First Day Back to Montessori Home-School

The anticipation, trepidation and anxiety (all on my part!) are mostly over with regards to restarting A-girl in her very own home Montessori environment. After a 2 year hiatus where she went to a wonderful Montessori Preschool called A Loving Family Montessori here in British Columbia, our move to a new location in the province has meant that I am her new/again directress. Just after the first work period here today I'm realizing how out of touch I've become with A.'s development and also how ignorant I am about an almost 4 year old's cognitive abilities. I have the master activity sheet from her old school which tracked which activities she was introduced to, and whether she achieved mastery or not with each one but still I was expecting her to be able to do things that she cannot yet accomplish just because of how she interacts with me and how smart I perceive her to be. Silly me!

Today has been a lesson for me in how my daughter perceives some aspects of the world and how the Montessori materials all mesh together to form the connections in the brain to allow them to recognize patterns and symbols in our world.

She was so ready to soak up all that she could. I pointed to and named each activity that she could choose to do and she ended up choosing each one for a total of 12 and still asked for more!

Circle Patterns:

using knobless cylinder patterns A. attempted to duplicate the pattern with the colored circles we have (don't know what they are called and can't find them anywhere on the net. We got them from A.'s former school which closed a sister school and had a lot of materials to sell. We got a SUPER deal and these unknown circles were a part of the package.) This was the first activity of the day which proved to me that I need to prepare the activities more thoroughly and start with presenting the easier versions first to see just where A. is in her abilities. I thought presenting two colors at a time to place in a large to smallest sequence would be easy but I was very wrong. Lesson learned for me!

Punching out a traced triangle from the Geometric Demonstration Tray (Persistence is the key! We have some work to do on that)

Close-up of punching (that's a lot of holes!)

Flower shaped Sewing Card

Rough and Smooth Boards

Spring Themed Memory Game

Visual Discrimination Cards (Can you find the frowning face with only one eye open?)

Knobbed Cylinder Blocks #1 and #3

Numeral Cards and Counters

Tracing some Sandpaper Letters

Tracing Sandpaper Numerals

Matching Sandpaper Numerals to the Moveable Numbers

AAAAhhhhhh, having a little quiet reading time after a hard day's work!