Montessori Monday, plus a few more homemade works

Monkey is 3 years 8 months old

Last week, we weren’t in the homeschooling room very much at all, due to a very busy week.  However, that doesn’t mean Monkey wasn’t learning! 

Monkey is sorting pictures into "Land", "Water", and "Air"

Building a tower with the yellow knobless cylinders

Jedi decided to do a little work over the weekend too--he's using the hammering work. There are little tacks that are used to hammer the shapes to the cork.

It was also a big week for Monkey out of the school room. She has been doing gymnastics since she could walk--she started at 11 months old and has never stopped. She *loves* it and has a natural talent for it. The first day she walked out on the mats, she went right to the preschool bar, pulled herself up, and then tucked her toes up on the bar. She has gone to 3 different gyms and all 3 of her coaches says that she has a natural talent. We recently started at a new gym (last month), and after a month, they have recommended that she leaves the preschool class, skips the advanced preschool, and go straight to the pre-competative team. She won't be competing this young, but it's for the advanced children who will likely start competing within a couple years. The class is twice as long (an hour long) and it teaches a lot of skills that are too advanced for the typical 3-4 year old class. We're so proud of Monkey!!

Here is the geometric board I made this weekend. I basically found a finished piece of wood at our local craft store, and hammered a bunch of nails into it (not all the way through--you don't want the ends poking out the bottom). Then the children can take rubber bands and stretch them around the nails to form shapes.

Monkey working with the geometric board.

One of the new works coming out this week. I printed out 11 copies of a picture of pumpkin vines. Then I wrote a number from 0-10 on each one. Then the child counts out enough foam pumpkins so that the number of pumpkins in the patch matches the number written on the side.