Hammering - Practical Life

Here is the first elaboration on my Classroom Changes. (To see what my classroom was like, go to my older posts, in particular My Montessori Classroom and Materials.)

Above is what my classroom currently looks like. If you look just under the table on the far left you will see what looks like a brown rectangle. That is our newest practical life activity.

About a month ago, while browsing in Toys-R-Us, I spotted a craft activity that involved a small hammer, tacks (large tacks, like those used in upholstering), a thick piece of cork board and geometrically-shaped wooden tiles. I filed it away in my mind under "Things to Consider for School."

A couple weeks ago, Ella was given a little bit of money from a dear friend whom we met at the mall. She used one dollar to go on the pony carousel (typically we don't let her use her money - or ours - for those rides in the mall, but we often will make an exception for this one), and then went to the Dollarama where she got "funny water" (Sprite - another thing she doesn't get much of) and a little tool kit. Pretty much the only reason she got it was because of the hammer. She did like, and continues to play with the other tools, but for the most part, what we hear is the little "tap-tap-tapping" of her going around "fixing" things. She loved the hammer so much, she insisted on sleeping with it the first two nights!

So, after that I thought perhaps the time was right for some slightly-more-realistic hammering, and I bought the Bojeux PlayArt Hammer & Nails kit. (If you click on that link, you'll have to scroll down almost to the bottom to see it.) Here's what it looks like (in the box): It was an instant hit! I didn't do anything, she got it, opened it up, and began to make designs with the tiles, hammering carefully and remarkably accurately.

Initially she worked rather randomly, in that she would hammer any tile anywhere. But as she has become more used to it, she's now making designs, or sometimes trying to make designs, and when she wants to make more elaborate things, she asks me to help her. I make a house, for example, setting the tiles in that shape, then she does the hammering.

I have it set out with the other Montessori Materials, and though it is not "strictly" Montessori, it is certainly a practical life lesson, and it lends itself both to artistic design, geometry, and mathematical thought.

There are multiple products such as this one. I know that HABA puts out a similar toy in a variety of ways. They have the basic Geo Shape Tack Zap, the Large Geo Shape Tack Zap (presumably for littler fingers), to expand either of these two, they have the Geo Shape Tack Add-on Set, and for those who may wish for more excitement, they have the Figure Tack Game. My understanding is that the HABA version uses tacks that are more nail-like.

In the future, I'll try to get a picture up of the Hammer & Nails while in use. All of us has suffered some degree of illness during the last month, so photos of stuff in action have been harder to come by. Having school depends on whether or not Ella and I are well enough to go!

Classroom Changes

****Happy Birthday, Mum!****

That's the blog equivalent of when overwhelmed and overexcited folks get on television and wave at the camera saying, "Hello Mum!"

As per the title, I've done a lot of changing around in our room since I last posted photographs, so here's what our classroom looks like now:

As you can see, we've added quite a few new materials in various subjects. And, if you're doing Montessori at home, as am I, learn from my strategical errors: Don't put more than two new materials/subjects out at the same time! I made too many changes too quickly, and for a while Ella just wanted to bounce from one thing to the next because it was all so new and exciting. Now I know better. If you only change or add one thing at a time (or maybe two, depending on how long you have as "school hours" a day), that will give the child more time to explore each new thing, without trying hard to get to everything at the same time!

I don't have time to detail all the new items and their presentations tonight. Suffice it to say, I've got close-ups of all the new stuff and will be writing about their use (both in theory and in practice) in the near future.

If you have a particular subject/material that is relevant and you would like to hear more about that one as soon as possible, let me know, and I'll blog on it first. Here's a list of what's new:

• Kumon workbooks (arts and crafts/math/writing)
• Clock with movable arms (preliminary history/telling time)
• Knobbed Cylinders Blocks 1 & 2 (sensorial)
• Land, water, air presentation (preliminary physical geography)
• Hammering (practical life)
• Seasons puzzle (preliminary history/telling time/preliminary ecology/preliminary biology)
• "Mighty Mind" (mathematics/logic/geometry)
• Letter boxes (language arts/reading/writing/spelling)
• Library corner (language arts/interdisciplinary)

As you can see, there's lots of interesting stuff coming up. The only problem is, I barely know where to begin!

