So much to do, so little time

Argh! I feel so overwhelmed at the moment. I am currently finishing off a course I started some time ago, and I have 4 weeks to complete a few assignments for it. There is also all the materials I want to make for our homeschool, the house to sort out, the garden to prepare for the better weather... More recently I have felt the real need to be more creative, to bring art and crafts into our home but also I need a creative outlet that is for me and not for the children. I also need to try to supplement our income so that we have a little extra put by for times when we might need it too.

At the moment, my days consist of getting up at 6.15am, going for a swim, coming home for breakfast, then get ready for our day, do school or whatever we have to do for the day, and some afternoons I get to sit down to try to catch up on emails etc, but often I don't, then Daddy comes home, we have dinner, he baths and gets the children ready for bed while I try to get everything I need to get done without interruption done in 45 minutes, then I go upstairs and sit in bed trying to do more stuff. I have been really exhausted since Bear was born, and I tend to go to bed real early! I remember with Addie though, that there was a time we decided to go back downstairs after she went to bed, and our productivity rose greatly...

So, I have been giving a lot of mental effort into trying to work out how everything can work out, and we also get a better work/life balance as well, especially with the summer coming!


I need to make some small changes, some medium size changes, and some what some may consider to be big changes.

We need to spend the next week leading up to Easter getting the house in order. That is a big thing. The house is not in order, and it needs to be. With order comes tranquility and more time too. Less time needed to straighten things up, more time to do other things. I have almost done one room, the room we call the family room - it was intended to be a quiet room where we could go as a family, hence the name, but has been developed into the room we start our school day in, we sing, we read, we say prayers, we learn a little. I have a library of reference books in there, and our readers. I have now also put our language materials in there (not all of them, but just the ones we will need shortly). And our geography materials, and the Pink Tower - all the items that need to be kept from Bear's reach at the moment! This room is definitely still a work in progress in terms of the materials that need to go in there, but is the most sorted room at the moment. And I love sitting in there!

We need a strict timetable I think, to stick to until we are in a rhythm that can be sustained and have us where we want to be. I need to be stricter with myself and try to find some ways to increase my energy. I need to go back downstairs once the children have gone to bed (oh but I love getting into my bed, so this will be a real struggle!).

I need to get my assignments out of the way asap, and then get on with making some of the materials I want to make. There are quite a few, and I think I need to schedule time into my week to make these, so I know I will make progress on them each week, because at the moment I feel I can't do them with my assignments hanging over me, which I can't concentrate on because the house needs sorting!

And then, in May, I am launching my new business! I am so excited, I want to launch it now, but I just can't. I have to do all things in order, and using common sense that right now I cannot do it, but once my course is over, and I have some more materials made, I can do it. And I am so excited!

Do you want to know what it is? Maybe I will leave that for another post (and leave you all guessing!).,. but let's just say that it combines my need for a creative outlet, my love of nature, and hopefully will provide me with not only a hobby that I feel I need, but also a means of earning that additional income that I feel we need to have at the moment...

Must get back to the assignments now, but I just wanted to say that sometimes life just really gets on top of us, we have so many things we need to do and sometimes we just need to take a day or two out to plan and to decide what can and can't be done, and in what timeframe, to make us feel more empowered and certain about the future. Otherwise we can get bogged down and keep trying to wade against the tide and getting nowhere fast.

A tiny ray of hope!

Those of you who have been following my blog (and my facebook ramblings!) will know that having a 15-month old around while I am trying to present to Addie has been quite a challenge! Bear wants to be involved in everything, touch everything, do everything that Addie is doing. She can be really in to doing something (rarely on her own, but there are moments of individual work), and he will just come in like a tornado and leave devastation in his wake... !

Some times, Daddy will take Bear to work with him, so we can really get in to some work, but he can't do that every day, and the struggles I have been having have really made me question whether or not I can do this home education thing...

However, today there was a tiny ray of hope.

