Originally, we had these three activities planned for the week: tactile tablets, later geometric solids exercises, and sorting grains. Then i realized that I had planned to make the tactile tablets at home but they had somehow slipped off of my list and so i didn't have any of the materials on hand. So, we swapped out tactile tablets for this week and swapped in the sound boxes. So, here's our madcap recap:
- Sorting grains. The Gettman book outlines specifically what grains you're to use for this activity, but i was limited by what was available at our local organic store, so i had to improvise on a few of the items. Anyway - we started with the larger grains this week - black beans, pumpkin seeds and chick peas. You count out a specific number of each, place them in the bigger bowl and then the child sorts them into the designated smaller bowls. JM had a very easy time of this portion of the activity.
Here's where it gets tricky ... it becomes a tactile exercise when the child is to put on a blindfold and do the activity by feeling the items as they're pulled from the bigger bowl and then placing them in the designated bowls. JM seemed initially excited by the idea of the blindfold but once we put it on (i actually used a toboggan cap pulled down over his eyes), he would lift it in order to peak at the grains. I quickly realized that doing the whole exercise blindfolded was not going to happen and so i did away with the smaller bowls and tried having him just pick items from the big bowl and identify them without looking. I got him to keep the blindfold on long enough to prove that he was at least capable of identifying the grains, but it was clear that this activity needs to wait for a future day.
- Sound boxes. I made the sound boxes using glass baby food jars, dried grains (per Gettman) and then superglueing the lids on and painting them with white spray paint and then red and blue sharpies for the lids. The whole time I was making them I thought they were turning out very badly but in fact once everything dried, the "sound boxes" themselves turned out very nicely. The Montessori activity, however, was another story. The idea is that there are 2 matched sets (one red and one blue) of six jars with various items inside that make different sounds when you shake the jars. When we first started the activity, it became clear that JM just didn't get what we were trying to do. Some of the jars sound very similar, so I then pulled out several that had more distinctive sounds and tried again. The activity was still a nonstarter. He couldn't really distinguish the sounds and so he couldn't figure out why i was placing the two "matched" jars together. After we spent awhile floundering with this activity, we decided to shelve it for another day down the road.
So, if you're keeping track, we're 0 for 2 so far this week! Read on, it gets better!
- Binomial cube. I introduced the binomial cube last week, but JM didn't get much of a chance to work with it so i didn't include it in last week's update because I didn't yet have a feel for how he was doing with it. We worked on it several times this week - several times at his request - and by the end of the week he was able to do it by himself! I was skeptical at first - it seems like a difficult, pointless activity. But as we worked with it more, there are several nice lessons in it including remembering a rough sequence and rules for how to place the blocks. I tried to help him see how he could check his own work as he went, but he was more content to ask me after placing each block whether it was correct. We'll continue to work on that!
- Geometric solids. We didn't get a lot of time to work with these this week. I had intended to teach him the names of all of the solids, but we only had time to work on stacking the solids. The idea is to experiment with combining the solids in different ways to see what works and what doesn't. For example, you can put the cone on top of the cube but you can't put the cylinder on top of the sphere. Although he wasn't enamored with this activity this week, he still worked on it for awhile.
- Red rods redux. You might remember our "poor man's red rods" from a week or two ago ... I didn't want to invest any money in the red rods (they're expensive!) because i was pretty certain that it would be an easy activity for JM. He asked to play with the red rods late Friday afternoon and so we brought out our posterboard red rods. He was really enjoying them but he was very frustrated that they kept curling up and he couldn't get them to line up properly. So I decided in that instant to jump in the car and run to Home Depot to make some "real" red rods. (We also bought materials for the touch boards - maybe we'll do those next week). I was going to make the red rods out of dowels but the longest dowel that i could find was only 36". I asked one of the guys at Home Depot to help me find some material - maybe something plastic - to use for this project. He immediately had a solution - PVC pipe. We used the narrowest PVC pipe and cut it into pieces ... 50", 45", 40", etc. down to 5". It took three pieces of pipe to make this project - at about $2.50 per piece. A heck of a lot better than spending $25 or more plus shipping. Plus, the rods are much lighter than wood and easier for JM to manipulate. As suspected, he had very little difficulty with this activity, but he enjoys it a lot.
So that's our update for this week. Next week we'll be doing tactile tablets (if i can get to the store to buy some foam board), a bells activity (it won't be exactly like the montessori bells activity), and stage #4 of I Spy.
Thanks for reading!
- JM is very comfortable with the geometric cabinet and can easily work with all four panels at once. So, we worked on refreshing our memory as to the names of all the shapes and taught him a couple of new names. For this exercise, we used the cards that I made which correspond to the shapes in the cabinet. It's only been recently that I've begun to really internalize the three-part lesson. For those of you who are not familiar, children learn the names of new things in three steps ... 1) being told "this is a ____", 2) responding correctly when asked "show me the ___", and 3) responding correctly when asked "what is this?". The first step is obvious, but there is a subtle difference between step #2 and step #3. When JM is learning new things, there is a time period when he can easily do step #2 with the item but cannot conjure up the name of the item in step #3. It simply takes some repetition and then step #3 comes easily. But I digress ... here are all the shapes that we used ...
We also had fun combining the land & water globe with one of JM's birthday presents - a fun foam world puzzle map. We practiced finding all the continents on both the globe and the map and then finding lakes and islands on both.
I still had intentions to use the "sand" and I could see that blue on blue might look a bit odd, so i encouraged JM to mix in another color ... he chose yellow...
