Montessori Monday Lovin Language!

Lovin Language!  What is the best method to teach reading, phonics or whole language?  This is a century old question and I will tell you what method Montessori teaches and why.  Let me first start off by saying that as much as I love Montessori math I LOVE the Montessori method of language instruction even more!  This method of teaching language is so complete and thorough that it not only teaches a child how to read but in the process they will become fluent readers and writers. 

Where do I begin?
Similar to Montessori math, language also starts out very hands on.  Children will learn to build letters and manipulate sounds to spell before they will actually write.  In doing so the child has a complete understanding of the letter and how it is used in the context of words instead of trying to memorize what a foreign symbol is. 

You start out by introducing sandpaper letters.
Sandpaper letters give children a tactile hands on experience with learning letters and sounds.  Here is a great post on living montessori now about sandpaper letters.

After you introduce sandpaper letters and sounds you can add activities to reinforce letter recognition such as sand writing, letter building, play dough, Melissa and doug puzzles, wikki sticks ect.

A sandpaper extension would be beginning sound objects.  Use small, interesting objects in conjunction with the sandpaper letters and place them in baskets for sound sets 1, 2 , 3, 4 and 5.  Everyone has a slightly different method of introducing letter sounds.  This is the method I use. 
sound set one:  m, a, t, s, p
sound set two:  b, c, r, f, e
sound set three:  h, i, d, g, n
sound set four:  j, o, k, l, u, w
sound set five:  x, v, z ,q, y 
As soon as they finish sound set one they can build, spell and read mat, pat, sat, tap, Sam, Pam, map, at and am. 

Also practice blending letters together by saying mmm-aaaa-t say it slow then tell them to say it fast, what does that spell?  Mat!
At this stage play games, games and more games!
Games are a "sneaky" way to reinforce learning without them knowing it.  A few games I like to play are: bingo, I spy, letter hunt and I have who has. 

What happens after they know the sounds?

The next step is the moveable alphabet and the pink series.  This is where it really gets exciting!  It is their opportunity to take the letters and sounds to build words  The first step in this process is to match 3 part cards with a picture and a word that matches the card with both the picture and the word, then they build the word.  

I start out with short a words the pink series is three letter short vowel words.  Continue teaching each set of short vowel words until you finally end with short u words.  Upon completion of this series your child will be able to fluently read CVC or short vowel words!  

What about sight words?
Remember that century old question I asked at the beginning?  Well here is your answer... BOTH methods are best.  In a Montessori language program we teach phonics in conjunction with whole language or sight words.  Sight words are not just words you can't sound out.  They are the most commonly used words in the English language.  I use the dolch list here.

After you teach each set of short vowel words introduce 10 sight words.  This is another area where you play games, games, games.  We have sight words be the magic word of the day.  We use funny voices such as (cowboy, valley girl, movie star and volcano) when introducing the sight words.  This makes it more interesting and fun.   A fun and educational DVD series that I use to introduce sight words is Let's meet the sight words. 

In our classroom and at home we have word wall set up.  Here is a picture of our word wall.  We use the word wall for writing workshop and sight word games.  We play sight word swat, race to the sight word, build a sight word and sight word art. 

By using sight words in conjunction with phonics it will speed up a child's fluency and they will enjoy reading much more!  Giving a child a love for reading is the gift that never stops giving. 

After the pink series is the blue series which is long vowel words and vowel combinations.  A program that uses a good systematic approach to this is primary phonics and they also include a teacher's manual that mirrors Montessori methods. 

BOB books is another great reading series for children and they also have itunes apps that are fabulous! Click here to view those. 

The last part of the reading series is the yellow or green series.  In this step the children learn blends and special sounds.  Allison's Montessori has sandpaper letters that I use to introduce this series.  Once your child has completed all of these steps he will be a fluent reader and enjoy reading!!!  My son is 5 and he reads at a 4th grade reading level because he learned with the Montessori Method starting at age 3.  

I hope this will be a useful guide on your quest to teach your child to read!  Listen to them read and read aloud to them often!

  Reading is the window to the unknown world.   

Rachel 

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!

Word Work Wednesday Part 2 Valentine's Day

Word Work Wednesday Part 2

Valentine's Day Writing

We read this book

In the book it talks about all of the reasons why Mouse likes his friends. We used that as a springboard discussion to play the warm fuzzy game. Each kid drew a name stick from the jar and wrote a nice thing about the person on the stick. Everyone closed their eyes and one at a time a child stuck the post it on the friend they wrote about.  This was fun and went along with our kindness character trait. 

Then we read this book.

After we read the book we did an interactive writing activity.  We made a bubble map titled "If you give a mouse a Valentine"

The kids all wrote what they thought the mouse would want if they gave him a Valentine. 

They used their ideas from the bubble map to write their sentences.  When they were finished writing, they cut out hearts to display their work on.

We also practiced our cutting.

Here is our board to display their creative writing projects!

 

Mommy Monday Hip Homeschool Hop!

Dolls, Barbies, fingernails and hairbows!!

On Monday's we stay at home and have "mommy day".  This is our day to do fun homeschooling and projects.  Allie loves to play with her dolls and barbies.  Her favorite thing to do is cook and she loves learning anything that has to do with cooking!

Allie is getting very good with her fractions because of all the cooking she does.  She can go in the kitchen all by herself and make the whole family scrambled eggs and she even adds bacon, cheese, dill (and one time even raisins!)  While we are cooking I always grab that teaching moment.  We talk about volume. measuring, adding, subtracting, dividing equal shares and fractions. 

 

This is one of our math songs!

For reading today we read Aesop's Fables.  We did a comparison chart and we discussed why Aesop chose certain animals for his fables.  She chose her favorite fable and told me why she chose that fable.

Her favorite fable today was the one about the peacock.  She liked how the goddess pointed out the peacock's strengths and how everyone has something they are good at and everyone can't be good at everything. 

Allie as a fairy in Peter Pan

After we talked about the peacock story she told me what she was good at.  She is good at acting, singing, cooking and riding horses.  For her writing assignment today she made a bubble map all about her.  She then used her descriptions to write an acrostic poem about herself.  She really enjoyed this creative writing assignment. 

We use the Workbox system for homeschooling.  A few of Allie's workboxes today were her contraction snowmen (see freebie!) and clay suffixes

making clay words with suffixes. 

For art we are just finishing up our Polar regions unit.  Here are the projects she did for this unit.  She also made a Polar bear mask.

Here is her torn paper landscape with polar bears!  I think she did an awesome job :)

Here is her Inuit Native American and her igloo made out of Styrofoam blocks.  This was a great math project!  She had to cut the cubes and spiral them in tilting towards the middle.  I put on the hot glue where she wanted and she placed the cubes.  The little man was made out of a wooden clothes pin, paper and fur.  Allie made his arms and legs out of pipe cleaners and then wrapped the paper around them and taped it. 

I love homeschooling!!!  We had a great day, I would love to hear a comment about how your day went!

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!