Week 9, day 1: Slowly getting back on track

Nugget had been showing a growing interest in getting back to the Montessori room. She was going in their on her own (just for a few minutes) and talking about it again. So I decided to try to get us back in the room a bit.

To give me a framework for developing new activities, I'd decided to try incorporating some aspects of unit studies. I'm going to focus on swamp animals for a few weeks, since we live near some swamps and she's been interested in them recently. This week I chose frogs, and developed variations on some basic activities using frogs.

Her biggest request was a new animal beginning sounds activity. So I made her a swamp with all kinds of animals and insects. The sounds were easy, but she was quite taken with all the animals (as expected).


I used some of our Safari frogs for her to match to pictures of their real-life counterparts.


She put the appropriate number of frogs on each lily pad (this was difficult -- she's not quite ready for this yet).


I put out the pieces to a frog craft and an example that I made. I let her figure out on her own how to put it together. She did great!




She used her new magnifying glass to match tiny pictures to big pictures.


As a gross-motor activity, I cut lily pads out of felt for her to jump between.


The only old activity she chose (at my suggestion) was the knobbed cylinders, which she pretended were frog daddies and babies who needed to get back to their houses.

(Is anyone surprised to hear that Nugget is obsessed with being a vet when she grows up? This kid LOVES animals. Nearly all of her play is animal-based, and anything can be made more interesting by throwing animals into the mix.)

All of this was accomplished with Sprout asleep in the sling on my chest. I felt like super-mom!