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. 

First Great Lesson: Experiments on the Laws of the Universe

It’s that time of the year in our home wherein we're doing "The Great Lessons". Maria Montessori’s plan for the framework of elementary education is cosmic education and cosmic education is attained via telling the five great stories and followed by key lessons. These stories are typically told in the beginning of the Montessori school year for lower elementary and repeated ever year. This is our second year of the great lessons and I decided to document it so you can replicate it in your homes as well.

Montessori For Everyone has a beautiful summary of what The "Five Great Lessons" are all about. This post is all about the First Great Lesson: The Beginning, and we'll showcase the experiments to demonstrate the basic laws governing our universe.

How To Introduce Clocks to 3 Years Old

Vito has been playing with Mavi’s learning clock and pretending that he’s able to tell the time (he always says 8' o’clock), so I decided that it’s about time that I should introduce this very important tool in telling time. I remember doing this activity with Mavi back in 2012. In this post, you will see how Mavi and I worked from creating a paper plate clock to matching analog clock with its digital label.