New Montessori Activities

I'm constantly adding and adapting the activities Ella does for school. Here's some of the newer stuff...

This is a practical-life activity. Essentially, she's learning to use tongs to transfer an item (in this case rocks!) from place to place. She soon figured out that she could get more if she sort of "scooped" up as many as she could before closing the tongs together.


This is a colour-sorting activity, which could fall in the category of "sensorial" or "finger dexterity."

For a long time Ella's favourite colour was blue (it's now green), and she still always begins with blue if green isn't an option.

I'm not 100% sure yet, but I suspect that my greatest challenge is going to be making mathematics fun and interesting. We've used the small number rods (pictures previously, but not in use), but in order for Ella to do it, I need to be completely with her, helping, showing, and creating games in order to keep her even semi-interested. Since until now that has been our only math-oriented activity, I've added my version of the spindle box. It was very easy to make. I got a few long, thin dowels and had Dad cut them into 5-inch lengths (45 spindles are needed for the activity), and sanded them. Then, using a "snap together" desk organiser that I got at the Dollarama ($1 for three parts, I needed ten, so I bought 4 - anyone need 2???), which didn't snap together very well! So I glued them together in two sets of five (easier to move, and takes less space), and using a thick permanent marker, I made the numbers 0 through 9 at the ends of each section. She's either not "up" to doing it on her own, or is not able to maintain interest in it on her own yet, though. So we're doing it as a game and we take turns putting the correct number of spindles in each section. I try to be sure that I alternate between doing the even and odd numbers.

She does really well until about 5 or 6, and then (quite honestly) I think she gets bored and doesn't bother really trying to do it correctly anymore. Math just doesn't have the fascination for her that other subjects seem to. I can't really blame her; neither of her parents were fond of math either!

WARNING - NUDITY AHEAD!!!

That is to say, our anatomy lesson - which (strangely enough, lol...) is anatomically correct! (To see the "nudity" you may have to look closely).

I got this anatomy layer-puzzle at one of my favourite toy stores, Hot Toads! (you can peek at my links, if you want to see other great stuff). I never have enough money when I go there. They are primarily an online store, but they do have a small store in Oromocto, New Brunswick, and the owner really knows his stuff. It's put out by Beleduc-Hape Toys.

This was an excellent activity. The bottom layer is the skeleton, then organs and systems, musculature, skin/nude, then dressed. As she did the puzzle, we talked about what the different parts were called and what they were for in a fairly informal manner. She did catch a lot, because I over heard her explaining to her grandmother that the skeleton was bones inside you and those are you "hard parts"!

Perhaps our favourite subject of all - geography! We're doing world continents. Ella adores maps and globes, and I've always like geography and cultural studies. I've made some "Antarctica" cards that we play with, and we're still planning an "Antarctic Expedition," which will take place in a snowy, barren location (maybe our back yard!). I had been hoping to do it tomorrow, but the weather might be against us. Freezing rain - yep, okay, they've got THAT in Antarctica, but by noon it's supposed to be just plain rain, and that will be wet and miserable. I need a cold day for it, not a wet one!

Ella had a surprise visitor - Nanie! Mum, being off from school (yea March Break!), came down to see Ella at her school, and to play. Every time Ella takes a piece out of the puzzle and lays it on its corresponding "shadow" above the written name of the continent, she'll say, "This is _____" (fill in the blank with whatever continent it is). She doesn't get them all right yet, but when she's stumped, she looks up at me and says, "I can't bemember this one!" and I'll tell her. She'll then repeat the name and continue. When re-assembling the puzzle, she also says each name.

She was so proud of herself - she got them all out, on the right shadows, and said all their names correctly when showing Nanie! Nanie (being a typical grandmother) was pretty proud too!

Run-of-the-Mill Schoolday, Part 2

Continuing our run-of-the-mill schoolday:

After using the sandpaper letter "t", we went on a "tuh" walk. Ella LOVES these walks! We go around looking for anything and everything we can find that begins with the sound "tuh." On this particular day, we found "toys," "toilet," "top," "time," and "turn" (when we "turned" a doorknob).

