Montessori Monday Valentine's Day Fine Motor Skills

Valentine's Sensory Box!!

Spooning water beads into heart trays.

Today I want to share with you some of our Valentine's day "works".  In a Montessori classroom we call the items that we put out on the shelves for children to work on "works".  Many of these activities can be made with common household items.  The kids are given an individual or group lesson and then they may choose them off the shelf to work on. 

These are our practical life shelves. 

Practical life "works" are introduced to kids to build fine motor skills and to work on practical life skills.  Many of the tasks in this area are to practice everyday skills.  The children love working on activities that they see adults work on everyday. 

Card writing basket. 

This has word wall words, Valentine's day words, pens, markers, pencils, and items to decorate a card

Sorting, counting and patterning Valentine's erasers

Valentine's Tangrams

We are working on Pouring into 4 containers. 

Lacing beads extension, making a criss cross on the buttons

Heart lacing

Shape nuts and bolts, sorting, and matching fine motor practice

Letter Pinning and heart pinning

Fine motor practice marbles on a suction cup paddle

Letter writing on white boards

Wikki Stick letter and heart shaping

Fine motor practice heart sticks into a Parmesan cheese container

I found this adorable broom at the Dollar Store and thought it would be perfect for "crumbing" the tables.  The children love doing this work. 

Heart "I spy" box.  I found this box at the Dollar store.  I filled it with rainbow rice, Valentine's shapes, letter number beads.  The children shake the box and find letters and numbers.  The younger ones circle the letters and numbers they find on a control chart.  The older ones write the numbers down. 

Heart shaped links.  I found these at the Dollar store.  The children make patterns and sort them.  This week we will use them for measuring. 

Our Math Shelves

Here is what is on our math shelves right now.  When a new parent asks about Montessori I show them our math shelves as an example.  I tell them you will not see a lot of worksheets come home because everything we do in the classroom is hands on.  We have a "math work time" and a "language work time" everyday.  

Fine motor practice and counting

Shape matching

Pattern Block and unifix cube graphing

Penny sorting, and coin rolling. 

These are a few of the works we have on our shelves right now.  I would love to know what you are working on this month.  Please leave me a comment and let me know how you can use some of these works at home or in your classroom! 

100th day of school FREEBIE!!!

Here is a fun freebie pack for you with activities and pictures for the 100th day of school.  Please share this link with everyone to come and get their own copy.  Leave me a comment if you liked it and how you can use it. 

Click Here for 100th day FREEBIE!!!

Have a great Superbowl Sunday!!!

Fun Friday! Winter Crafts

Torn paper snowmen

Today is fun Friday!  This week I decided to post some of our winter crafts and art projects.  I didn't post these before and they are so cute I didn't want them to get forgotten in my dusty picture files ;)

Our art display line

Our hand print tree and snowmen glyphs from (Deanna Jump)

snowmen glyphs

The kids do the entire project by themselves.  I don't do any prep work.  I love doing art projects this way because they all turn out completely different and they are working on cutting, spacing, gluing and creativity skills.

syllable snowmen (Kai-son) 2 syllables equals two parts to the snowman

Penguins with hand print feet

March of the penguins.  The kids chose a emperor penguin or a macaroni penguin.  They wrote the name or beginning sound of the name on the belly of the penguin.

Rainbow, rice, red "R"

We do a sensory art for every letter. 

soft fluffy penguins

 

Macaroni penguin

This penguin was created during "free art", the child went to the art center and created this penguin completely on her own.  This is creative learning at it's best!!! 

I hope you all had a great week and have a fun filled super bowl Sunday!!  I will post some more fun science activities tomorrow for "Science Saturday"!! 

100th day of school!!!! Thrilling Thematic Thursday!

100 days of school!!  This year has been flying by, I cannot believe it!  Today was our 100th day of school it was wild, crazy, a little bit dangerous but fun!  We were lucky to have an amazing parent helper stay for our special day.  We started out our day making our 100 day crowns.  Then we headed to circle time to count our chart and to see what number we ended up on.

Our helper of the day counts the numbers everyday and we count with him.  When we get to a "10" we do something different everyday.  Today we jumped and clapped every time! :)

We sang our 100 days of school songs and we read an interactive poem together.  For Math the first thing we did was dance to this song.

I asked the kids if they had 100 dollars what would they buy.  Everybody had a chance to draw on the chart what they would buy.

We even got to see a REAL 100 dollar bill!!

Each Child shared the poster they made at home for a family project with 10 groups of 10

Great family projects!!

