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...

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!).

My 18-month old does chores

Too young? No way! Babies and toddlers have more potential than we usually give them credit for, and can do a lot more than we normally let them. Addie has only a few simple chores, not to overwhelm her and we keep them fun. This is what she can do:

- Put her clothes in the wash basket (she loves doing this, and will often put ours in too!)
- Clean up her spills - she wipes the table, wipes her face, picks up things she has dropped. She has also taken a liking to the broom and dustpan and brush - 2 weeks before I was going to show her how to use them! She is telling me she is ready to do this now, so I probably won't wait the 2 weeks.
- When it is nappy changing time, she collects her nappy and wet wipes and takes them to the bathroom to get changed. We have started the association with the bathroom so she knows this is where things like that are done!
- She puts her rubbish in the bin. Actually I was very surprised that she knew what I meant when I said 'Go put this in the bin' and she went straight away and did it! Martin was even more shocked and told her not to put things in there (until I told him she was doing what she was asked!)

Other things she does which are independence-building, but not necessarily chores:

- she gets herself in and mainly out of bed herself. We put her in a toddler bed at 16 months so we had no problems with her climbing out of a cot. We involved her in the building of the new bed and taking down of the old one, and it seemed to work really well. 
- She takes her own shoes and socks off (don't they all?!) and we are happy she does this rather than getting frustrated with her that she repeatedly does it.
- She likes to try to get herself dressed. If that means trousers on arms, and socks on hands, then so be it! She normally takes them off, then we put them on right anyway, but try to encourage her to help in everything. 

There are other things we will start introducing over the next weeks and months, so watch this space!

Montessori Work Cycles

I wanted to write a short blog post about work cycles and how they form a big part of the Montessori method.

A work cycle normally lasts 2.5-3 hours long, and there can be one in the morning, and one in the afternoon in a Montessori setting. These are the lesson times. Seem long? They probably do to be honest, and most people I speak to are shocked to learn that this is the length of lessons. However, there is a BIG difference... Within each work cycle, children can do many different things... They can:

• Be presented lessons on a 1-to-1 basis by the teacher
• Practice those lessons as long as they want to (so they are not rushed to finish something to move on to something else, they can carry on as long as they need to, and sometimes this can be for hours!)
• Practice lessons they have already been taught - they independently choose to do this from the materials on the shelves which are always available.
• Have a group lesson on a particular subject
• Help themselves to a snack and drink when they want to (children are not always hungry or thirsty when break time comes around at school - this way they can regulate their own needs)
• Be talking to friends or watching other children working
• Teaching a younger child how to do something
• Resting or sleeping
• Taking a toilet break

This means that in a 3 hour period, a child may have done maths, language work, art work, geography, science, history, had a snack, read a book, had a rest and been involved in some group work. Another child may have spent the whole time practising his or her maths skills! 

I love the idea of work cycles - they give children something mainstream schools don't give - time. Time to learn, to digest, to ask questions, make mistakes, correct mistakes and practice what they learn. If they need more time to learn something, they can have it. They do not have to move on when the rest of the class does, or when it is dictated to them. If they need to do multiplication over and over and over, they can. And particularly with the maths materials, children get so engrossed in using them, I once taught a child who used the Montessori bead material (I will get round to explaining this at some stage) to practice skip counting and his times tables for the WHOLE DAY! He loved it, was so proud and happy with what he had done, and so excited to tell his mum, who then brushed off his amazing achievement as 'oh that's nice'... (charming!)

Anyway, yes, the work cycles allow for that time, they allow the children to choose what they will do next, they create their own learning paths, under the direction and constant observation of the teacher (who makes sure they get a good variety and are always getting introduced to new things when they are ready to learn them)...