Mostly practical life

I prepared some pouring & spooning activities for the kids and added them to the shelf.  They were chosen immediately.  In the spirit of following the child I will be preparing a shelf dedicated to this interest in my next setup.  The kids like a mix of textures.  Lily loved spooning flour.  Because then she gig to play with it between a few spoons.  We will have opportunities during our next time using flour to actually discuss its texture.  This goes together well with the touch board.  Colored water & pouring is always a hit & this time I used a flower vase to be the vessel the water ends up in.  It’s a multi tiered sort of thing that proved more difficult to empty than pour as Maggie found out.

Maggie poured into a flower arranging vase but realized that when it came time to empty the vase to start over that the spouts were pointed in different directions.

The shelves as is right now.  We have been working on a handwriting without tears program that has a book that goes with it about shapes.  I pulled these shapes from the book and we worked on drawing them with the metal insets.  Lily was hesitant and didn’t seem to enjoy the work so we stopped at one shape.  She particularly didn’t like the tracing around the object.  But she did enjoy counting the sides of the shapes and did very well with tracing the inset of the circle.  This was with hand over hand assistance.  The number rods are available as well as the number tiles so they can be matched up.  The large hexagon box and triangle are out and printed extensions help to remind the kiddos where the shapes should be set to make shapes.  Paper is available on the shelf and pencils are set up on the table because we’ve had math out for two days.

One day I had out a planet match with shapes and 3 part cards but the planet was lost so this set was taken off the shelf.  Said planet has been found.  Lol. I’ll add it back soon.  There is a tray with math stuffs (mostly the bead stair) with color pencils to color in the bead colors to help with memorization and counting skills.  You can match the number to the appropriate bead cards too.  I have also left out the hanging bead stair.  and the Triangle box with added extensions.

Doing math.  Simple addition.  This is something I am super proud of.  I printed out some math sheets that represent the bead stairs.  Or checkboard beads.  Lily immediately went to matching the beads to their chart.  Then something wonderful happened.  She answered questions.  She understood the beads on the laminated pages represented the beads in her hand and she matched them up and counted them.  We are still shaky with the placement of the plus and equal sign but that is because the concept is foreign to her in a symbol representation because it is young in her mind right now.  She is doing great with math.  I am very excited.  Maggie has always had a fascination with math.  She is doing very well also.

Lily has no problem counting the beads and adding them together.  Maggie does a great job as well.  Maggie has had a strong love for numbers since an early age.

The main focus on the shelf was practical life and math this time around.  Spooning flour from one bowl to the other was one of the activities.  Lily loved the soft texture of the flour.