Our Montessori Story Daily: Monday, January 23, 2012

G - word drawer 25 from My Montessori Journey:

G - writing the words from word drawer 25 (this is something I saw N's Montessori teacher do when N attended Montessori school for one year at age 3 -- after G matches a phonetic object with a word, I write the word in highlighter for her to trace over):

G - experiencing the multiplication bead board -- 3 three times is nine:

...3 six times is eighteen (she went all the way to 8 before wanting to stop):

S - division bead board, doing 64 / 8 = _____ (S: "Mom, look, 64 is the square of 8." Me: "That's right, the square of 8 is 64."):

...25 / 5 = _____ (Her language changed: "Mom, look, the square of 5 is 25"):

G - experiencing the multiplication bead board with 10s (she wanted to fill the whole board with beads, and then I showed her how 10 ten times is 100; she said, "Mom, look, it's a square"):

...so we got out the ten bars and a hundred square and compared them:

...she spontaneously replaced the golden bead unit with a multiplication board unit:

...and then put the golden bead unit in the multiplication bead board:

All of S's talk of squares made an impression on G -- as she was putting the beads away, she noticed a square of beads that she created unintentionally and said, "Look, Mom, it's a square." So we got to talk about the fact that the square of 2 is four:

G - Melissa & Doug sensorial puzzle:

G - listening exercise sent home by her preschool teacher -- first, she cuts out a series of objects (in this case, things you would find in a grocery store); then, standing behind her so she has no visual cues, I say, "Find something you can pour into a cup and glue it where it goes"; "Find something you would eat in a salad and glue it where it goes..."

S - journaling with dictation and handwriting; this is beginning journaling for her, an approach I learned in The Well-Trained Mind. Because it would be difficult for a 5-y.o. to think of something to journal about and then "hold it" in her head long enough to write it down, she instead dictates her entry to me and I write it down. Using the same trick I learned from N's Montessori teacher, I use a highlighter when I take her dictation so she can then write the journal entry herself:

S - exception word drawer 42:

S - Writing with Ease copy work:

S - Writing with Ease narration work (I read a story to her (here, Aesop's The Owl and The Grasshopper), and she narrates a two-sentence summary of the story (much harder than it sounds!), which I write down):