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Nurturing Learning - The pursuit of truth, goodness and beauty
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Uncategorized

Kindergarten Math

I was checking out Maria Miller’s recommendations for kindergarten math one day and realized that J-jo has already mastered many of what Maria states as goals for K math.

She states that: 

The goal of kindergarten mathematics is to prepare children for first grade math. Please see below a list of objectives and goals for kindergarten math:

  • To count by rote at least to 20, but preferably a little beyond.
  • The concepts of equality, more, and less
  • To count backwards from 10 to 0.
  • To recognize numbers 

  • To be able to write numbers (He can trace them and write about 4 or 5 of them without guidelines.)

  • To recognize basic shapes
  • to understand up, down, under, near, on the side, etc. (basic directions)
  • To have a very basic idea of addition and subtraction (not sure just how basic she means, but since J-jo can add and subtract with manipulatives up to ten I am considering this mastered.)
  • It also helps to expose the student to two-digit numbers. (We have worked on the teens and tens board and do place value when we get around to doing calendar, which has only been 45 days this school year.)

I like her game suggestions (at that same link under “Counting”) and J-jo and I have been playing the two domino games listed there. One involves making domino trains (a matching activity) and one involves adding the dots on both halves of your domino and seeing who has the most.  I’ll let you visit her site for the directions.

Below, J-jo counts his dots (he saw it automatically as 5) and triumphantly snatched up my tile which only had 2.

This is all to say, that even though I worry about J-jo not being like Bear who desired to sit all day with Mommy to do learning activities, it seems that the 5 minutes here and there that we have been sneaking in have been very effective in teaching him.  Recently, he is requesting lessons more and more.  It’s an exciting change, but they are still very short and only as long as his attention desires them.

Here’s some other things he has enjoyed.

I leave the hundred board as below, with some squares filled in, and the rest a scrambled mess.
 He comes in and fills it in.  It usually takes a few days.  This particular day, I had the rods out to show him how to build some of the numbers. 

He loves Rosie’s Education Unboxed videos and though we don’t watch them often enough, he remembered seeing one of her girls doing this and was determined to follow suit.

I think we may play with time and money next as he likes to tell me what “time” it is.  (As in, “Mommy, I’m tired because it is 7:40,” or “it must be lunch because it is “11:40.” – There’s almost always a 40 when he tells time:)

Uncategorized

Before FIAR – Corduroy

Preamble:
We’ll be rowing four bear books in a row so I can keep out most of the Montessori work out for the month and rotate in new works.  Corduroy, We’re Going on a Bear Hunt, Blueberries for Sal (there’s a farm where we can go blueberry picking right down the street!), Jesse Bear, What Will you Wear, and finally Goodnight Moon (which has the story of the Three Little Bears as part of it).  Goodnight Moon will transition us out of the bear theme and into the moon theme.  We may row some books outside of the FIAR book list to extend the moon theme. Of course, we may be tired of bears by then, so we may have to change course, but I keep finding more and more fun stuff for bears!

 Here is our bear habitat sensory bin. 
 Lisa counted all the coins in her piggy bank.  J-jo gets to put all his coins IN his piggy bank.
Bear sorted all her coins and then counted them with my help.
 Above you can see various Montessori trays to go with Corduroy. 
From top right clockwise: coins in the piggy bank, small, medium, and large bears (J-jo does this work with me and I simply ask him to cuddle, kiss, tickle, pass me, etc one of the sizes), buttons in a box for sorting, counting or making patterns, basket of pairs of matching textured fabric with a blindfold, coin sorting, and the bear habitat sensory bin.
 French: animal puzzles.  This was mostly J-jo’s work.
 Corduroy inspired preposition presentation and work for Bear.  J-jo and I also played with this minus the grammar symbols and preposition cards.  I would ask him to put the bear on the bag, in the bag, under the bag, etc.  He loved it.
 Button patterns and the animal classification cards for Corduroy from Homeschool Share.
Rolling the die and finding the right colored bear card(from abcteach)  We also played memory with these bears.
And of course, if I had thought it out right, I would have coordinated the button work we did to be done the same week as Corduroy!
To finish off the week we watched the Corduroy movie on YouTube.  There are two parts.  Here is the link to the first part.  It was neat to talk about what was the same and different as the book.

Here are some other blogs with Corduroy activities:
Delightful Learning
Homeschool Blogger
My Pursuit of

and Mrs. Kilburn’s Kiddos has lots of links for bears.

Linked to Tot School at 1+1+1=1; Preschool Corner at Homeschool Creations; Mom 2 lil Posh Divas; Beneath the Rowan Tree and the Weekly Wrap-up at Weird Unsocialized Homeschoolers.

Uncategorized

Corduroy inspired Montessori Grammar Work

Usually, the Montessori presentation for prepositions is done with a silk flower and a vase; however, since we have been rowing Corduroy this week for J-jo, I changed up the presentation a bit and used a small teddy bear and a tiny shopping bag.
 I followed the presentation from a file called “The Primary Grammar Cabinet” by Josh Galarza but presently I can’t find a link for it.  He presents a story for each symbol explaining why the symbol is what it is.  The stories help both Bear and I remember which symbol is which.  The article triangles should really be lighter blue than the adjective triangle, but I didn’t have any light blue in my stash of foam.
 After Bear has put the teddy in/on/under etc the bag, she pulls out the grammar symbols.  I made these from foam sheets, just eyeballing it, no patterns.  We use these in conjunction with the grammar symbol guide I printed from here to help us remember which symbol is for what part of speech.  Bear is quite good at simple sentence analysis.
Uncategorized

Five in a Row – Gramma’s Walk

A few weeks back we rowed Gramma’s Walk, which means we read it every day and then did activities to go with it.  This book was perfect to row at the same time as an ocean unit.  Many of the activities you will have seen in these posts.

One thing I struggle with with the Five in a Row and Before Five in a Row books is the lapbook portion.  I am trying to find a way to make these more Montessori friendly – something to leave out on the shelf for self exploration so that the activities can be more accessible to J-jo who can’t participate much in lapbooks. I didn’t achieve this so much with Gramma’s Walk, but I’ve been working on it for the other books we’ve been rowing.

Gramma’s Walk is the story of a boy and his grandmother who is in a wheelchair and how they use their imagination to take a walk along the seashore.  Using their five senses, they describe their walk and it feels like you are right there, experiencing it all.

We played memory with some animal track cards.

I also found this match the tracks to the animal online game and some other matching cards.  Here are the matching cards I printed out (scroll down a bit) for our memory game.

We did a survey of how many handicapped parking spaces were at our Walmart, library, and Publix and then graphed it (this idea came from Sowing 3 Seeds).  We talked about how a big store might need more of those spaces than a small store or building.
We played in the sand.

We acted out the story a lot.  Retelling stories through play-acting is one of Bear’s favorite things to do.

We colored sandpaper.

 We made a barnacle (I made it – file from homeschoolshare.com)
 J-jo matched shells to shell outlines. (The only way to get him to do certain work is to offer it to him at snack time.)
We did some shoreline experiments (it was a flop).  Basically, the different pans represented different types of shorelines and walking with them was supposed to show displacement of water and you could see which type of shoreline might have the most weathering from wave action.  We couldn’t tell anything but it was fun to do on a hot day.
We even went on a ferryboat on our first day in Quebec and saw a buoy too!
(The kids are hugging their cousin.)
If you do BFIAR or FIAR and have rowed Gramma’s Walk, please feel free to leave a link in the comments.
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