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...

Build it, and it will come

I couldn't really think of a great title for this post, but I think this sums up a little of what I wanted to get across.

One of the main downfalls, in my opinion, of Montessori home education or homeschooling is the lack of other children in the learning community. This is a big thing in Montessori, where children learn in multi-age communities, and often learn skills from observing or being taught by their classmates. At home, this is a lot less possible, and while I have toyed with the idea of opening a co-op in my home (but found that it would probably be too overwhelming as I would possibly become the 'teacher' rather than just another co-op parent) this lack of community has been something that I have been quite sad about at times.

For Addie, in particular, I have felt this could be an issue. As the oldest, she has no older children to observe and learn from. And she is a great observer. One thing that struck me today was that she will probably have to learn from me and what I do. So perhaps I need to be doing a lot more work with the materials myself, as my own work, when she is working. Even the much later stuff, to entice her and show her what the future holds.

Bear, on the other hand, I am not so concerned about... Today, he started doing this, copying his sister!

So, perhaps all is not lost, but the relationship between siblings is going to be a very important one, and one we need to make sure we build on. I know some siblings that never get on and are never close. Luckily, Addie is a natural teacher to Bear, and she loves helping him (far too much quite often!)... so even with presentations I might be tempted to adapt or even skip, I need to make sure I don't and that I do things properly, so that if she has the opportunity to teach, she can do it in the 'right' way. 

So, as the adults, and the main adults affecting our children's education, we must build a solid Montessori environment, in order to best facilitate this as a family of learners, each teaching each other. This reminded me of one of our scriptures: "Organise yourselves; prepare every needful thing, and establish a house, even a house of prayer, ...a house of faith, a house of learning, a house of glory, a house of order, a house of God." 

Build it, and it will come...

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!

HT2 Day 1: Spring, Colour Boxes and Coin Boxes!

Today was the first day of HT2... and what did we do?

Well, we read about March around the world, how it is becoming spring in the northern hemisphere, and autumn in the summer hemisphere, we read about Monkey's Miserable Monday ('m' sound), we read The Cat in the Hat, looked at a Spring book and we also read the Story of Living and Non-Living Things. Addie loves books!

We then did Colour Box one - EASY! We had done this before though, so I expected it to be like that. Colour Box 2 - I didn't have to present this, as Addie started to pair the colours as I was taking them out of the box. She did pair black and grey together, though, and she got the names of black and brown mixed up, and did not know grey. All the other colours she knew. So, we have a little work to do on that...

Bear loves this coin box from Tower High Learning. And Addie spent a long time with him, showing him what to do. He loves it when she does this.!

Our most productive day yet!

In our new classroom, we spent 2.5 hours this morning (just under our planned goal of 3 hours a day). Wow! So much work was done, and a large variety of things, more than with our old way of doing things.

A cool extension I made loosely based on the geometric cards that go with the geometric cabinet!

Looking out the window for the horses, Addie says "Where neigh gone?"

Our new classroom!

Yes, we haven't been home educating for long... Actually, I broke my toe and a part of my foot, so had to rest up, and basically all home edding stopped. It had pretty much already ground to a halt anyway, because I was finding it exhausting to run around after Addie with all the different parts of the curriculum in different rooms. Initially it seemed like a great idea, but after a while I started to not like it, and when Daddy was cooking, Addie always wrecked the classroom area of the kitchen. Not a good start, and not a good way to instill order! So, we took some drastic steps!

We have converted our small office into a single bedroom for when Nanny or Jay comes to stay. We have converted our dedicated classroom downstairs into a family room (well, both these rooms are works in progress). The major thing we have done is turned our big double guestroom into the classroom upstairs! I love it! It means we can be up there without distractions, and also without distracting Daddy from working, and also, we can make a slight furniture move and accommodate a blow-up double bed for guests (or we might get a sofa bed for the family room, who knows!)

So, here is our new classroom - I am starting again basically, and so some shelves don't have stuff on them, but they will be coming soon! This room is also so lovely because it gets a huge amount of light, even on a dull and dreary day, and has good lighting for when we need a bit extra. I also have a storage cupboard.

This is the view from the door of our lovely huge window and the field opposite where there are normally horses! The tour will start from the right hand side!

This is where I am currently storing the map cabinet (turned around so little fingers cannot get to the puzzle pieces yet), the continent boxes, a desk for an older child (nowhere else to put it!) and on it I will have a CD player and musical stuff. You can also see our calendar which will be kept there for the time being!

This is the reading corner where Addie can choose a comfy seat or a chair to sit on. She loves it here.

This is where I will put all things cultural. There is also a floor mirror, mainly for the new baby, but Addie really loves looking at her floor work in the mirror too!

This is the Practical Life area for non-wet stuff. Again, this is still being built up, and on the top I will have reading books etc when Addie is older. She also has a little table and chair against the wall (I will put some calming images on this wall). This is currently doubling up as the snack table until I can think of a better place for it! The 'wet' practical life activities will stay downstairs.

This is what we have in the corner behind the door! We have from right to left what will be language shelves, maths and sensorial (which will become more maths shelves in the 'elementary' (primary in UK) years if we stay here that long!). I have all my non-fiction books categorised on the top shelves, the next 2 shelves down are currently for storage of materials, with the bottom 3 being used for actual work. Eventually, it is the plan that all shelves will be used for work. On top of these shelves I have my albums and other materials stored. You can also see at the top right of this picture a glimpse of the other small window I have in the room. It is long, but not very high, but great for storing a few additional plus-size books and also my supplies.

 

Downstairs we have our dining room which will be for cooking, art, messy botany stuff like planting things and most wet practical life activities. As you can see there is a great blank board for our Autumn display I am making, and there are a couple of things Jay has made for his learning (based around the IB's learner profile/characteristics of learners). This is also the room I teach him in.

We love it. Hope you do too...

Paint and pasta!

Addie does not seem to want to wait to start school... so why should school wait for her? We aren't quite ready to start to be honest, the house needs sorting out which is this weekend's goal. But one thing is sure is that my little girl is bored of her toys and although she loves her books, she has been very demanding and tearful recently. 

She is breaking her last 2 teeth, so that might be contributing, and last night we went out for our anniversary and my sister babysat. Just after midnight she came in to me with her blanket, and wouldn't go back to sleep for ages, she just cried. For about an hour and a half! But I think she definitely is ready to start 'Tot School', so today we did a couple of things - some art and some practical life.

Art
I am aiming to introduce Addie to the primary colours week by week, but this work is not ready, so I decided that today she could paint with the colour red only. She has previously seemed a bit reluctant to get her hands dirty, literally, so I tried her with finger painting and hand prints, which she did do, but asked for her hands to be wiped and then used the brush. Afterwards, we looked at a red flower she picked yesterday too, so a gentle introduction to the colour red and art activities.

Practical LifeSo the other activity we did is Transferring with a Spoon, which Addie has done before, but this time we did it at the table, and she really enjoyed doing this. She started to transfer the pasta well from one bowl to the other, and then started using her hands. Any that fell on the floor she picked up, and she also poured the pasta out of the bowl into the large, deep tray the bowls are in. A lot of touching and exploring the pasta, which she calls 'patia'. She also experimented by putting the other bowl on the chair and started transferring with her left hand. She did this activity for about 40 minutes which was amazing and when she had finished, she put the tray back on the table and put the table away (it's normally kept in the corner of the room and was meant to be the nature table, but it is the only one we have that is exactly the right height for practical life work!).