Every child brought in 100 of some type of snack.  We counted and graphed everyone's snacks then put them all into one big bowl to make "gorp"

Everyone helped make "gorp"

We had a cooperative project where the thinking math question was "how many friends will I need to count 100 fingers?"  We had quite a few sick kids today so we had exactly 10 friends to count fingers on.  They were excited to see that it equaled exactly 100!!!

our 10 friends equaled 100 fingers!!!

Finally we had a special treat brought in by one of our students!!  This was my favorite 100th day memory ever!!!  This little boy brought in a cake with 100 candles to celebrate my team teachers' "100th birthday" haha !! 

Happy 100th birthday Mrs. Nicole!!

my brave parent helper!!  She almost caught on fire, that is dedication!!!  haha this is what 100 candles looks like! :)

Happy 100th day everyone!! 

Word Work Wednesday!

Today is word work Wednesday!  On Wednesday's I teach Kindergarten.  We are working on writing labeling and writing 3 part stories.  We always start our day with journal time but recently I have been using that time to do our mini lesson on writing.  I forgot to take pictures of our anchor charts today.  Next week I will post all of our charts.  We started our mini lesson with a review on drawing, labeling and coloring a picture. 

Writing workshop, they are drawing, labeling and coloring a picture. I learned these ideas from Crystal at www.kreativeinkinder.blogspot.com  at the  Virtual Teaching Expo Everything K

Here is one of the pictures (these are in their journals so it is on wide ruled paper)

This student is extremely detailed.  You can clearly see he drew in pencil, labeled, and colored using at least 5 colors!  He is 5 years old!! 

Today our writing workshop was so much fun because usually I have them write a sentence and then illustrate what they wrote.  Today I told them to draw, label and color their picture and they didn't have to write a sentence.  They all wanted to write a sentence and did without me even telling them to!! 

Here is the sentence that goes with the picture above.  It says "Sneakers is planting the flowers."  The only thing I had him correct was the N needed to be lowercase and asked him to tell me what special sound was at the end of flower.  He remembered and corrected it on his own.  I love this!  "Sneakers" was our "elf on the shelf" ;) they still talk about him!!   

Later on in the day we had our writing lesson and our regular writing workshop where they are working on 3 part stories.  To help us remember how to write stories we have "Steve the Story telling caterpillar"  He is a puppet and we have him on one of our anchor charts. 

Steve the Story Caterpillar.  I read about Anchor Charts in the book Teaching with intention.

We brainstormed about how to write a story, then we did interactive writing and we all wrote a story together on the board.  After that everyone chose a title for their stories and began writing.  When they were finished I met with each of them individually to discuss their stories.  I was amazed and proud of their stories!!  They were so creative and original.  I will post them next week after they finish illustrating them. 

During our writing workshop and reading groups we had word works or literacy centers.  Here are some pictures of what we are working on.  Everything that is out on the language shelves is all review to them and they work independently. 

This is the Moveable Alphabet.  She is working on her "pink words" , they are 3 letter short vowel words.

This is the "insta learn board".  I believe this is an absolute must for every classroom and homeschool room!!  I could and should write a whole post dedicated just to this board.  Zack is working on spelling words with digraphs.  This board is leveled and self correcting. 

This little girl is working on long vowel, rhyming words.  The children have to figure out how to spell the words and it will not fit if it is spelled incorrectly.  The cards are color coded so they always know what level they are working on.  Like I said... A maz ing!!!!  They also have a math one, but that is for another day! :)

Sight word horse races from scholastic.

Letter and word poking (kindergarten does words and preschool does letters)

After I teach morning Kindergarten we go home and finish our day homeschooling!

This is Allie doing her word work, compound word magnets from the good ole' Dollar Store!! 

This is another fabulous Dollar Store find!  A word wall spinner with commands.  Allie LOVED this work!!

One of the commands on the spinner was to define a word, so we just expanded on this and defined several words. 

After that Allie chose a word in the dictionary to be her new vocabulary word.  We call those our magic words and she gets a sticker on her chart every time she uses the magic word correctly!

We do some type of "word sort" activity everyday.  This one is from Hillary Lewis at Rockin Teacher Materials  Her Spelling has improved 100% since we started doing word works!!! 

Allie finishing up her polar bear research report during our writing workshop. 

We finished up our day with writing workshop.  We also have anchor charts in our homeschool classroom but they are a little more advanced.  Allie has discovered that she does like to write stories when she knows how!!  Homeschooling for her has been such an incredible blessing!  Tonight, the last thing she said before she fell asleep was..."Thank you mommy for homeschooling me and always planning fun things to do!"  It just made my heart melt and all the late nights laminating, cutting and printing are so worth it!!! 

Sorry this post was so long, I guess I had fun writing and doing word works today too!!  I hope you enjoyed it too!