest of my series on Montessori Music, there is a tab at the top of my blog under the header, or they can be found here!

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