Introducing a rug

In Montessori classrooms, children are encouraged to work wherever they're the most comfortable. Maria Montessori provided child-sized tables and chairs, but observed children often choosing to work on the floor. To accommodate that, she introduced small rugs that children could lay out on the floor. This provided a way to contain their work from spreading all over the floor, and to keep other kids from stepping in the middle of the work.

Yesterday, Nugget and I made a trip to Old Time Pottery, a local overstock store. I was able to find 2 lightweight cotton rugs with an unobtrusive pattern. These will be easy for Nugget to roll up and carry around.

I introduced the rug idea this morning along with a shadow matching game. I printed these pictures from a site with story stretchers for "Brown Bear, Brown Bear, What Do You See?".

Nugget was able to do the work quite easily. I think the more valuable part of this was the opportunity to see what the rug is for.

Clothespins and trays

I love to watch Nugget embrace the whole procedure of doing her Montessori activities. She seems to enjoy the fetching and replacing as much as the activity itself.

For example, I recently set up a few new activities for her -- flower arranging and clothespins. For the clothespins, she gets a tray with a basket containing the pins and a small round box. She removes the box lid and places the clothespins around the edge of the box. When they're all placed, she removes the pins, replaces the lid, and returns the tray to the shelf.

The purpose of the activity is to strengthen Nugget's fingers in the writing grip. When I introduced the activity two days ago, she couldn't get the hang of using the clothespins, either by pinching them or by squeezing them in her fist. After a few tries, she returned the tray and left it alone for the next day.

She picked it out again today, though. And, to my amazement, after a failed try or two she got the hang of the pinching motion and was able to place and remove the clothespins correctly!

She seemed to get a kick out of this, too, and repeated the activity numerous times. The fun part to watch is when she finishes putting the clothespins back. She replaces everything on the tray and returns the tray to the shelf. Then she picks the tray up again and takes it back to the table! She did this probably 3 or 4 times before moving on to her trains.

She really seems to see the fetching and returning as an integral part of doing the activities. I'm really happy with that. I think part of it is that she has a neat streak and we've encouraged it -- she's taken to cleaning up on her own during her play, without being asked. But I also think part of it is the delineation that the tray gives. I think it's a brilliant part of the Montessori method.

Sweet Pete

I was reading an old craft book with Nugget this afternoon ("How to Make Flibbers, etc.") when we came to instructions about putting cloves into an orange, which they called a "Sweet Pete". After I read it, it occurred to me that she might be able to do that -- and we just happened to have one about-to-be-thrown-out orange!

It's pretty simple. We used a skewer to make it easier (the book called for a toothpick), and Nugget did a fabulous job of pushing it into the orange (with me holding the orange for stability). She made a small hole, removed the skewer and placed it on the ground.


Then she picked just one clove from a bowl, turned it around so that she was holding it by the top, then pressed the pointy end into the hole.


She stuck with this for quite a long time, and covered a lot of the orange with cloves. It's sitting on our table, smelling fabulous.

I was really impressed with how Nugget handled this. She watched patiently while I demonstrated the first clove, then followed the process carefully each time. A few times she caught herself not putting the skewer down before picking up a clove, but she corrected herself. Also, there were some skills here that she's only recently mastered, like pushing the skewer into the orange in a controlled way and maneuvering the clove around in her fingers so that it was positioned correctly.

I think this was the best activity we've done in a while, and it just came out of nowhere. I'm going to keep my eyes open for more similar activities to exercise her new fine motor skills. Her ability to follow directions is also really promising for doing more complicated things in the future!

First stringing and sponging activities

I finally got Nugget the new activities she's been asking for. Unfortunately, I introduced these activities the morning that she first started to suffer from a nasty stomach bug. So she hasn't had much patience for them yet, although she's tried them a few times.

One was a simple wooden puzzle of three pieces -- a leaf, a squirrel, and a nut -- that fit inside one another. I picked it and two others (a chicken and her hens and a pig and piglets) at a thrift store. These are a different type of puzzle than Nugget's used to, and she still hasn't quite worked it out.

The second is her first stringing activity. I used rigatoni pasta (dyed with food coloring) and pipe cleaners. To keep the pasta from sliding off, I twisted a wooden bead to one end.


She's gone back to this one a few times, even while sick, so I think it might be a keeper.

Another attempt to provide sick-toddler entertainment saw me bringing bowls of water onto our lanai. Nugget wanted to float her turtles, but I also introduced her to moving water with a sponge. She gave it a shot a few times...


