Cutting workbook

So my mother gave Elena a cutting workbook lately (thanks Mom!). The first picture was a puppy. You're supposed to cut the picture out of the book, and then give it to the child to cut along the whiskers.

So I cut it out, and then Elena cut to the side of the whiskers. Each whisker was a wide grey line, and the child is supposed to cut on the line somewhere, but Elena was cutting pretty exactly just to the side of the line. She cut OUT the whiskers. Then she went for extra credit. She cut off the puppy's chin. And ears. And eyes. And tongue. This continued until she, with a dissected pile of puppy parts, exclaims, "I'm done! There's no more dog! Now I want to do the kitty!"

OK, honey. And you can cut off the picture this time.

Playing "soccer"

Some tidbits from Elena trying to play soccer:

"Here's how you play soccer. You sit there, Mama. I will dribble back and forth, and you say to me, 'Go, go, go! Good job!'"
She went off dribbling for a while at high speed while I did as she requested. But then while running furiously, she said, "Tell me to stop now, Mama! Tell me to stop!"

ER: "Let's play with teams now"
me: "Okay, shall I be on your team?"
ER: "Yes."
me: "So is Nonna on the other team?"
ER: (shocked at the suggestion) "No! She's on OUR team!"
me: "So... we're all on the same team? There's just one team?" (Thinking, "Basically, like we've been doing up until now?")
ER: "Yes. We're all on the same team together."

In my world, teams only make sense when there are more than one of them. An "us" and a "them" of sorts. But not in Elena's world...

You're HUGE!

I was tucking in my two lovelies to sleep. Elena, sitting up in bed, looks at mama and from out of nowhere says, "Mama, you're HUGE! You weigh a LOT!"

Aghast, I told Elena that you just don't say that to people. It can be a sensitive issue with some people. It's not polite.

"But, Papa, when I tell myself how big I'm getting, I tell myself, 'Elena, you are HUGE!'"

Educational potpouri

Again, not to be particularly interesting to anyone, but to help us keep track of what we're doing.

Though we don't have any of the elementary child materials other than the posters that Erich made, we have a full set of the teacher materials (descriptions of lessons and how they might be sequenced, etc). We do not have this for the primary materials. Now that I've been home more, I've been wanting to learn things to do with the primary materials. Since I cleaned up her school area, Elena has been requesting to use the materials a lot and I'm not a huge fan of just making things up (because when I read the real lesson... it's always better). So we've been trying to put together lesson materials (for the teacher) for the materials we have, as well as getting a way to track what lessons Elena's given and when she follows up on them other than just sporadic mentions on this blog. Before diving into the elementary material during his certification, Erich did go through a condensed primary training, so he had some materials tucked away that we found. He hadn't been required to make full books for each subject like he was for the elementary stuff, so they're not complete by any means. The other great resource that we've found is infomontessori.com, which has descriptions of the lessons and sequences for much of the curriculum.

We were feeling a bit overwhelmed with how to keep track of everything (as well as how to organize our own notebook of lessons for the teacher), but finally settled on doing it based on the materials that we actually have. I took an inventory of our materials and made a spreadsheet divided (by sheets) into the four major topic areas for primary (Practical Life, Language, Math, Sensorial). Then on each sheet I have the materials we have (including the non-montessori ones) and am hoping to get on there the appropriate lessons so we can note the dates they're presented and followed-up on.

What this highlighted were two big things: First, we really don't have many materials. For example, the only language materials we have are the print, lowercase, sandpaper letters and the laminated words cards that we made with pictures for matching games. (Fortunately, I think her language skills are progressing just fine, given the abundance and utility of non-official materials for language like, you know, books, paper, and writing utensils.) Erich pointed out that a typical Montessori primary classroom is about the size of our whole living room area. Currently, we have all Elena's school things in one small corner. Now, I think we can get away with a smaller space because we don't have to have out materials for all levels in a typical primary classroom. Things that Elena has mastered or moved beyond, we can put up until the next child is getting ready for them. But we will still be looking at expanding the school area significantly. We don't need that much "living space," especially since we get so much use of the outdoors here.

