Toddler Activities

My little boy Harry is now almost two and is very much interested in a few different Montessori inspired activities. He is definitely all about gross motor so we give him lot's of time, space and freedom to explore this. But here are some of the activities he is currently enjoying at 22 months.

Visual Discrimination Activities: Harry has recently developed visual discrimination and can now match colours and objects, so I have set up a few activities for him to explore this new skill.

This is Harry matching Schleich farm animal figurines to picture cards. He can do 15 animals! He also has this activity with African animals (Cards from here)

These are Harry's friends exploring the colour matching table. There is an assortment of colour matching activities.

Harry loves threading beads! He gets super focused when threading which is so good for his concentration development

 Practical Life - cutting wooden food. Harry is quite interested in Practical Life and copies what I do around the house so he enjoys cutting up the wooden fruit when we are not preparing snacks or meals.

 Sensory play - very typical of this age, Harry also loves sensory play, especially anything wet! It has been too cold to do much of it, but he did enjoy playing with goop with some of his farm animals.

Building towers - He uses all sorts of materials to build towers, Duplo, the pink tower, knobless cylinders and these rainbow blocks are all favourites. Great preparation for when the Pink Tower and Knobless Cylinders are properly presented in the future.

So those are a few activities Harry is currently enjoying whilst at home and are really easy to set up. 

Montessori activities.. What we've been doing!

We've been working hard on our Montessori activities, although admittedly there are days or periods that Mr. 3 doesn't want a bar of it! And that's ok, he is very super active so working on his concentration will be the main part of our focus at the start. So here is a round up of what we have been up to!

 Mr 3 loves puzzles so we placed all the pieces from 4 different puzzles into a basket and then he had to complete them all at the same time. I loved that he had to categorise the puzzles such as what was food, what was a farm animal, a mode of transport and jungle animals

 Miss 4 and Mr 3 loved baking ANZAC day cookies and were able to be part of the entire process including licking the spoon afterwards

 Mr and Miss 3 enjoyed using little medicine bottles to transfer coloured water. They have not yet mastered the art of replacing the water in the little tube after squeezing it out though!

Sorting these glass pebbles into different colours has been a popular activity, but a little too easy for the three-year-olds

 These fantastic wooden tiles from WWF are great for matching and sorting with many variations. In this pic, the two children are matching the animals and saying the name of the animal

Sorting plants and animals was fun. First we did the sort with the coloured sorting cards, then we used the black line masters in our Botany journals. The children LOVED pasting these in! (The sorting cards and blackline masters are from the Helpful Garden. AMAZING resource website!)

They LOVE setting their table for lunch and are getting better and better at it each day

 These are the coloured plant/animal sorting cards. The children loved using the Janod magnifying glasses

  Using little transport stamps, Mr 3 sorted the transport into air, land and water as part of our geography curriculum

 Using water beads to practice spooning was a major hit with Mr 3. Usually he has very little concentration so when he spent a full 10 mins doing this, I knew we were onto a winner!

 Even little Miss almost-two loves transferring her glass pebbles. Was very shocked that she didn't once put them near her mouth! She played with these literally ALL DAY! And yes, I am continuing to find them in weird places around the house

 I had very little expectations when introducing this sort. It's a vertebrate/invertebate sort and I honestly thought the three-year-olds would have no idea. Well they shocked me! They actualy caught the hang of this quite quickly, although I still had to help a fair bit. Just goes to show why I love Montessori!

 The three-year-olds have also enjoyed matching sea life creatures to picture cards I made up at the last minute. They did need prompting to look at the features and shapes of animals, but quickly got the hang of it.

I have been so shocked and surprised at what my children have been able to achieve and this is exactly why I love Montessori. Children are so much smarter than many give them credit for!

Programming: A more streamlined approach

A few weeks I shared the EYLF programming template I use, but as the weeks wore on I realised I needed a more streamlined template. I found that trying to come up with seperate indoor/outdoor activities for Creative and Intelligence just wasn't working so I've changed that and also added the outcome numbers you can circle. I'm currently in love with a new font too, so here she is! My programming for this week;

If you would like a blank PDF copy, you can grab one here. Enjoy your day

Start of our Montessori journey...

