Montessori Monday

I'm putting this up Sunday eve - I've been having issues with Blogger's scheduling feature!

We worked only one afternoon last week.  I've been reminding myself that we do a lot of really great things together *outside* of our little classroom, like gardening and spending time outside - and that those count too!  What are some of your favorite "outside of the classroom" activities?

First up last week was tonging snakes into a jar, a fun lesson I saw over at The Adventures of Bear.  Short Pants really liked examining the snakes (he asked if we could do a snake lesson soon) and since they are curvy it was a bit of a challenge to get them into the jar:

I also set up a simple sifting lesson for him.  He used a little sifter to seperate rice and salt:

I had a bowl set out for him to pour the rice into, but that only lasted a few minutes.  Pretty soon Short Pants was pretending to cook "muffin pies."  Oh well - he had a lot of fun and there was even some more sifting done to boot:

We also worked with some "parts of a plant" cards that I made.  Short Pants identified the different parts on his puzzle while we talked about the functions of each part.  I haven't been very sure how much of the "parts of" stuff we've been doing has been sticking - but I got proof tonight that at least some of it is.  We were out in the garden weeding for a moment.  Short Pants pulled up one of the weeds and said, "Look, I can see the secondary roots."  and then "Hmm...I wonder if we can see any of the root caps."  :)

Sorry this pic isn't so great - it's almost impossible in the basement to photograph anything laminated without a lot of glare showing up:

Short Pants has been playing with his castle a lot lately (ok, nothing really unusual about that!) so I thought it would be fun to get out our 3-part castle cards from A Bit Of This and A Bit Of That:

We also played a fun fishing game.  I laid out several letter fish on the rug, then said a word and had  Short Pants "fish" for the correct ending sound.  He needs more practice on this.  Even though he is able to sound out many words, his "default" is to identify the beginning sound even when asked for the ending:

After that we got out a few phonics objects.  I wrote the names on slips of paper and then he matched them up to the correct object.  Each time he matched one up I also had him show me the ending, middle, and beginning sounds for some more practice seperating those:

Short Pants also got out his math manipulatives box and solved a few addition problems.  He's always so precise in how he wants to line the manipulatives up - I think there's some Montessori roots showing there!

If you did some Montessori lessons last week with your kiddo(s) age 3 and up, please link up below.  Please also make sure to either place the Montessori Monday button from the sidebar in your post or place a link back to this blog in your post.  If you don't do that then your readers will miss out on the great lessons listed by others!  Thanks for reading and participating!