Montessori Monday

Hooray for organization! In the last week, our shelf came, to help us organize our various works for homeschooling, and Finn had a blast helping me put it together and arrange each of his works in their proper place. My plan is to keep this shelf as our main work area (aside from the art shelf in the kitchen which is where all the art supplies and our poetry books, reading book, etc live). I'll rotate works in and out of this shelf to keep his intrest piqued and to hopefully stave the boredom of having too many works out all the time.

A new work that Finn helped me put together this week, a transferring work. He uses the little tongs to transfer pinecones from the basket to the glass triangle jar. This can be trickier than it looks!

Those tiny little pinecones can be slippery to hold onto. Fortunately, Finn's persistant, although he has a bit of trouble when it gets to the last few pinecones in the basket.

In a blast of inspiration, I pulled out this puzzle and book of Elizabeth's. (She's a huge Van Gogh fan.) I turned the page to The Bedroom and challenged Finn to copy the picture with the magnet puzzle.

Work like this is so great for teaching children to pay attention to details in artwork, and also helps them develop their spacial relationship as they figure out how close to the window to place a painting or how close to a chair to place a towel.

Finn has learned about primary colors at school and is working on secondary colors. We painted eggs using primary colors last week.

We'll probably paint using secondary colors this week and arrange them to make a sort of egg color wheel.

Finn's hundred board came along with the shelf. He's excited to have one at home now so he can keep working on his counting.

Finn has gradually been working his way through the stack of cards in Mighty Mind. He's pretty good at working on tangram-style puzzles and seems to enjoy the challenge.

He's been working through 2-3 of these cards every other day or so. I can see the cards beginning to get more difficult, and I wonder if he'll continue with the same zeal.

This last photo isn't really a Montessori work, but I couldn't resist taking a picture when I found Finn reviewing his latest reading lesson by reading his words to Paulie. He's so excited to be reading words now. :)

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