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? 

spring tea gifts: inspired by hoboken

thanks to the wonderful blog say yes to hoboken - i got an idea for party favors for our upcoming Spring Tea at school. we normally do tiny bud vases with flowers in them, but since we couldn't find the bud vases, i thought it would be fun for the children to help make favors for their guests that come to the tea.

this project was very easy to do, i did although get a couple complaints that the letters were difficult to read, so i washed the names with thick green water color and it worked just fine. i prefer the white but i can see how the letters may be a bit too camouflaged for some.

these will be put into tiny plants in little drinking glasses and will serve as the party favor as well as the place cards. can't wait to show you the tables all set and ready to go!

snack cloth times two

i've been slow on the updates but i assure everyone i've been pretty busy! i have a lot of projects that i need to take pictures of and put up on the interwebs and here are the first two. if you remember, i made a table cloth for my classroom snack table way back when, but when little ones are eating at it all morning long and washing it almost nightly, it took a lot of wear and tear. so it was definitely time for a new one, i sewed it up pretty quickly so the quality isn't my finest, but the kids seem to love it. (you'll notice snack crumbs on the floor.. messy children!)