So it has begun. A third year. Last year, at a different school, we had thirty-seven children in the classroom and the year before that we had thirty-eight. This year, I have twenty-one. The positive difference cannot be stated emphatically enough. My posts this year will almost surely revolve around this difference.
Here are some sorting cards for parts of a sailboat. There is a version for 3-6 and for elementary.
Here is a timeline of of the history of scripts. I made it a couple of years ago during my Montessori training. It was a lot of fun to make. Like the Timeline of Humans (below in an earlier post), these are both large documents intended to be printed out on a two foot wide paper roll. This timeline of scripts is one-hundred inches long. You might wonder what good this would be to anyone without access to a large printer. And I tend to think that you would be right to wonder this. However, it can be downloaded and viewed through a pdf reader (such as Acrobat or Preview, etc.). If you have a computer in the classroom, the children can look at it by scrolling around and panning in and out.
Someone recently asked me if I could break up the timelines into 8.5 x 11 pieces that could then be printed out one by one and placed together. I estimate that this timeline would break up into about twenty-five pages. This might be a really cool thing for the children to piece together! Alas, I have yet to do this. Maybe soon.
Download Timeline Of Scripts Here (pdf)
Last Thursday was the last day of our week before an entire week of Spring Break. The children were looking forward to this break. They have been working very hard the last few weeks so on Thursday I gave them a “Free” work day. Unlike some other programs, we use weekly workplans (personally, I am very divided on this issue but that’s not the topic here) and so we do have a somewhat restricted idea of what counts as a job and how many jobs someone needs to do everyday. The work and amount of it vary from child to child and we give them a lot of choice but we certainly do not let them do “whatever they want”. Except for this Thursday - or at least any job that they wanted to do. The rules were simple - follow the well established groundrules of the classroom which they all knew and choose a work. Other than that, they could work on any job in the classroom and this included art. The children were very happy about this. And five of the boys (two of whom struggle to finish their weekly work) decided to fill the white board with multiplication fraction tickets. Unfortunately, I only have a picture from the beginning of it (click on the thumbmail below). From here, they went on to set the “school record for number of fraction problems in a day” (whatever that meant). They wanted to walk across the courtyard to the upper elementary classrooms to ask them what their “record” was for number of fraction problems in a day. I neither encouraged nor discouraged any of this. I simply stood and watched.
Here is a hominid family tree to download. I based it on a range of resources, both websites and books. It should be accurate but I made it two years ago so if anyone can find an error PLEASE let me know. It starts with Orrorin tugenensis 6 million year ago. (Probably an upper elementary chart but not necessarily.) Letter size pdf.
Here is something to help with decimals. It is intended to be introduced to the student after working with the decimal board for some time. It can help with the move to abstraction. This is new and I have not really tested it in the classroom very well yet. Any comments suggestions would be helpful.
In honor of my son Benjamin turning 2 months old today, I thought I would make available for download some of the black and white prints I made for him. He LOVES contrast and will stare at these with a focus and intent I had not thought possible in an infant. Below is a picture of him staring at the ones I simply taped onto the mobile that came with his little sleeper. They are motivated by the book “Montessori From the Start” by the Lillard mother/daughter pair. And I do mean motivated, very loosely. I say this only because in their book they go into some detail about this subject and provide much guidance that I did not adhere to because of time constraints. One day, I would like to sit down with that book and make these in accordance with their guidance. But until then…
Download Black & White Contrast Cards Here
Download Quadrilateral Sorting Activity Here
This is a concept sorting activity for quadrilaterals. I managed to fit it all onto one piece of 8.5 x 11 paper. There are small cards included which refer to attributes of the different quadrilaterals. I assumed that a square is in fact a rhombus. As a result, there is no card that says “no right angles” for the rhombus because technically, it could have all right angles. but the shapes speak for themselves. you do not need to use the characteristics on the cards to use this activity successfully.
Last week, the first years were making a fish book. Two of the boys were trying to finish theirs on Friday before the end of the day. One of them, a very bright boy who never seems to have any trouble doing anything, came up to me holding his fish book and crying. He was literally sobbing and trying to get his words out. I asked him what was wrong. He lifted his shoulders and then threw his arms down while sighing all the while holding onto his fish book. He then said, “It’s just not coming together like I want it to.” The comment gave me pause. I thought about it and then assumed that he must mean that there is something wrong with the staples or that the paper was not aligned right or some other physical feature of the book that was not to his liking. So I simply asked, “Is it the staples?” This seemed to frustrate him more. He said, “No, it’s not right. The book isn’t coming together.” He then walked away. The only explanation that makes sense to me is that he has a very subtle understanding for a first year of what a book should be. Perhaps he really meant it in just the way that an adult would mean such a comment. Why do I even now seem to exhibit some sort of hesitation at accepting this? What is it about that part of me that makes me resist believing that children are far more capable than we might realize. This is, of course, not to say that children can do anything if we would just let them. Far from it. But there is still work to do on myself as a teacher in order to be open to these abilities of children while also remaining reasonable in my assessments of their developmental progress.
Here are some 4-part cards I made for the layers of the Earth. There is a set of four cards for each of four layers - Crust, Mantle, Inner & Outer Core. It prints out on five pages. Just cut them out and your ready to go.