We have only been open a few short weeks, so up until now I have been getting a feel of how my day care will run and the children are still settling in, so we haven’t started any traditional Montessori (M) activities which has been frustrating for me. After reading countless home schooling M blogs, I felt that my current set up wasn’t really conducive to learning so I changed it up. We have a big open plan living space where the kitchen/dining/family room was and I found we were spending most of our time there during day care hours and the children weren’t utilising the beautiful toy room I had set up for them out the front. So we swapped them and I now have a gorgeous, open classroom which we trialled today with little Miss P. I also have a clearer view of where I want to go on our M journey, so we were able to start our Zoology, Botany and Geography units. I didn’t want to start them til a little later, but Miss P was interested in some of the resources I had out, so we started today. Before I go any further, I have to say I am not Montessori trained so ours is definitely not a traditional M set up. I also love the Reggio style of teaching so our curriculum is a scoop of Montessori, a teaspoon of Reggio and a pinch of magic. So here’s our new set up!

Our ‘work’ area

Rest and reading area

Art corner and Science table

Our weekly activities on the shelves

The Baby area for my beautiful 6 month old son

I love animals and nature so I love that learning about this is very Montessori. This week we are learning the difference between plants and animals and also have a matching animals game. We made some clothes peg animals and looked at different parts of animals with our magnifying glasses

We made some beautiful paper plate flowers today and talked about seeds and what they are. We also completed the first page in our Botany Journal

I love this felt world mat I bought a few years ago and had it sitting out thinking I would use it in a few weeks, but Miss P decided she liked the look of it too, so we had a spontaneous geography lesson. Using the pictures of animals, landmarks and people, Miss P had to decide whether the picture was of something that lived in the ocean or on land and put it on the proper place. Absolutely amazes me how much knowledge these little people already have about the world!

Lastly we briefly touched on maths by using play dough to cut out shapes and then cut them in half. We snuck in a tea party, Miss P practiced her pouring with the water table and little baby had fun grabbing anything and everything close by! Hopefully the rest of the week will be as amazing as today was :)

The 'After' pics!

I just realised I never posted my after pictures! I'm still working on my 'sleeping' area but the backyard and play room are all finished. Just need to dig up the garden beds out back :)

Programming: My planning

As a teacher, I'm a planner and the idea of the children coming each in day and not knowing what we will be doing that day just doesn't compute with me! I know that as Early Education educators we are supposed to base everything on the children's interests and as much as I love this I also need to ne prepared! Will I follow my plan for the day to a tee? Absolutely not! Will I extend the activities based on children's interests? Most definitely! If my children are suddenly all about dinosaurs, then of course I will provide lot's of activities about dinosaurs but not having a plan means I don't have materials organised, I would scrambling to find them all and as a result, I just don't think my activities could be as meaningful as possible.

So, I downloaded a few different planning/programming templates but I didn't really get them or they seemed too complicated. I love the Starskills planners and how they have the EYLF outcomes across the top but I also loved Arlee's  (from My Small Potatoes) S.P.I.C.E acronym for how she plans her day. So mushing these altogether in a workable program, I created this template for myself and here is my first week of planning organised (Normally I'm open 5 days but we were on holidays the first two days)

Love the idea of having the picture of the craft on programming as I'm a visual person.

So do you have a simpler way of programming? I would love to hear yours!

Practical Life: Lunch Trolley

Montessori is aimed at creating independent children and believe practical life activities are extremely important. To reflect this, I created the lunch trolley. Children can access the trolley all day to get themselves a drink of water and by using a jug and cup, it teaches toddlers practical skills, gross motor skills and also gives them a sense of pride. They can drink like grown ups do! At lunch time, the children will set up their own table with placemat, cutlery, plate/ bowl and cup. The Melissa and Doug placemats are fantastic for teaching children how to set a table properly and are super cute! After eating, we will wash up our items also teaching more important, practical skills. The key to practical life activities is to make sure everything is accessible to children, they should be able to get things by themselves. I can’t wait for lunchtime!!