Following E

These are some the things E wanted to do today.

ART

We made a Rhamphorhynchus.

Completely beguiled, he seeks to fly it all over the house.

WRITING

He picked the square frame and drew the square in red and the horizontal lines within in blue.

READING/WRITING/LANGUAGE ARTS

Used 2 part cards to match pic. to word and the word in this case was 'bed'. He then picked the alphabets 'b', 'e' and 'd' from the lower case moveable alphabets and brought them together to form the word 'bed'. Then I have him a long piece of our leftover paper stash, drew a line across the length of it and let him write the alphabets for bed.

ART/SENSORIAL

More homemade playdough. This time I made it with 1 cup flour, 1 cup salt and 1/2 cup hot water. I dissolved the salt in the hot water first then added coloring (E chose blue which is his fave. color) and then added the flour + 1 tbs. cooking oil and I had amazing results. It was smooth and non sticky. Most of all E had a grand old time.

We took it a step further this time. E cut out the shapes with his playdough cutters and I baked them at 210 degrees for 1 hour. They hardened and are now ready for painting and ultimately sealing with varnish. Since I do not have the paint and varnish readily available, we're going to wait a bit on that.

PRACTICAL LIFE
Very proud of E. I left him alone to work and he managed to cut this hen out all by himself. He's getting to be good at cutting.

RELIGION
'Oneness of Humanity' collage/poster by E.

Hard at work.

Although non-Montessori, I've started working with E on a formal reading program through Teach Your Child to Read in 100 Easy Lessons http://www.amazon.com/Teach-Your-Child-Read-Lessons/dp/0671631985. Although I know that E knows the sound of letters and knows words through the whole word method, I am never certain if he knows them all. He refuses to work on phonics via the Montessori method. So, I thought I'd give this a go since I want for him to learn phonics systematically and lo and behold, he responded. He loves it as it can be done in a fun/game-playing way. So, we did Lesson 2 today and hopefully, we'll get to 100! I must add that although we are doing this, we still do the Montessori reading and language arts as well. I feel that they can be combined successfully.

He was also very interested in his little and large collection of plastic figurines today. Started with his fave. dinosaurs and then went on to sealife and finally dogs. Since he was so into his dinos today, I figured we could make one with toilet paper tube, construction paper, glue, pipe cleaner and scissors. And we did! We made a Rhamphorhynchus. I drew out the pieces to cut and he cut and squirted glue on parts that needed to be glued down. It was a good exercise in team work.

If you're interested in making your own Rhamphorhynchus, leave me a request with e-mail address here under comments and I'll e-mail my tutorial to you.