Show me the money! Montessori money math!

Sensory math!  Sorting coins that are "hidden" in water beads.  

Show me the money!!  I mean really, who isn't excited about money?  Kids included.  It is natural for children to have a desire to learn about money.  It is a part of our everyday lives.  We should take this opportunity to teach them about something when their interest is high.  I like to introduce money around President’s Day.  We start with a discussion about Washington and Lincoln and that leads into learning about pennies and quarters.  

Another good time to build excitement about money is on St. Patrick’s Day when you can go on a search for the money at the end of the rainbow.  

This is when you can introduce the nickel.  We start with sorting coins, nickel , quarter and penny.  I use clear water beads and hide the coins to sort in the water beads.  After they have mastered that I add in the dime.  The next step after they have mastered coin sorting is to introduce the coin values. 

I do this by making it a Montessori counting work, I use sandpaper numbers to help reinforce the value of the coins and have objects to count to reinforce one to one correspondence.  

At the end of our money unit we celebrate with a PJ day and snack money store.  Each child brings in a snack and I pass out coins for them to count out to buy snacks.  

This was a fantastic learning experience and super fun to top it off!!  Have fun showing the kids the money! 

Weekly Kid's Co-op Link Up 3.23.2012

Weekly Kid’s Co-op

It is the end of the week again and that means another weekly Kid’s

co op!  I am getting to the point where I look forward to this every week.  I can’t wait to see all of the fun creative ideas all of you come up with.  Here are a few of my favorites from last week.

Building with Ice Cubes

http://trainupachildlearnaswego.blogspot.com/2012/03/building-with-ice-cubes.html

25 Easter Crafts

http://nurturestore.co.uk/25-easter-crafts-and-activities

Fine Motor for Fine Arts

http://www.rainbowswithinreach.blogspot.com/2012/03/rainbows-of-fine-motor.html

O’Keefe Art Lesson

http://www.littleblogfish.blogspot.com/2012/03/our-schools-georgia-okeeffe-art-lesson.html

Here is My link for this week http://discoverykidzone.blogspot.com/2012/03/superheroes-and-villians-happy-birthday.html

Spring Has Sprung!

Spring really snuck up on me this year!

 This time last year we were feverishly finishing our remodel on the preschool, it is so hard to believe we have been in our new building for almost one year!  The year has flown by. 

When spring rolls around every year I can’t help but think of new life.  There are birds chirping, new flowers coming up, green grass peeking through and fresh buds on the trees. 

New life also has a greater meaning to me at this time of year.  In two short weeks we will remember the great sacrifice that Jesus did for all of us on that fateful day.  He did this so that we could have new life! 

I am 100 percent about having fun and celebrating with all the novelties that come with Easter but at the same time it is very important that we stop for a moment to remember that Jesus died for you and me so that we could live eternally!  Pass that on to your children so that they too will have new life! 

Happy Spring

Writing Workshop Wednesday and Sensory Art Pond life

I just realized that I haven't done a writing workshop post in awhile.  I am posting pictures of a few things we did for writing this month.  We are working on descriptive writing using adjectives.  In the picture above we talked about the difference between frogs and toads and graphed it on a venn graph.  The children used those descriptions to make a sensory art with bumpy toads and smooth frogs.  I did not tell them how to spell the words they sounded them out using decoding skills. 

To make this sensory art I had small colored noodles and sand out to glue onto the toads.  For the frogs they made a collage of shiny foil paper. 

We started our writing on this day by labeling a pond.  The kids used the labels to write a sentence and draw a picture in their journals.  If you click here you can see our Monet art we made to extend our learning on pond life. 

On this day we worked together to make og family words.  This was a preschool writing workshop.  After we were done the children used the moveable alphabet to write the words.  You can see more of our frog works at this post HERE

This is what Allie wrote about frogs.  It is such a blessing to be able to homeschool while I am also teaching.  She is getting so much out of it and loves it too.  If you click here you can see where we homeschool when we are not at preschool. 

We also learned the op family and did word works to go along with that.  We played sight word swat with the word swatters and we also played number and sight word lily pad hop.  The children hopped like frogs onto sight words on lily pads that were called out.

Keep writing and reading interesting and fun always! 

Creating + Learning = FUN!

Happy St. Patrick's day! What St. Patrick's day means to me

 6 reasons why St. Patrick's Day is important to me!

1. Danny Boy!

My Grandpa Dan is one of the most important people in my life!  He raised me when I was a small child and has always been a huge part of my life.  He has the kindest heart out of any person I have ever met.  His love for God has been contagious to our entire family and continues to grow.  The sound of his laughter is always on the front of my mind and just the thought of him brings a smile across my entire face!  This man is 1/2 Irish and he was born on St. Patrick's day!  When he was born the song Danny Boy was on the radio so his Mother named him Danny Patrick Kelly, Can you get anymore Irish???

2. Leprechauns

This is my Grandpa's birthday cake that I made him using the bear cake pan.  If you have ever met me in person you would notice right away that I am not someone of great stature!  I am a whole whopping 4'11" tall.  I blame my ailment of being "vertically challenged" on my Irish heritage and the Leprechauns!  Ha Ha I know that isn't actually true but nevertheless it makes for a fun story.

