Month: September 2013

This one is for Jenn @ MrLittleMan.  She’s doing all sorts of cool things with her son’s tot school so check it out!  Awhile ago she inquired about some of our Montessori inspired work. Here are my favorite resources. Online: Montessori Primary Guide: great ideas for many basic activities. MontessoriMom: a list of early practical life skills. Montessori for Everyone: a list of essentials for a toddler classroom. NAMC Curriculum: I haven’t purchased anything but if you click on the link under each picture you can see the table of contents for each manual.  That alone is very inspiring. Deb at LivingMontessoriNow is an amazing resource for everything Montessori.  I’ve had a few questions already and she has been a big help to me. In Print: Basic Montessori: Learning Activities for Under-Fives by David Gettman is by far my favorite book.  If I could only read or buy one that’s the one I would choose. Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Pre-school Years by Elizabeth G. Hainstock is essentially the same as Gettman’s book except in more casual language.  It does have more information regarding at home preschool specifically. If anyone has specific information let me know, I have too

I turned 27 on the 9th.  Where does time go!? We celebrated with a picnic at the park. We were approaching another financial milestone and things worked out just right us to hit it on my birthday. By the grace of God we transferred the last few dollars and now have a FULLY FUNDED emergency fund!  Hallelujah!! We are still a long way from true financial peace (because of the farm) but this is a big step to have completed.  It feels good! You can read the rest of our money story here.  

Our Tot School journey started with lots of lots of research. We kicked off with color themes when he was 12 months old. We had more fun with our St. Patrick’s Day theme than with any other to date. We took a break from colors to welcome Spring and celebrate Easter. We ended our color unit with Gray week. Then we had our most educational week where we learned all about Chicks. After that it was on to shapes! Color themes are pretty standard. I was inspired to do shape themes by Kaysha at Memorizing the Moments. After that, though, it seems like most tot schoolers move on to letter of the week themes. I am not interested in introducing the alphabet this year. We spend a lot of time reading with Kent so he does have a lot of exposure to letters. He understands the concept of print. For example, he will point to a road sign in a book and say “slow” because we’ve moved his finger along the letters while pronouncing the word and he remembers. We often started our color and shape weeks with me printing the theme name on his magnadoodle and sounding it out

I love seeing Kent use his imagination and I’m fascinated with all the small world play ideas on the web. I have been trying harder to facilitate his imaginative play. Recently one of our tot trays was a square made out of Lincoln logs. For rectangle week I added some longer logs and horses from his Safari Ltd. toob. We used the log rectangle as a paddock for the horses to jump in and out of. Now for the part about keeping it real… I wonder sometimes if people think we have a perfect, strict schooling routine. Let me assure you that “tot school” is very much a fly by the seat of our pants operation on most days. Here’s what happened when the phone rang during our play session… So you see, nothing perfect here! We have fun though! 😉

Since becoming aware that clipping was difficult for Kent I have been on the lookout for new ways to strengthen his little hand muscles. These little squirt bottles turned out to be a great way to do just that. I bought mine from the vet clinic but similar ones are available on Amazon. I let him pick the colors and filled each bottle with liquid watercolor diluted with water. Then I placed two coffee filters on an old towel in a cake pan. He caught on right away and went to work. It was great to see his little hand muscles flexing. I have never before seen him so engaged in an art project! He systematically emptied each bottle and then requested to do it all over again. I moved the coffee filters to some newspaper for drying. We gave them out as decorations. An older child could cut them in the shapes, or I could have cut them in small pieces and had him make contact paper art!