The first two weeks of November we learned about the 5 senses. This was so much fun and I finally got around to doing several Montessori activities that I had wanted to do for a while.
We started with touch. I'd seen the balloon matching game on several montessori blogs and it was a bit hit (I used salt, flour, popcorn, lentils and something else I can't remember :-). She could tell the difference just by looking so she liked to hide them under a diaper to make it trickier.
We also made a touch and feel city
and did a "paint in a bag" activity. I wanted her to just play around but she wasn't feeling inspired so I got out her sandpaper letters and asked her to copy some. She knows most of her letters by sound and a few by name but this was our first try making them herself and she did really well.
\I stuck to the easy ones like o, t, i and c (c turned out to be hard since she kept completely the circle and then getting frustrated it wasn't right so I would suggest leaving that out at the beginning) but I was impressed by how attentive she was to getting them right. We also made lots of shapes.
For sound we went on a sound hunt. We went to several rooms of the house and found all the sounds we could I had originally planned for her to draw a picture for each sound but she ended up wanting me to. I had a few in mind for each room but she surprised me and found more than I did - my favorite part was when she wanted me to draw Jonah in every room because apparently, he is noisy wherever we go!
We also played stop and go dancing. When the music was on, she would dance,
when it was off, she would stop.
This is one activity that Jonah was allowed to participate in, although she told me that it was okay if he kept moving when the music was off because he didn't understand the rules. She's so understanding :-)
For sight, I made a tray with household items.
Then she would cover her eyes while I'd hide one and then she'd have to remember what I took away. She did pretty well and insisted on playing later with Craig. She also liked to play with being the guesser but she'd always blurt out the answer before I had a chance to guess. Its similar to our attempts to play hide and go seek. She's great at seeking, not so good at hiding. That's probably a good thing at this age though.
I combined taste and smell for our last day. We did some smelly painting (adding a few drops of essential oil to her tempera paint) and then made popcorn.
The popcorn was a good chance to review all the senses since she felt it before we added it to the pan, she had to listen and tell me when it was done popping, she saw the difference between the popped and unpopped corn then we smelled it and ate it.
I love this picture because she is sorting out the pieces she can't eat because they look like animals and are therefore her friends!
The next two weeks was Thanksgiving. We didn't do that much since we were all sick but I did print out some Thanksgiving themed tangram sheets. I told her the basic Thanksgiving story while she worked on these. She had done tangram printables before but this was the first time without the colors to help her but she still did fine. Now that I know she can handle that, the options for tangrams sheet freebies are much wider so I'm excited. And once we do one or two, she normally starts making her own patterns and will end up playing with the "copy pieces" all morning. I love them! (And so does she, despite the grumpy face she insisted on putting up for the camera)
Later one, when we were feeling a bit better, she made a handprint turkey out of beans and corn. I think you can tell she did this one all by herself (for a picture of what it is "supposed" to look like, see here)
We also made thankful turkeys to decorate our table.
I would not recommend this activity with younger kids. Maybe it was our glue but even I had trouble getting my feathers in place. Okay, that sounds sad so lets go with the glue theory but it was a good chance to go over things for which we were thankful. At first, she just named whatever she could see - the lightbulbs, chairs, bananas - but eventually we got to some good ones like friends, family, snuggles and toys.
One day she asked to do school but I didn't feel good,so I made her a "turkey" sandwich. But this led to a big of a communication issue the next day when I was really sick and Craig made her lunch. She kept asking for a turkey sandwich and he kept saying they didn't have any turkey. Her attempts to tell him to make a turkey sandwich out of peanut butter and honey didn't make sense to him until a few days later when I made her another. If only he had downloaded the pictures!
One things I've learned is to not always make everything so theme-y. One of the activity suggestions was to make fall placemats. I loved the idea of placemats but instead of doing a seasonal one, we made these to help Lucy learn to set the table correctly. It doesn't really have anything to do with Thanksgiving but it was fun and useful.
I've also lessened the amount of themed books we read since I seemed to be settling for lesser quality because it worked with the theme and that was not my goal. I did get a couple books on the 5 senses and Thanksgiving but just a few which left us time to read The Little House and Tattercoats over and over and over again.
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