Yesterday and today were a mashup of geometry and sensorial items (Montessori) and Language.

 

Above you can see an array of different materials we used.  The girls went through them quickly as they are very simple puzzles but it was a great workout for fine motor skills and before sitting down to handwrite.

 

Above Maggie stands next to her brown stair tower and Lily’s creation from her pattern card bringing together the pink tower with the brown stairs.

 

We pulled out the botany/leaf cabinet and the colored pencils to create ‘fall leaves’ though they ended up more colorful than fall like.  The botany cabinet is not intended to be a tracing tool like the metal insets that are used in Montessori.  But in terms of following the child which is a Montessori rule I did just that when the girls thought it up to use them as stencils.  So above you see colored pencils which are also watercolor pencils where we used a wet brush to paint over the leaves after coloring them in.  Lily has gotten much better at using both of her hands and arms bilaterally and holding onto items as she uses her handwriting skills.  Same skill has improved in scissor cutting.

Above the girls are working on the blue series matching word to picture and matching beginning sound blends to their pictures.   Boxes worked on:

1. Blue series: Picture and word cards #3 R blends (Lily) and also articulation of those words afterwords with word practice.
2.  Blue series: 6 r-blend and 24 pic cards R blend match sound with picture (Maggie).

We also read some out of our Hooked on Phonics series.

Above shows the girls working on their Language Arts interactive notebooks.  I love these workbooks as they have them in every subject.  It adds to language creativity and allows the child an opportunity to learn how books and presentations are created by making title pages and adding to the table of contents each time they produce work.  Today we worked on Short and Long vowel sounds.  I also love the fact it allows time to practice on scissor skills.  Lily is doing a fantastic job now of cutting with both hands.

To end the day we topped it off with assessments in an old program called ABC Mouse.com.  The program itself is hardly used now by the girls as they have more age appropriate ones to choose from now but it still holds as an old favorite with some of the things on it.  I like their assessment areas to test the kiddos on the things they know as it’s easy to get to without much logging in and flip to from student to student.  I have been using Khan Academy also as a way to ‘test’ them for online filing but ABC mouse was covering some of the material we worked on last week so that’s what we used.  Topics included:

1. Sight words part 1
2. Nonsense words (which went right along with the Dubard Method)
3. Recognizing Nouns and Verbs (which was fairly easy as they have been working on the grammar board for ages) — But it is different when reading it all together digitally in a sentence form.

The computer and Ipad apps have been welcomed by the kids in between their usual worksheets, presentations and handwriting work.