... but it quickly devolved into squeezing the water onto the ground and eventually pouring out the bowls.


It's very un-Montessori to do it so messily, but when the kid is so sick and grumpy that even smiling at her wrong sends her into a tizzy, correcting her few minutes of fun is the last thing I'm going to do.

Activity area reorganization

I couldn't sleep last night. Maybe it's because I had more caffeine during the day than I'm used to -- although I didn't have any after 2pm. Whatever it was, I found myself awake and energetic at midnight. I'd been meaning to re-work Nugget's activity area, so I decided to harness my energy for good.

The big things I changed were a refresh of the activities on her self, weeding out her puzzles, and adding some decoration to the walls and window shelves.

Here's her activity shelf. The top has the old stand-bys of crayons and bead stacking (although I've moved the beads from a Valentine's-themed bucket to a flower shaped bowl).

The middle shelf includes a line-drawing activity -- draw a line from the circle to the X.

There's also a basket with animal flashcards -- these can be matched to the flashcards stuck to the walls around the nook.

This is a shape-sorting activity. The foam shapes are from a magnetic building set that she isn't interested in.

The bottom shelf has the spring bird activity and a redesigned version of the pompoms and ice cube tray -- I've replaced the tongs with a spoon and glued small squares of color to the bottom of the ice cube hole so that the pompoms have a designated place to go.

On another shelf I have her puzzles, but I've removed those that she's grown out of (pretty much all the peg puzzles) and replaced them with trickier peg puzzles (matching by color and pattern) and jigsaws.

Now here's my next project -- this is a desk in the guest room that's been taken over by the pieces and parts for Nugget's activities and art projects. I keep her area so neat, but don't treat mine the same way!

Nugget's cabinet

Here's pictures of the cabinet in the kitchen where Nugget gets her plates and silverware. All of her plates are visible, but I'm trying to set her up for success here in the beginning by putting the plate I'd like her to get in the front.


When it's dinner time, I request that she get a certain plate ("the one with the bee and flowers", for instance), a fork, a spoon, and a sippy if I've pre-placed it.

Her highchair is pretty high up, and she was getting frustrated by having to blindly push her plate and utensils onto the tray. My husband had a brilliant idea and put a little step-stool next to the highchair. Now she can climb up and put everything in its place -- except that she can't put the fork on the far side of the plate. We've never really emphasized that, so I didn't expect it to be a big deal, but it appears to be one for her. She really, really wants to put that fork over there. So we still have to be around to help with that part. Maybe we'll spring for another stool.

Table setting

Sorry for being so quiet on here recently. Nugget has a cow's milk allergy, and she had a likely accidental exposure last week. We've been working our way through the various stages of the reaction, and it's left me pretty drained.

She hasn't been in any mood to do the activities. She has, however, been quite happy to set her place at the table. I set up a low cabinet with her plates and silverware. Each night before dinner I ask her to get a plate, fork, and spoon. She happily goes to her cabinet, picks them out, and carries them out to her highchair. It's too high for her to properly set her place, but she pushes them onto the tray.

If we ask, she'll pick out a bib (and try, amusingly, to put it on) and, when dinner is done, carry her plate into the kitchen (if dinner was messy, we scrape anything spill-able onto our plates first).

I've been really pleased with this activity. Nugget picked it up really quickly and loves having an "important job". I love that it's starting to incorporate her into the routines and chores of the house. I think the only downside is that I've had to remind her once or twice that the plates are for dinner time, not for picnics with her stuffed animals (I pulled out paper plates for that).

Tongs

A few weeks ago, I bought a ice cube mold with heart shapes that I intended to use to melt old crayons in. When I was trying to come up with new activities, I set it up with small beads for Nugget to place inside, but that wasn't interesting. Last night I was looking at my materials and saw the tongs. She'd played around with them when I first bought them, but hadn't been able to manipulate them. I thought some more exposure might help.

I figured the beads would be way too hard to pick up, so I grabbed a few pompoms and set them out in a small bowl with the ice cube tray.

I showed her the activity around lunch, and it took her about half the bowl to get the idea of the tongs. I was thrilled when she first actually squeezed them with one hand, and did all sorts of cheering when she transferred her first pompom.

I didn't get a picture of her with the tongs, but this is her cleaning up so you can get an idea of what it looks like.


And, just because I'm so tickled with it, here's two pictures of her cleaning up her activities -- carrying a tray and putting an activity back on the shelf.

