I love it when they work together . . .

Overheard today from two preschoolers:

Princess: Mrs. F, how do you write a letter "d"?

Super: I know - I'll get the sandpaper letters for you, Princess.

(He went over and got the sandpaper letters and brought it over to the second table. They spread out the letters.)

Super: Here is the letter "d" Princess. See, it is a circle and a line. The circle is in the front.

Princess: Thanks, Super!

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I love it when they work together, and I love it when they spontaneously think to use works.

Made me smile today.

Pictures from early March: Preschool

Top shelf on the Art Shelf - free art materials, shamrocks, and
Level 1 from Child-Size Masterpieces.

Second shelf on Art shelf - Q coloring sheets and Cat In The Hat coloring sheet

Cutting sheet, paper, and inset paper (the children like to use inset paper for smaller drawings/making books, etc.)

Top shelf of the geeometric shelf - The insets. There is also a geometric plane shapes chart on the wall and geometric plane cards in the bottom right corner - both from Montessori For Everyone.

The Geometric Shelf

Top shelf - stereognostic bag with geometric shapes,
pattern blocks, and a shape game that I got at the thrift store.

Middle shelf - Geometric solids, felt geometric shapes,
shape sorter.
Bottom shelf - My version of the triangle, rectangle, circle,
and square trays of the geometric cabinet, sandpaper shapes,
and a shape puzzle.


Not pictured in this picture - my version of the
geometric cabinet trays 7-10. They will displayed in a future post.


Shamrock number line, shamrock cards and counters

Math U See Stair

Quilt number activity

Quack, Quack flannelboard story from KidsSoup

A picture of some of the things on the wall.

On the South wall, there is a small 12 month calendar, our Montgomery Academy pledge, a little sign about children, and a painting of The Very Hungry Catepillar done for us by Little Boy's mom. We love it!

On the West wall, starting from the left - Our calendar, the monthly nursery rhyme, geometric plane chart, a bird poster (I got this for 25 cents at our local teacher's store. I have mammal, reptile, fish, and amphibian posters too.), continent chart (from Montessori For Everyone), and our Daily chart. Our Daily Chart holds our schedule, the sign language card for the letter of the week, the weather/season cards for the day, and name cards (the name cards are flipped over).

I got all of the pocket charts shown here (and our red Helper chart, our red folder holder, and our Alphabet Center - not pictured) at our teacher store. They have a big sale in July, so I buy then for the year. Most of these pocket charts I purchased 4 years ago - when we moved the preschool room out of a bedroom into the family room area.

Preschool: What We Were Up To - First Week of March

Dr. Suess and Being A Great Me!

March 1-5, 2010
Letter of the Week: Qq

Number of the Month: 7

Shape of the Month: Trapezoid

Color of the Month: Green

Nursery Rhyme: Little Boy Blue

· At the sensory/art table, we have green play-doh, salt tray, and nature box.
· At the paint easel, we have green paint and green DOT paint.
· On the practical life shelf, we have lock puzzle, lock and key, tonging, lacing, , sorting pom-poms by color, sorting quilts by size, transferring with a dropper.
· On the art shelf, we have a cat in the hat tracing sheet, quilt cutting sheet, Qq coloring sheet, Quack coloring sheet, shamrock stickers, shamrocks to glue, and then our free art supplies (paper, cardstock, construction paper, scissors, crayons, markers, pencils, tape, glue, stapler, and paper punch.)
· On the sensorial shelf, we have color tablets 1 and 2 and 3, the brown stair, block tower, and knobless cylinders, fabric box, and baric tablets.
· On the geometry shelf, we have the circle, triangle, square, and rectangle puzzle, and the constructive triangles. We have geometric shape cards. There is also a geoboard, shape sorter, and geometric solids, pattern blocks, and a shape game. We are also working on the geometric cabinet trays 8-10.
· On the letter shelf, we have sandpaper letters (lower case and upper case) alphabet cards, and leap frog letters. We also have objects, cards, and books for Pp and Qq.
· On the language shelf, we have CVC cards with middle letter “a”, picture cards with CVC words with middle letter “a” to match, calendar matching, and winter letter words. I also have the Bob books – Set A (easy reader books) on the shelf. There is also a flannelboard story (Quack, Quack) on the shelves and the farm.
· On the writing shelf, we are working on the trapezoid shape with the metal insets. We also have dry erase writing, letter stamping, magnadoodle, and CVC cards with middle letter “a” to spell with the moveable alphabet. We also have the number 7, the letter q and q word letter tracing sheets.
· On the science shelf, there is bird puzzle, bird books, bird cards and bird coloring sheets and the flower puzzle, flower books, flower cards and flower coloring sheets. We will be doing the fish and the root soon.
· On the geography shelf, there are the continent globe, sandpaper continent cards, the sand and water globe and the continent map puzzle. We have continent 3 part matching cards, and continent coloring sheets. We started the Asia continent box with Asia cards and Asian animals.
· On the math shelf, we have sandpaper numbers, number puzzle, number rods, number matching, spindles, and shamrock counting activities. We are starting more Montessori math activities this month.
· What we are reading: Cat in the Hat, Cat in the Hat Comes Back, Green Eggs and Ham, One Fish, Two Fish, A Bad Case of the Stripes, The Mixed Up Chameleon, Quack, Quack, and Chrysanthemum.

What We Were Up To: February

I didn't take that many photos in February. My camera wasn't working great, and we were just busy and I didn't take the time to get the camera to take photos. Anyway, here are some of the things that we did.

This student is actuallyusing a straberry huller to transfer the roses onto the paint palette. The box was from a small box of chocolates. I got the idea for this activity last year from My Montessori Journey.

Making Art with foam art stickers, heart doilies, glue, crayons, and markers.

Making a bracelet out of beads and pink chenille stems.

Cutting out hearts. The students loved this activity.

Jelly Bean painting flowers with watercolors

Helper painting flowers with watercolors

Valentine's Day Party

I will be the first one to admit that I don't love celebrating Valentine's Day at Montgomery Academy. It sort of drives me crazy that Valentine's Day now seems to be second in the holidays for amount of candy that my children receive. And it doesn't matter what I seem to decide about passing out valentines, it just always turns into a big free-free-all, and well, it just bothers me. But the children REALLY enjoy it, so I continue to do it. I also knew that having a Valentine's Party was something that the homeschoolers enjoyed about public school, so I wanted to have a party for them. So we had our party on Friday, February 12th. We also celebrated Chinese New Year.

Making Valentine bags

More bag making. A couple of the moms
were able to join us - which is always
fun for us (especially their children!)

Flower helping Little Boy
decorate his bag

We made Chinese lanterns

and did some Valentine coloring sheets

(the homeschoolers did the Valentine mancalas)

and we did an "I love you because . . ." sheet

for all the mommies.

Happy Valentine's Day!