urban gardening: the montessori way

two of my favorite things: montessori and planting (okay three - the city). i first showed the children how to make newspaper pots with a pot making tool, they loved this so much i later put it on the art shelf as a "vessel maker." we repotted flowers in the newspaper pots and planted them in our little plot of soil in the courtyard of our very urban school. we also planted seeds in peet pots - some children brought them home to replant and some donated them to our little garden! the children LOVED doing this. some of them had experience with gardening because of grandparents in the country or situations like that, but most didn't know much about it. its so important to get your hands dirty!

seed planting

fill up with soil

choose seeds: basil, radish, sunflower, green bean. 

seed planting or flower repotting

make a newspaper pot

stick your flower in the newspaper pot!

roll

press

twist

voila!

notice the roots

courtyard gardening

watering

if maria montessori could visit antarctica, she would teach children there too.

teaching children about maria montessori is so important. once they realize that a woman's name is the same name as their school, they come to appreciate their experience more in their own little ways. i made this work and i just want to play with it all day! it is a timeline - the cards are numbered on the back so that you can read or look at them in order. each card describes when and where maria montessori influenced teachers and children in each continent. the wooden "children of the world" coordinate with the cards and the planisphere mat so that nonreaders can still look at the images and match everything together. all the colors are the same as the montessori puzzle maps and globes. the only continent she did not leave a stamp on was antarctica, but if she could have, i think she would have!

children of the world

planisphere mat and timeline cards

set up on a workmat

a dollar's worth: a math original

my life can now finally return to more or less normal, i have completed and submitted all my work for my montessori training! it sort of all came together at the last moment thank goodness. one of my math originals is about teaching the worth of a dollar. when i present this lesson again next year and i have more time to think about exactly what i want to say, i will definitely talk a lot more about money out there in the world, but for this year and this lesson, i stuck mostly with the mathematical thinking behind what makes up a dollar. this lesson is a great work to show in conjunction or directly following lessons in fractions, which was what was happening in my classroom. the best part was that the children made the connection on their own!

in the classroom: carrots, beets, ginger, radishes and sweet potatoes

i presented this in class today and children actually used it! yay!

montessori adventures: root vegetable recognition & a note about food in the classroom.

i present my original sensorial lesson - root vegetable recognition. it is basically a stereognostic matching work that introduces seasonal vegetables. the original post and lesson plan can be found here. i am a little late getting this in, but ideally i would present this during the heart of winter. this is part of my urban homesteading unit project and i love it!

i am still trying to decide how i feel about food in the classroom in terms of activities and work. i am trying to teach my children about healthy, natural foods and i feel strongly that this activity needs the actual food to show that. using rice as a sifting activity or beans for pouring - that i tend to stray away from because it is easy to substitute a non-food item for those activities. but when teaching about the actual plant i think it is important. 

what are your thoughts about food in the montessori classroom? do you or don't you?