Science Project: How to Make an Erupting Volcano Model

We made this volcano to go along with our First Great Lesson: The Volcano and this is our first paper mache project at home.  I tell you, I tried to avoid these kinds of activities and projects because they are messy, and requires a lot of work.  But since it’s summer, I decided to try it and much to my surprise I enjoyed making this model more than the boys did.  This project was inspired by a post I read from Red Ted Art.  So read along and learn how we made our model as simple as possible for less work.

Montessori Inspired Life Cycle of a Green Bean Plant

This is a follow-up activity on our Montessori Inspired Parts of a Plant.

After learning about the parts of a plant, Vito and I talked about how plants grow.  We walked around the estate and identified baby plants, some of them were just actually sprouting off the ground and this amazed Vito.  We also read the book How A Seed Grows to go along with our activity, this is a really good book!  The book illustrates the different stages of a plant’s (bean plant) life, from the preparations to planting up to the the part where the grown plant needs to be moved into a ground soil.  We have a few of these Read and Find Out books and Mavi loves to use them as reference.  Anyway, aside from the book, I also used the very beautiful Life Cycle of a Green Bean Plant from Safari Toob and a homemade life cycle cards (this are now available in my shop, Early Childhood Life Cycle Mats).

Montessori Inspired Parts of a Plant

It always excites me to introduce new things to Vito.  Our recent activity is learning about plants, specifically in this post, the parts of a plant.  I love doing plant study with the boys.  I’ve been doing this with Mavi since he was 2 years old, and I love doing it all over again with Vito!  Printed materials used in the activities were all homemade, and some were used during Mavi’s preschool days.   This is Vito’s second year of plant study, and you can read related studies here:

• Introducing plants to toddlers
• Collection of botany lessons for preschoolers
• Bean seed study
• How plants grow

Building Words with the Moveable Alphabet and Objects

Vito is 43 months old.

I am so excited to share that we’ve finally started building words using our moveable alphabet!  I had fun working this with Mavi long time ago and I can’t believe I’m doing this again with Vito.  This is the part of Montessori language arts that I love the most, teaching kids how to read! In my previous post, I talked about how we are using objects and miniatures in learning about letter sounds which is essential in reading.