I sat down with Addie to present Open Ended Distance Matching with the Knobbed Cylinders, which she absolutely loved, and along comes Bear... And he absolutely loved it too! Neither of them did the activity 100% as it is written in the album, but there was so much sensorial learning going on! Actually, Bear really surprised me once again with these. Although it is really a work for a 3-year old, he is really good at matching the cylinders to their holes (except the one where it is only the height of the cylinders that changes). He puts them back with no hesitation and very little error. And actually, it was not a disruption this time, it was great to see them working together. OK, so Bear did not get the cylinder that was requested, he went and got another one (and placed it, first time in the correct hole regardless of which cylinder it was), but Addie was really good at selecting the correct cylinders too, and we went through all of the cylinders, doing both the Open-Ended and Closed-Ended presentations because they loved this game! I was pleasantly surprised and the tiniest ray of hope started to come through... I managed to capture some of this on camera, but I have realised as I added the photos that I actually don't have any of the main work they did, just that difficult 4th block and also the last block we did when we started to lose interest...!

Bear is really good at realising when he has made a mistake - he recognised that the cylinder he did put in was in the wrong hole, and corrected himself - something I have only noticed from looking at these pictures as I write this post!

Addie did some more work on her lifecycles today... Here she is getting her Insect Lore Life Cycle Stages Frog to kiss 'his picture' on the Tadpole to Frog (Lifecycles) book (I wasn't going to correct her that the frog is a lady frog!)... 

And then Bear and I did some more work together - Rolling a Work Mat and putting it away! So cute! (and after that we got it out again and looked at the Children Around the World pictures together!)

Today was a good day. Tomorrow will be different. Actually we are going to watch the solar eclipse, hopefully at the beach! Onwards and upwards with a tiny ray of hope...

Making Montessori materials

In a Montessori classroom, there are 4 kinds of materials, as I see it. There are the Montessori materials, such as the beads, knobbed cylinders, etc that you can buy from Montessori suppliers (such as my favourite Tower High Learning). There are materials for art and craft that are chosen by the teacher. There are things found out and about in nature by the children, plants, classroom animals, etc (if you can call them materials) and finally all of the teacher-made laminated material.

The teacher-made material is really a labour of love. You have to print it out, laminate, and then cut... Or you have to print it out, cut it, mount it on card, cut it, laminate it, cut it. I have even found out today that teachers then round the corners (for safety and durability purposes)! And it is not just the odd thing. There are language materials (and some people use the pink, blue and green approach which is a LOT of materials), classification and nomenclature cards, booklets, geography cards, folders, information, history cards - yep... pretty much for every area of the curriculum.

At the moment, the main printables we need are continent folders (and related geography cards), social classified cards (pictures only), related object matching cards, biological classification booklets with sorting cards to go with them, nomenclature cards (biological, scientific, geographic, geometric), life cycle cards and booklets, cultural folders (4 sets of cards, sounds OK, but one set is a set of 10 pictures for every country on a continent, for every continent! needless to say we are not going that far with that material making!). We also need land and water form folders, art folders, biome folders. LOTS to do!

So, at the weekends at the moment, I am making materials. Here are some of the ones I have made. Doesn't look a lot, but has taken me 2 long afternoons to print, laminate and cut. Some have been cut, mounted, laminated, cut!

I purchased Geography Folder materials from Montessori Print Shop, printed, mounted and laminated them. They are stored in a red envelope which I also laminated for durability.

To go along with the continent folders (I have only made Europe so far!) I have these 'Our Global Community' books which cover a whole range of topics. These are great and Addie loves her books!

I love these cards, which are Children of World cards from I Believe in Montessori. Addie looked at these today, and absolutely loves them. She thinks that the girl in the top left is Jay, because of the freckles and colour of hair (although Jay's is a lot darker than that!). Each card has the continent that child is from on the front, matching the Montessori continent colours, and on the reverse I have written the country the child is from. This is currently a free giveaway from this site.

 I have also made some continents cards and I have finished laminating and cutting European landmark cards. I have laminated, and yet to cut, the landmark cards from the other continents.

I have made the Biological Classifications booklets, and added this series of Living Things books to go with it to reinforce the concept of all of these booklets. These are also great books!

I also have a couple of plant lifecycle cards I have made, but I will show these in another post coming soon(ish)!

I love having materials like these on the shelves. I just wish I had more time to make materials, and I have a very long list of the ones I need to make!

Wish me luck!