Second, Elena has moved beyond most of our current materials. Which makes sense, since we got them over 18 months ago. We still have some uses for some of them, but we're stretching it. For example, Elena is very comfortable with recognizing and naming numerals, which is a major goal of the counting spindles that we have (as well as the sandpaper numbers, which we also have). But I've been using the counting spindles lately to help her by providing a concrete aid for addition and subtraction, and they have worked well for that. (For anyone who's curious, we would look at the math problem in one of her workbooks, say 6 - 4 and instead of just using her fingers we'd pull out six spindles from the six box and then take away four... you get the picture. She really enjoys this.) Similarly, the main purpose of the sandpaper letters is to help the child get a sensorial feel for the letter while connecting it to the sound. She pretty much has the letter sounds down (for the short sounds), but the sandpaper letters have become useful again for helping her trace out how to write the letters. (In general, her reading and math comprehension is better than her writing--she recognizes and uses all the numerals, but can't reliably write them all--though I don't think this is a problem and may be pretty normal.) Hopefully we can convince some generous grandparents to help out with some materials for Christmas and her birthday (goodness knows she has enough toys. Besides, she loves using the materials and having "school time").

Other things she's been doing lately: While taking inventory of our materials, I realized that the only moveable alphabet we have are her bath letters (we may have a magnet set somewhere... hm...). She does a LOT of her word-building while in the bath. She likes to sound out words and spell them out with the letters, but she also frequently requests to build words that pull on spelling principles that we haven't gone over with her much if at all. In her last bath, for example, she wanted to build both "snake" and "snail," and thus got introduced to the idea that the /ei/ sound can come from both "a_e" and "ai." She also requested to build several anatomy terms. She's really into her anatomy, so I've been very grateful to have my parents around to answer all her questions about "what muscle is this?"

She was also given a sticker book almost a year ago when she was out with Erich visiting family in Iowa. It kind of made me want to vomit with all the pink and sparkles, but months later I was looking through it and found that it's pretty educational. And she loves to use it. The activities in there use the stickers to practice basic math (addition and subtraction), shapes, matching, etc. Plus there are some pages that are simply "decorate this how you please," which I also think is important. At this point, she's almost worked through the whole thing. I like that for many of the activities, I can read her the instructions, set her up with the appropriate stickers, and let her go at it. She then has me check her work at the end of each activity.

She also has a couple of pre-K workbooks that we've gotten for her. We've had them for a while now--at least a year, I think, but they're large and include a good variety of things. Lately she's been looking back through them and correcting some of the "mistakes" she made when she first went through some of the pages. Also, she is able to do many of the activities independently when previously she needed more coaching. For example, she can match the numeral to the picture with that number of objects without any help now, but she still needs some coaching in walking through the addition and subtraction problems. She does much of the work on her own, but can't quite be left to do the whole page on her own. She seems to be able to spend a lot more time on the workbooks now and enjoys them a lot. I think they're fitting nicely into her Zone of Proximal Development right now. :)

And I think I'll leave it at that for now.

Oh!--one last thought. In my cleaning, I found Sheep in a Jeep which was for a while a much favoured book. I think it'll be a great time to bring it back out, though, because she's doing well with the /ee/ sound being produced by two "e's" and may be able to read a good bit of the book herself now. We'll see. But I plan to try it soon.

A couple language ideas

I just suggested Elena write "list" at the top of a list she was making (scribbling). I broke up the word for her, since she wasn't doing it herself: (by sounds) L - I - S - T. She interpreted the "ih" as an "E", and had difficulty writing the "S" -- it came out looking like a misshapen "E".

Presentations to be used to help this:
* Sound games (middle sounds), to distinguish words that differ "i" and "e" short vowel sounds in the middle of the word. E.g. "pen" and "pin". "wit" and "wet". "Nick" and "neck".
* Sandpaper letter "S"