Gosling Makes Her Own Game!

This morning Gosling decided to make her own "game." She took the number cards out of two other "games" and decided to match the numbers. She did a great job too. Guess I'm going to have to give her more numbers to "play" with.

If It Won't Snow I'll Make My Own Snowflakes

This is a "snow" themed matching activity.  Again I found the template on-line and used Google images to cut and paste the photos.  I decided to go with colors for matching since Gosling is still building that vocabulary, but you could use anything, counting, letter recognition, shapes...

http://www.prekinders.com/grid-games/ 

Gosling places with all the pieces facing up, but you could make the game for advanced by turning the pieces upside-down and playing "Memory." I've done this with older Montessori students. 

Handwriting Without Tears

I absolutely love this program. The first time I used it was when Goose was learning Cursive Writing. Now Gosling is learning print. She is obviously to young to have the dexterity to trace letters with pencil and paper. So between the Montessori Sandpaper Letter Cards (from Lakeshore Learning) and the "Wooden Pieces for Capital Letters" from HWT, Gosling can learn how the letters are formed.

Actually I made my own wooden "foam board" pieces since I don't have the money to buy the real set right now.  Here is the web site for HWT - http://www.hwtears.com/hwt

This is Mat Man

He is made from the "Wooden Pieces for Capital Letters" and the "mat."

This activity helps children to develop body awareness as well as become familiar with the pieces.

There is a cute song that they sing as they put Mat Man together.

http://www.youtube.com/watch?NR=1&v=lYiGf_0elw8&feature=endscreen

 (Sorry the photos are sideways today. It's one of those days and I can't figure out how to fix it.)

This is the other way to use the "Wooden Pieces for Capital Letters" along with the sandpaper finger tracing card.  This, at least the sandpaper card is a hand over hand activity until they really know it.

There is an App for That
There is also a great app for the ipad and now any tablet. Unfortunately, I bought it for the ipad and now the ipad is out of commission. But it is a great app. Also a hand over hand activity to start with. But I highly recommend it.

Free on-line Resources
I also recommend setting up a free account to use the on-line activities and resources. There is an adorable on-line Mat Man game that Gosling likes and I use the Worksheet maker for Goose so she can continue to practice her cursive writing.  You can type in any words and print for free. Right now Goose is writing her Human Anatomy and Physiology vocabulary words, but we've also done States and Capitals, Continents and Countries and Spanish Review.

7 Continents Pin Map

Now that Gosling is almost two and a half and she has gotten very good at matching, I decided to throw a little geography into her routine.  I was able to download the pin map and flags from
http://www.montessoriprintshop.com/uploads/GeoF-89_World_Continent_Pin_Map_Flags___Map.pdf
I colored the continents myself before laminating the map. Otherwise I followed the directions with the download and it came out beautifully. And she loves it!

I did go with toothpicks since she is so young, but she has no problem putting in all the flags herself.

A Montessori-ized Gift

Gosling loves horses, so for Christmas Santa brought her this stable with 8 horses, all different breeds. Santa ordered this from Lakeshore Learning http://www.lakeshorelearning.com/ . The breed name is written on the underside of each horse.

 

 Next, using a 3-part card template I found here,http://titus2homemaker.com/2011/09/montessori-3-part-cards/

I cut and pasted horse photos from Google images. 

Only one part of the three part cards is shown because we are going to start by matching the 3D horses to the photo card while taking about each horse breeds name.

Home Made Fun

         Home-made Playdough - I found this recipe on the internet.  My mom always made us playdough when I was a kid but she used cream of tartar. I haven't been able to find that. What I really like about this recipe was that I could use lemon juice instead of the cream of tartar.  Here is the recipe:
1 c flour
1 c water
2 tsp of lemon juice
1/4 c of salt
2 tsp of oil
Mix together, should look like pancake batter.

Separate into bowls for the number of colors you want to make.  I made two colors with the amounts in this                                           recipe. Each girl got 1/2 a color for their own use and it was plenty.

Add as much food coloring as you like to each bowl to get the color you wish. ( I did green and orange to make pumpkins for Halloween.)

One color at a time, pour mixture into a sauce pan and heat on medium for 5-10 mins until it balls up.  If it is really sticky, keep cooking. It may still be a little sticky but should get less as it cools. It will be hot!!!

Place on a plate to cool. Then it is time to play!

A few notes:  Do NOT get it wet or it will get very sticky and make a huge mess. It will get on your hands so if you need to wash them in the middle of playing be sure to dry them extremely well.

If the playdough does get a little wet or just gets really sticky, you can add a small amount of flour to the work surface and roll the ball of playdough in it.  Be aware if you use too much flour it will dry out and get hard.

Store in an airtight container like a baggie. It will still eventually get hard, but it's easy to make so throw it out and make some more.

To get the remnants off of the work space, it will stick to a work space so choose your work space carefully, rub your hand over the playdough stuck to the surface to ball it up and then use the big ball of playdough to pick up the little pieces.

Sorting and Opposites

              I cut and colored the pumpkins and cut out the fence and glued them all to a green paper. Then I put one large pumpkin at the top and one small pumpkin at the bottom for examples.  Next I picked a pumpkin, varying the order and used a glue stick on the back to make it sticky.  I asked Gosling if it was big or little and Where does it go? She then placed all of the pumpkins in the correct spot all by herself. I was one very proud Mommie!