My nine-year-old painted a gorgeous Monet reproduction this morning. Can you tell how she was beaming with pride? Beautiful! Check out this excellent Paint-by-Number kit we received from Timberdoodle Co to review. The set includes everything you need and has easy to follow instructions my kid had no problem whatsoever figuring out on her own….
If you were Italian, you might say to someone asking to borrow a possession, “Si chiama Pietro e torna indietro” or “Its name is Peter and it comes back.” Reading that in English is for sure a head scratcher. But in Italian it’s a clever play on rhyming words and commonly known idiom. My oldest…
Ah multiplication facts. You either learn them easily or you don’t. I think that was a defining moment for me in elementary school; that was when I realized I hated math. My parents worked with me for hours — even bribed me — to get me to memorize them. When I kept blanking on my…
Have you seen the flood of wonderful videos on Youtube the last month coming from Montessori educators needing to teach from home? Even if you have a presentation down pat, it’s still incredibly helpful to see how others present work. Even with a uniform method like Montessori, every guide brings a little bit of his…
I love words. When I was a kid I used to snuggle up with a thesaurus and memorize as many words as I could then use them in my school assignments to confuse my teachers. Ah middle school when you think you’re so clever… Anywho, my kids are not the same at all. They aren’t…
“Human consciousness comes into the world as a flaming ball of imagination.” –Dr Maria Montessori After the “Coming of Life” great lesson follows the “Coming of Humans” story. We have been studying the different eons and eras, and we’ve studied fundamental needs of humans by going camping and visiting a wool farm; here’s some of…
Happy to add this cool “Knot Tying Dexterity Game” Knot So Fast from Timberdoodle to our shelves this week. I remember seeing a knot-tying guide book once before and thinking if only there was a way to make this simple enough for small hands to understand, it’d make a great practical life activity to add…
If you’ve been reading my blog for longer than a hot minute, you may know I’m super-spatially challenged. I’m not great at construction sets, puzzles or building things. I was a writing major; I do know how to use semicolons and commas. Can’t do it all folks. I mean, I can’t. I do, however, have…
Speaking of “painting windows” in my last post… I always forget to share activities we do to the blog. So here’s one of the activities we did at the end of January for the Second Great Lesson (Coming of Life). I keep reading about the “Mural of Life” used in Montessori classrooms. Aside from the…
Do you know how big our sun is compared to our home planet? Can you visualize that? After our model solar system activity, we got a good idea for the sizes of the planets. Originally I’d really hoped to take the kids on an adventure around town showing the scale and distance apart, but even…
