Archive for March, 2015
Mabel in action at school. Lots of photos attached, description below.
In Montessori school, each continent is a color. That color remains true throughout their entire education. You can see in the first photo, she’s tracing each continent onto the coordinating color paper, then she cuts it out, and glues it to a new piece of paper, in the appropriate layout as the globe. As she moves onto other work, and learns about animals, cultures, etc, each image will have a coordinating border or sticker matching the color of the continent that it represents. It helps give them a concrete learning and understanding of different people and animals around the world. Brilliant.
In the next photo, she’s learning her sandpaper letters. She’s tracing each letter to develop muscle memory for how to write them. Also, she only learns the *sounds* each letter makes, rather than the name, so she can begin spelling and writing in cursive right away. In this case, though, she’s learning the sounds in Spanish… at home, we teach her the sounds in English.
In the third photo, she’s cleaning a table, practicing to take care of her environment, and keep it organized and clean.
In the next photo, she’s doing concrete counting with the number rods. They are placed in random order, then she counts them, and matches them up with the sandpaper numbers (again, traced for muscle memory). It helps the concrete understanding of the number symbol.
Lastly, she’s practicing writing her numbers. Zoom in and you can see how clear her handwriting is. This is a product of practicing with the sandpaper letters, before she’s able to practice writing with a pencil.
Also notice that she’s working alone? Each child is able to work on what they would like, to help them develop concentration and follow their interests. If they are ignoring a certain work, the teacher (guide) will help them get involved in that work to pique their interest. In Mabel’s case, she was resisting sandpaper letters, but Miss Toba began telling her she needed to do that work first in the morning, then she could choose another work after that. A wonderful way to have them learn something new, but still be able to do a work they really like, too.
