South America in a Nutshell

If you have been following my blog, you know that we love studying geography!  This month, I am happy to share my South America in a Nutshell learning material.  And just like its predecessors (Asia in a Nutshell and Africa in a Nutshell), this is packed with lots of information about South America, its flora and fauna, culture and people.  Here’s a walkthrough of the learning material.

Montessori Multiplication Bead Board and Bars

To those who are interested, I recorded Mavi’s work a few weeks ago on Montessori multiplication using the bead board.  We do it occasionally for practice. Whenever he does the bead board, he followed this work with multiplication using the bead bars.  Please use the video below as your reference in case you wanted to try this at home.

Learning Music for Kids (with FREE Printable)

Welcome to another series of 12 Months of Montessori.  For this month, I am going to feature our Montessori-inspired activities in learning music.


Different Types of Music

Mavi loves learning about music. We often hear different genre in stores like classical, rap, hip hop and ballads. He would often ask me “why are some people making sad music Mom?”.  Therefore, I decided to introduce Mavi to the different types of music.  How music is used to express one’s feelings, how it is used to pray, to entertain and how it symbolizes one’s origins.

Sorting Musical Instruments

Yesterday, we started our Montessori-inspired activities for Music.  This is in preparation for our Montessori Music post this coming Friday, the 17th of July for 12 Months of Montessori Series.

Now, I just wanted to highlight this activity, of sorting musical instruments.  There are lots of instruments out there, but I think it is important for the child to identify the groups or families of these instruments to understand how they work.


The Helpful Garden has this amazing file of musical instruments!  It was created as a Montessori 3-part cards, but in our activity, we sorted them out according to their categories.  So I started off by presenting the instruments to Mavi and how these instruments make sounds.  (We also watched videos on how these instruments are being used)