Digging into Practical Life

I completely forgot that I have pics of the rest of my materials to put up! I'll get them up another day, really!

I'm finding my evenings (and random free time) being taken up by trying to get everything ready for this first week. I'm still finishing up the sandpaper globe, rough and smooth boards, and color shade matching. And, of course, tons of Practical Life.

I'm aiming to have two new Sensorial activities out the first day (probably the Pink Tower and Cylinder Block #1) and fill up the rest of the shelves with Practical Life -- most of which she'll be familiar with. My current planned line-up is dry pouring, spoon transfer, tong transfer (hopefully with a sorting element as well), stamping in a defined area, simple dressing (either a zipper or snap dressing frame or a buttoning snake), and one more thing.

I'm trying to walk a fine line between having new and interesting activities and having things that she is familiar enough with to dig into without a lot of hand-holding on my part. I'm also trying to throw in a bit of a Valentine's theme with some of the materials (red trays and bowls, pink rice to pour, etc). So there's a lot to make all come together at once, and nothing is totally done.

I finally got some artwork on the walls, though. My husband and I have been looking for a cheap coffee-table book filled with various artists' work that we could cut up and frame. We haven't had any luck! So I finally found a book of photographs of baby animals for just a couple bucks. It's a little cutsey for traditional Montessori, but it's real-life and Nugget ADORES them. We have a curious-looking giraffe, a brown bear, a porcupine, a duck, and a wolf.

Okay, so I owe this blog pictures of the rest of the Montessori Outlet order, pictures and descriptions of the projects I've been working on, and photos of our school area once it's set up. Soon!