So rewarding

This morning, while I worked on breakfast, Nugget got out her own work and set it up neatly on the table to use it. She worked quietly for a while by herself, then I heard her start using another activity. I came into the nook expecting to guide her through cleaning up, only to find that she had re-assembled and re-shelved the first activity by herself!

Our work and play spaces

I've had a few people ask about what Nugget's spaces look like. I'm going to share them as they are, but with the caveat that they're a work in progress. We've lived in this house for about 9 months, and we're still figuring out how our flow works into it. We're constantly tweaking where furniture is and where things are stored. In fact, I did a minor re-arrangement last night before taking these pictures this morning.

First, our "work" area. This is officially the breakfast nook, but we never used it as such. A few months ago we removed our cafe table and put in a toddler-height table and stool. Nugget eats lunch and snacks here and colors and does puzzles.


The black shelving unit is new, and holds puzzles on the bottom two shelves. The light wood folding shelves I moved out of her playroom just last night and set out her "work". This has worked out great, as she re-discovered some activities that hadn't been as easily accessible before.


Nugget still doesn't get the pattern activity (her Dad put the top pattern down), but she likes to make up patterns of her own. And she might understand it more than I give her credit for, just not like it -- she told us she was going to make a pattern, but a "different" one.


This shape/color matching hasn't been out for a while. I need to make some changes -- the cards slide on the table easily, and the shapes slide on the cards. Maybe some non-skid on the bottom of the cards, and gluing a few of the same shapes on top of one another to make a bigger, heavier piece?


This is Nugget's playroom. It's not your traditional Montessori or Waldorf environment -- there's more colorful plastic in here than hand-carved wood, but she likes it. We buy most of her toys second-hand at thrift stores and resale shops for monetary and environmental reasons, splurging rarely on nice pieces like a Haba doll or Plan Toys drum. Some of her favorites in here are a doctor's kit, Duplo (Daddy builds her robots), and various Little People. Outside the door you can see her cardboard playhouse.

I have some goals for these spaces. I'd like to put more shelving in the nook/work area, as well as more artwork. In her playroom, I'd like to start a rotation system with her toys. We'd tried that about 6 months ago, pulling a number of toys into the guest room. But then she discovered that trove of toys, and we just had two destroyed rooms at the end of the day.

In the kitchen she has a nice wooden kitchen of her own and a Learning Tower, along with lots of wood and felt food and cooking implements. I'm in the process of clearing out a cabinet to keep her plates and cups in so that she can start setting her place at the table herself. Hopefully I'll get that done tonight, and I'll have some kitchen pictures in the next few days.

Bead stacking

This is the bead and dowel activity I was mentioning. We finally acquired a 5/16" drill bit, so I was able to throw this together yesterday evening for use this morning.


I just took a piece of 1" pine I had and drilled a hole as big as the dowel. I cut the dowel to a seemingly-appropriate length and Gorilla-glued them together.

Nugget went right for this one. I intend to grow this into a pattern-following activity (giving her pictures of bead stacks for her to repeat), but for now it's a great fine-motor activity to put the beads on the dowel.

I need to tweak this by sanding the dowel smoother -- it's rough at the top, and some of the beads with smaller openings stick and cause frustration.

For now, though, it's a hit. She's gone back to it a few times. And pulling the beads off -- and dropping them on the floor to bounce around the nook -- seems to be fun, too.

Patterns

I thought I had a great idea for a new activity for Nugget dealing with patterns. Here's how I presented it, thanks to my thrift store finds.


You can see one of the new trays, a piece of paper with two rows and 5 columns, and two wooden bowls filled with cardboard squares -- some colored with a black marker, some left brown.

Here's the activity when it's set up.


I filled the top row with a pattern of squares. The idea is for Nugget to reproduce the pattern on the lower row.

I was pretty excited about this one. It's a simplified version of a bead sequencing set that I lust after. I have the raw materials to make a set like it (colored beads, wooden dowel), but haven't had the time to assemble it (a theme in my life). So I figured I could do something quick and simple to see if it was worth finding the time in the immediate future to put it together.

Unfortunately, my excitement doesn't translate to Nugget's excitement. She watched as I set it up and pushed a few pieces around the board. But she had way more interest in the wooden bowls (which she hadn't seen yet).

So the pieces quickly found themselves scattered on the table, homeless, and the bowls were off into her wooden kitchen for use in making "soup". Ah, well. We'll just chalk this one up on the Waldorf side of things.