3. Green, Green, Green! 

Green Sensory box for the month of March

My favorite 3 year old working on a Bell pepper print Shamrock with GREEN paint!

Color Mixing and GREEN Oobleck!

Well if you can't tell GREEN is my favorite color!!  It is said to have a calming effect and because I am a self diagnosed person with ADHD this may be why I LOVE the color green.  Having a holiday where everyone is required to wear green is amazing and I love it!!  :)

4. My Faith

St. Patrick was an incredible man...so incredible in fact that they named a holiday after him, imagine that!!  This man made it his quest to spread the message of  God throughout Ireland, what a wonderful legacy.

5. FOOD

Every year for St. Patrick's day we read Green Eggs and Ham by Dr. Seuss and have green eggs and ham for breakfast.  This year I saw cute rainbow pancakes on Pinterest and decided to add them to our breakfast menu.  They were very easy to make I just made colored batter and piped them out of Ziploc baggies onto the griddle.  For dinner every year we have the traditional corned beef and cabbage with Irish soda bread and Irish potatoes, I forgot to take pictures of our dinner and now it is all in our tummies!! 

6. Family

This is last on my list today but it is absolutely not least.  My faith and family are number one in my life!  St. Patrick's day is an excuse to come together as a family to eat yummy food, read stories about St. Patrick, go to parades, sing Irish songs, learn about our Irish heritage and just plain have fun.  Today was a magical day for me and I hope yours was the same!

RAchel

I am Linking up with Living Life Intentionally!

Weekly Kid's Co-Op Week Of March 16 2012

Weekly Kid’s Co-Op

This is our last week of school before spring break and we will get to go on a little family getaway to an indoor water park.  Tomorrow I am excited that we will be spending an entire day as a family at our local High School’s Science Circus! 

I am thrilled to be participating in the Weekly Kid’s co-op and I wanted to invite all of you to participate as well.  There is a link up in the post below.  Take a few moments to check out all of the wonderful and creative ideas.  Here are a few of my favorite posts from last week!

Pinky's Learning World DInosaurs and More Dinosaurs

H is for Homeschooling St. Patrick's day Sensory Bin

A little learning for two Watermelon Rind Rainbows

Sarah Lipoff Spring with Monet
Here is my Link for this week! 
Discovery Kidzone Montessori Adventures Weekly-kids-co-op March Monet

Weekly Kid's Co-op Week of 3.16.12 March Monet

Weekly Kid’s Co-Op March Monet and other art

Please add your link at the bottom of this post!  For Art this month our special Artist was Monet.  We are studying pond life and I felt it would be appropriate to add fine art into that theme.  Water Lilies by Claude Monet is my favorite piece of fine art!  We worked with watercolor pencils and watercolor paper. 

First we studied a few of Monet’s prints and discussed what a landscape painting was.  The kids drew the water and the edge of the pond, and then they added the water lilies along with other details.  They finished by painting over it with water to blend in the colors.  The paintings turned out FABULOUS!! 

We also made lily pads by color mixing water colors on large coffee filters.  This was an extension to our color mixing work at the science table!  We added cupcake liners and tissue paper flowers

Here are a few of our frog art projects from this month.  We made cupcake liner eyes, paper plate mouths and self stick foam for the “sticky tongue”.

This month we also have been learning about ROY G BIV.  We read a story about a Leprechaun named ROY G BIV and he was trying to build a rainbow.  To extend this lesson I put out a ton of collage materials and instructed the kids to draw a rainbow and put the colors in order using any collage material they chose.  Here are some of their collages.  The colors, creativity and texture on these collages make my heart sing!

Rachel

I am linking up to Weekly
 
Kid's Co-op

Weekly Kid's Co-op! Frogs, Colors and Magnets

Weekly Kid's Co-Op~! Frog Colors and Magnets!
Every week we get together and combine our fun and educational kid's activities.  This week I am talking about frog life science.  Please link up your activities at the bottom!

This week for science we are learning about frogs.  We talked about Metamorphosis and explained the life cycle of the frog.  We acted out the life cycle of the frog after I showed them the frog life cycle work tray.  One of our students brought in a fabulous frog science set with real eggs, tadpoles, froglets and frogs!!  This is the most complete set I have ever seen!   

After we studying all about frog life cycles we got real tadpoles!!  We have three of them, in our science journals we drew a picture of what our tadpoles look like and wrote the date.  We will make observations daily and record our observations every Wednesday.  The older kids labeled the picture of the tadpole.  The last thing we did with the tadpoles was research how to take care of them and what to feed them. 

Our color of the month is green!  Frogs are green and St. Patrick’s Day is coming up and spring is hopefully on its way.  I introduced the color wheel and explained the primary colors (this was a review for them).  I then talked about the secondary colors.  I demonstrated how to mix blue and yellow and we discussed what color it made.  Then we experimented with different amounts of drops to see what colors it made. 

Our last science work this week was Magnets.  The kids explored with a box of objects and a “magic Magnetic wand” to see what would stick to it.  After they explored they would classify the objects.  Finally they recorded their findings by drawing pictures on a recording sheet. 

My class loved the opportunity to be scientists this week!  I am excited to watch them grow and learn more next week.