Out of the Loop- missing my baby

Wow, I feel like a stranger on my own blog! It seems like forever since I wrote anything or visited anyone else's blogs. Even as I write this I'm feeling like a "fish out of water". I miss seeing the inspiring activities and musings and the heartfelt words of other moms, Montessori or otherwise. I have to thank Jen from Montessori Beginnings for awarding me her giveaway, lucky number 7 did it! 1000 stickers of real life animals and objects, we will definitely have hundreds of hours of fun with that once I get my new business streamlined and A. can be home with me more! Turning over A-girl's Montessori education to a professional for the most part has been bitter-sweet. I know that she is progressing in so many areas, especially socially very quickly and that makes me very happy. However it's so strange to not know what my little girl is doing every moment of the day and how she is reacting and creating. I'm like an information addict when it comes to what she is doing while at Montessori preschool. I can't wait for the Teacher/parent meeting week after next! I sit here looking at her Montessori shelf in the living room and it seems like a ghost town. I feel like I'm failing her. I always said that I'd never put my child in daycare because I didn't want anyone else raising my baby. Now it's almost like that and the only thinly veiled excuse that makes me feel any better is that she's in a good Montessori school. Well, that and when she says to me "I had fun at school today!" or "I want to stay at school!" How often do you hear that from a public school child?! I'm betting not too often.

So busy so lots of practical life!

I started a new business! (more on that in the future once I get my website up; it's for toddlers!) so A. has had to amuse herself a little more than usual. She also gets to go to her Montessori preschool every weekday morning now that I am working ( Thank-you Canadian Government for paying for Montessori school!) I'm finding that now that I'm busy getting all of the work done in setting up my new endeavor and I'm not observing her at all times she does more activities! She has been helping me do many things around the house. I almost think she has intuited that I need the help now!? She just had to do the vacuuming on the hard floors because in her own words "because it makes it beautiful".

Then because the carpet attachment is too heavy for her to push she used her little carpet sweeper to do the carpet.

She later went upstairs and her Papa was mopping so she helped with that too. (no pic) What a sense of importance and accomplishment she had in helping her family clean the house! The next day A.-girl decided to unzip a "bean" bag pillow I have and to take a lot of the corn out of it. So of course I said "well you made the mess so you please clean it up". Her new word of choice right now is "OK!", which makes life so easy! Everything is Ok, OK affirmative and positive! Broom in hand, she swept it into a semblance of a pile and we picked it up together and put it back in the pillow. Phew!

I've of course been feeling guilty not spending as much time with A.-girl as we are used to. I'm trying to find activities that will still challenge her, make her feel a sense of accomplishment and make her and my life easier. What better ones than practical life which you can incorporate into the daily routine of what you need to do anyway. Case in point, cutting with a knife: at breakfast time instead of cutting up her cantaloupe for her, I cut it into long strips and asked her to get a fork and knife from her dish drawer. One presentation and she was happily focused creating nice little cantaloupe cubes.

I hope in a few weeks everything will get back to close to "normal" after the growing pains of starting a business subside. In the meantime we will be doing lots of practical life activities (as I write this A. is cleaning the chair I'm sitting in because "maybe it has bugs in it"!) and she will get to stay for some longer days at her preschool which are contributing to her increasing independence and social skills. I like to try to look at the positive side of things, however I miss my little girl and look forward to whipping up some great activities for her at home when my time frees up!

We love Masterminds... Beads well, that's another story

Eons ago my husband and I bought a puzzle game called "Super minds" thinking it would be good for the future. I can't even remember where it came from. I got it out the other day to see what it actually was and got very excited when I looked at it. It is for kids age 5-9 but after looking at their marketing materials in the box I realized they have a version for "3-8" year olds called Mighty mind. As they state in their description of Mighty Minds;

Starting with the simple concept of manipulating two wood half circles, the child builds a full circle. Then by following a logical numerically programmed sequence of patterns, the child learns how to manipulate 32 wood geometric shapes to build pictures of increasing complexity.