Thrift store haul

I don't really have a lot of supplies around the house for traditional Montessori activities like scooping and pouring, or trays for presenting materials on. I'd been meaning to visit some thrift stores and see what I could get, but previous trips with my 20-month old have been pretty much fail.

Today, a combination of circumstances gave me about 90 minutes on my own near our small town's thrift stores. I took advantage of that to hit 3 of the 4 and come out with a great haul for less than $7!


You'll see a few trays (wooden and metal), some small bowls, a pitcher, two pairs of tongs, and various scooping implements.

Nugget got home just after me, so I quickly gathered up a few of the treasures, a box, and a big bag of rice. I set up a rice box on the lanai and she set about to scooping, pouring, and generally exploring the new experience.

Sorting, sorting, and more sorting

Nugget goes through puzzles as fast as I can buy them. Because I haven't figured out yet how to make puzzles (I have the means, but haven't had the opportunity), I decided to see if she'd like some new sorting activities.

Color is old hat, and she's good with shapes. So I needed something different. I had a bunch of old catalogs and magazines laying around, so I decided to flip through and see what themes I could find.

The first one I picked up was my alumni magazine. It had a lot of pictures of people, and we've been working with Nugget on the man/woman distinction. Perfect! I cut out the best pictures and glued them to index cards.


Nugget was very excited to try her new game. She was hit-or-miss -- got about 2/3 of them easily with the rest needing correction. She had some problems with the idea of the two piles -- she'd say the correct word, but put it in the wrong pile. I think she just needs more practice with the two-pile sorting.

When Nugget finished, she asked for more. So later that day, when she took a crib nap (first time in over a month!), I grabbed a clothing catalog. This time, I decided to ask her to sort shirts vs pants. And since she plowed through the men/women so fast, I cut out a bunch.


This one didn't go over so well. She was distracted and sorted poorly, and wanted to be done before she got through them all. But she stuck with it all the way to the end.

I'll probably leave these out for a few days and see if Nugget goes back to them, but I don't expect them to have much longevity. I don't think sorting is really her thing anymore.

I'll have to keep an eye on her for a few days, see what she gravitates to (other than puzzles!).

Adding shapes to the mix

Sorting by just colors has become a bit too easy for Nugget. She isn't very engaged by the activity any more. I can't blame her -- even though I present it in three different ways (sorting colored beads onto dowels, sorting pompoms into boxes, and matching colored puzzle pieces to their appropriate spots), it's the same thing. And she knows her colors -- she can identify all the big ones by name (red, orange, yellow, green, blue, purple, pink, white, black, and grey).

I spent some time trying to come up with another sorting activity, because that seems to appeal to her sense of order right now. It wasn't until we were in a local teacher's store that inspiration struck, though.

I found a small bag of foam pieces in various shapes and colors. I also picked up some large index cards. When we got home, I put 3 different shapes in different colors on a card and traced around them, using crayons to color them in.

I laid these cards out on Nugget's work table along with a pile of foam shapes. I showed her how to place the shapes on the appropriate places, and she got to work. I only made one at first as a proof of concept, but she quickly worked through that and requested another. And another. And another -- a "harder" one. Does she really know what that means? Anyway, I obliged her and made one that looked like a robot with 8 shapes on it.

I got four cards made before she moved on. Which is impressive, considering that she's in the middle of a pretty bad cold. Here she is, in the middle of her first three cards. She sometimes needed correction on orientation, but in general she was able to do this on her own after the first demonstration.

Color sorting pompoms

Nugget is really into colors these days. She has them down pretty well, but she seems to like the opportunity to practice. When we had large Christmas lights lining the driveway, she would walk down the line touching each and saying the color ("purple.... red.... 'ellow....").

One of her favorite activities is sorting colored beads onto dowels (we found this activity at a local children's resale store). I decided to try to make a similar, but hopefully different enough, activity on my own.

We have a bunch of pompoms of various colors that sit around for use in whatever crazy way Nugget comes up with. I dug up construction paper in matching colors and folded paper boxes. I put out a bowl with some pompoms and the boxes next to it, then demonstrated removing one pompom and placing it into the appropriately colored box.

We started with just red and yellow. Nuggest showed no interest for about a day and a half, but after a bit of encouragement gave it a shot and has come back to it a few times since. She much prefers to pick up a handful of pompoms and drop them all into one box, then remove the wrong ones. Hey, seems more efficient to me!

Tonight I folded up 3 more colors of boxes. Maybe that will provide more of a challenge.