Then it was snack time. I used this also as a practical life activity. For obvious reason, there's no pictures of this! I had to be right with her all the time. First we got celery (Ella loves celery, she has strange tastes for a little girl, sometimes!) and Ella and I cleaned it in the sink, pulling each stalk apart and rubbing it with our fingers under running water. Then I showed her how to properly hold a knife for cutting, and how far away she had to keep her other hand. It was not without trepidation that I gave her the knife, but even though I stood right there, my hands on hers at first, and later right to the sides of hers, I was amazed at how well she did cutting up the celery. She would remove the ends first, and then effectively chop it up into little pieces. We got three little dishes, and she divided up the celery into them and then put some salad dressing into each for dipping. After taking one of the little dishes to Daddy, we enjoyed our own snack. After snack we did clean-up, and Ella did the washing all by herself!

Then it was gym time...

Now, this gym is NOT at our home... it's across the road at the church, which is where we've been doing our homeschooling. With our home being relatively small and full, and my husband being pastor, we've been very blessed to take advantage of incredible facilities.

God bless grandparents! Ella got this tricycle for Valentine's day, a little early though. She LOVES riding on her trike.

After some riding around, which was done to music (we often listen to CBC Radio 2 during school hours, this time we were enjoying Disc Drive) a particularly dance-worthy song came on, so she began to do her moves!

After all that dancing, I'm sure you wouldn't be surprised to find that Ella was tired, so we called school to an end and headed home.

My Montessori Classroom and Materials

EGAD!!! I haven't posted since 2006, which is very, very sad. So, I've changed the name and the focus of this blog, so that (hopefully) I will remember it exists.

I'm now homeschooling my pre-school daughter using the Montessori method, and I would like to use this as a pictoral and written account of this adventure.

Here is my homeschool classroom:


My daughter, now 3 1/2 is fascinated with geography. She just adores studying that map. We're now learning the location of the continents while doing a unit on Antarctica. Hopefully this will counteract the winter "blahs" that have been invading our household.


Here you can see my Montessori materials. Some I made, and some I bought.

Now for the detailed close-ups, plus how I use them...

Above, you can see the yellow knobless cylinders and my version of the colour tablets box #2. I bought both the cylinders and the colour tablets - although the box of colour tablets I bought was box #3. Rather than going to the expense of getting both box #2 and box #3 (box #1 would have been way too easy!), I have taken out a dark and a light tablet of every shade in box #3, so that she can match two differing shade of the same colour before sorting a range of shades.

This is our geography set-up. I bought the map of the world on e-Bay, and then traced and cut out each continent/piece on black bristol board and glued them onto a piece of cardstock onto which I had printed the name of the continent. The National Geographic "Our World" is a fantastic beginner atlas (Canadians, make sure you get the Updated Edition so that you get a two-page spread of Canada and its provinces, otherwise you'll just get the U.S. and its states!) - and the pictures are actually deliberately made to look like puzzle pieces (did they hear about Montessori???) and the "Antarctica" book is from Usborne. Soon we will have a little globe:

I've been painting (and painting and painting) this globe for her, and it looks so good. But I've come to hate South-East Asia and the Arctic - WAY too many TEENY-TINY islands!!!

My miserable failure of sandpaper letters. I went about it entirely the wrong way, and the only difference between the red and the sandpaper letters is the colour - the painted area is WAY too rough. Next time: I'll mount red bristol board on the wood and then mount the sandpaper letter on the bristol board. MUCH easier!

Practical Life activities: pouring rice and using a turkey baster to transfer water. She LOVES the turkey baster activity.

Dressing frames. I made them with "paint your own" photo frames and tea towels from the dollar store, a variety of buttons from Mum, some hook-and-eyes from I don't know where, pretty white upholstery tacks from the hardware store, and belts from a different dollar store. I have a few more in the making now.

Four little cups and a variety of buttons for a sorting activity. Note the oh-so-classy Cheez-Whiz bottle as a holder!

My number rods (small) in a tin. I nagged my father into cutting a square dowel into the right lengths for me, but I measured them in inches, rather than centimetres. Mostly for his sake (Dad refuses to use metric), but also so they would be a little larger than the classic small number rods.

A little peek into our phonetic "mystery bags." Letter, lion, and letter; Tambourine, train, and towel; Hat, heart, and horse.

Ahhh... the teacher's corner - the messiest spot in the room. What can I say??? I try!

Next time: pictures of activies in progress...