So since we had bought the advanced set, I had to glean from the ads for Mighty Mind how to set up some puzzles from beginner to advanced. All I needed was some cardstock, a pencil to trace around the tiles and some colored felt pens. The mighty mind set has little colored spaces to first put the tiles that you need to use to build a particular puzzle. You then use those tiles to build the shape of that puzzle.

Here's some of the beginner puzzles I made from the absolute easiest to a slightly harder one.

The difference between these puzzles and a normal puzzle of course is that there is no picture scene being put together with the pieces. You just use geometrical shapes, each piece one whole color, to make shapes. A.-girl isn't interested in doing puzzles very often but as soon as she saw this activity she was hooked! They even have a magnetic set for traveling. We will be getting one before the next long trip!

We also tried sorting some beads by color. Well, that went well for about 5 minutes. A.-girl was so focused and then....beads everywhere! On the second and third attempt sthe following day the beads just went straight onto the floor so this activity has been "shelved" so to speak!

Real life and practical life

Have you ever truly seen a little worm poking its head out of an apple? It is of course a common image in children's books but an elusive one in real life! A.-girl was so delighted to see this little guy peeking out of his appledom. If only it had been a caterpillar, we would have read Eric Carles "The Very Hungry Caterpillar". Maybe I should have anyway!

After 2 weeks of sitting in it's crock, our batch of spicy garlic sauerkraut was ready. MMMM! So A. and I put it into jars to keep in the fridge. She stuffed the jars using her tonging skills (not! She does not like tonging activities) and then used her little fists to pack it in. She then poured in the juice to cover the kraut and after I cleaned and dried the jar she put the lid on. We then bottled the leftover juice to drink. Spicy Acidophillous coctail!

Recongizing a Pattern Sequence

My husband was delighted to discover while reading a childrens magazine to A. that she could recognize a pattern sequence and determine what object would come next in the sequence. I was excited to make this activity to further her skills in that area!

I started out by making four sequences out of foam silhouettes, each with 5 objects in a pattern. One sequence has only 1 object but in 2 different alternating colors (c/c/c/c/_, 1 sequence has 2 different objects in alternating order (A/B/A/B/A/_, 1 sequence has 2 different objects in the order of: A/A/B/A/A/_, and the last sequence has 3 different objects in the order of: A/B/C/A/B/_. I provided only one answer for each sequence on a separate blue foam square. She then has to put the foam answer square in the spot where the blue box is located at the end of the sequence.

I first introduced the activity by laying all of the pattern sheets out at once and the answer squares in a basket on the work mat. I made it both a cognitive and language activity because it seemed to me that in order for her to understand the sequence she would need me to demonstrate by naming each object while touching it as I went along the pattern from left to right. "barn, barn, pig (pause) barn, barn____" " I wonder what comes next". I soon realized that with all of the sheets out at once it was too chaotic and she had trouble recognizing the pattern. As soon as we did only one at a time on the work mat she had no problem deducing the pattern sequence.

I can see almost endless possibilities for extensions of this activity. I plan on next adding in too many answer squares so that the probability of guessing correctly is very small. I will combine more than one object with more than one color for each object and also increase the number of objects and the length of the pattern so as to make the patterns more and more difficult. I wonder if introducing new words by making new patterns with objects that are new to A.-girl would be good, or would I be combining too many things into one activity?!

Here's A.-girl doing a classic old favorite; her nesting/stacking boxes. She probably brings these out on a regular biweekly basis. They are a regular fixture in the living/montessori room (yes the montessori area is in the living room, we live in a VERY small area!) even though they take up a lot of room as when the are stacked up they make a beautiful sculptural piece. realized after introducing the Recognizing a Pattern Sequence activity that this activity actually incorporates pattern recognition because the boxes are colored in a certain sequence which is repeated. ie: orange, red, purple, dk blue, lt. blue, green and repeat. I now wonder if she was paying attention to more than just the size of each box when fitting them together or was she also looking for the correct color in the sequence? It couldn't have hurt in preparing her for her new Recognizing a Pattern Sequence activity!