Trying another approach

I'm still working out the best way to make homeschooling work for us. Today was my first shot at another approach -- more of a traditional homeschool situation with Montessori materials than Montessori at home. I didn't try to set everything out the night before for Nugget to work independently. When Sprout went down for his nap, Nugget and I settled into the nook to work together.

The last few days, I made a list of the big subject areas and the next 2-3 topics I want to cover. That way, when we had a few minutes to sit down together, I knew what we could cover.

In Math, I spent the last few days verifying that she can count out items from 0-9 and that she can identify the written numbers (she has to think extra about [and sometimes mixes up] 6 & 9, but everything else she has down). So we're going to move into the golden bead material -- I brought out the decimal tray and we've been looking at and playing games to become familiar with "one unit", "ten bar", "hundred square", and "thousand cube".

In Language, I have out the Progressive Phonics books (which she hasn't touched in a while) and we're going to talk about the double letters ('ee', 'sh', 'th', etc). I've come around to seeing reading as very much something she will step up to herself. I'm not really pushing a progression toward reading at this point (she's not even 3.5 yet!), just giving her pieces of the puzzle and waiting until she's reached the developmental point where it starts to click.

For Science, I put away the plant and seed materials and we'll start into insects. Today we read a book about butterflies, played around with butterfly life cycle models, and glued down pictures of the life cycle. Later, we hit the library and stocked up on books about different insects, so we'll pick our way through those over the next few weeks.

In Geography, Nugget really wants to learn about Australia. But today we started in the beginning, looking at the sandpaper and continents globe. We talked about the continents globe for quite a while, learning the names and talking about where we live, where penguins live, etc.

Practical Life, I'm just going to let happen in daily life. If I'm particularly inspired by something in a blog, I might put it out. But I'm not going to try to keep that stocked daily. And Sensorial I'm going to follow her lead. She doesn't really seem to want to do much Sensorial, but I'll keep a shelf or two of it out, in case she comes back to it (which she did today, after our other topics -- she played around with the Pink Tower and Brown Stair).

We had a nice time. We didn't cover a ton, but she seemed really "present" while we worked together. She showed a lot of interest and was very cooperative. It was a nice touch-base time for the two of us without the little Sprout sticking his nose (well, fingers) into everything.

And can I just say how much I LOVE the three period lesson?