Montessori

100 ways to home educate – guest post Tammie Griffiths from Aspire Chaos to Calm

16th February 2017 by Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

As yesterday’s blog on different ways to home educate was on fb, I’m reposting it here (with explicit permission!) so that it can be easily found as part of the blog hop 🙂 You can find Tammie on facebook or twitter

My article is in the comments 😉via Ripl.com

Posted by Aspire-Chaos to Calm-Connecting & Reconnecting Families on Tuesday, 14 February 2017

It was when i was carrying my eldest E almost 13 years ago that i started researching education options, i didn’t know about HE then but it didn’t take me long to stumble across it after looking at private schools, Waldorf/Steiner, Montessori, progressive schools and all the rest in between. I knew straight away that that would be the path for us.

What style/philosophy do we follow? Well it has been a bit of a mix, starting with Waldorf/Steiner with my eldest, she didn’t show any signs of wanting to do any formal learning, although well ahead in her speech and comprehension she just had no interest in the more formal stuff, preferring to play, do art, go to classes and socialise (insert a snigger here)

At 7 we introduce formal learning and even then I was up against her battle to not want to do it. It was tough for me to take a step back and trust that it would work out but it did. As she got older we started adding in maths and English as part of a structure (for me more than her) E went to Explore Learning (the tutor centre) for a time and she did well there.

When E was 6 i had K a whole different character, as she grew and developed her own way it became clear that she preferred to learn at a younger age and the Montessori method worked well for her and still does, in some way she has been easy, or is that i have just become more experienced? Probably that.

As time has gone we have got far more structured in our approach, most likely due to me becoming self employed, i feel i need to establish some kind of routine but also K has always needed much more of a routine than E ever did. And that is what i love about HE, that fact that i can tailor the educational style to the child is great! It makes it far more enjoyable for everyone. We still stick with structure in English and maths and the rest of the time being child led, i remember one time E focussing on a Tudor project for 2 YEARS!!!!! Yes 2 years……..what we don’t know about Henry the viii…hahaha.

It is great for them to follow their passion something they would not necessarily have the opportunity to do in school, they are heavily focussed on their swimming and drama and i love them having the opportunity to do these things alongside voluntary work and HE meets.

E now attends Inter High, an online high school which she enrolled in back in September, it seems to be going well, we hope that this will benefit her in working towards some kind of iGCSE or equivalent, She is off to do PGL with them this year too. This gives me more time to focus on K now she turns 7 this year, i can see where her strengths/weaknesses lay.

I also host Aspire an HE meet for families in our borough, that has brought about some great connections with families and some firm friendships made….for more info on any of the things we do please do get in touch, however you choose to HE, no one can tell you it’s your journey.

Today’s post is with Nevine and her purple sheep and tomorrow we’ll be visiting Lydia at a new adventure

Find the rest of the posts here. And if you’d like to join in, drop me an email

Montessori moments with the movable alphabet

9th October 2014 by Jax Blunt 4 Comments

We got another part of our new Montessori equipment out this week. This time it was the movable alphabet. (We have the red and blue version of this Small Movable Alphabet Letters from Amazing Child Montessori on Amazon.

The movable alphabet is used as part of the Montessori techniques for teaching reading and writing. Its use would usually come after the sandpaper letters which is how letter sounds are taught to begin with. Smallest has skipped that stage by using Reading Eggs and Alphablocks online. However, I want to reinforce her concrete understanding rather than it all being completely abstract, so I thought that the movable alphabet might go down quite well.

I was right.

The first stage in using the material is to have concrete items that are phonetically spelt – so I found a toy cup, a toy tin and a pot. For each one I asked her what it was, and then if she could hear any sounds she knew in the word. (It’s important to note that using this material comes before reading. In Montessori development, children often write before they read, and using the alphabet is a shortcut to that.)

Smallest identified the sounds sequentially, which I thought was interesting. When I worked in the children’s room in Yorkshire, children would often hear the vowel sound first, and struggle most with the end sound. It doesn’t really matter how a child decodes the word though, it’s just important that they do.

It also doesn’t particularly matter if they muddle up c and k to begin with. Or use an upside n for a u. This isn’t about spelling everything perfectly first time, it’s about hearing the sounds, building the words and (eventually) reading them back.

When she’d spelled out her words, I suggested she might want to write them out. (She’s using a STABILO EASYgraph Left-handed pencil in case you’re wondering.) It turned out she didn’t want to copy them, she wanted to draw around them. Which is fine too.

I can see that this activity, along with all the other reading activities she’s already doing, should help everything to come together to make reading and writing become a natural activity for her. She really enjoys working with the various materials, and it helps that they are all new and special to her 😉 I’m hopeful that I can get her writing alongside her reading, and maybe with a rather better pencil grip than the one Small still has.

If you’ve enjoyed this Montessori post, you might like others in this series.

Montessori moments – paper cutting.

30th September 2014 by Jax Blunt 2 Comments

One of the many strengths of Montessori is its focus on practical activities, introduced using real tools appropriate to the task at hand. If you’ve small children you’ve no doubt encountered their fascination with scissors – the Montessori approach is to demonstrate how to handle and carry them safely.

It’s very easy to do in fact. Take strips of paper, around 1 to 2 centimetres width. Hold up a strip of paper in the hand without the scissors. Hold the scissors appropriately in your other hand, and demonstrate opening and closing them. Then start to cut small pieces off the strip of paper.

You will rapidly find that you have a child competent with using scissors, and a large pile of small pieces of paper 😉

Staedtler Noris club small left handed scissors

We do this over a tray, and then the paper can be tipped straight into the recycling. I’d also recommend using paper for recycling to make your strips with – quite satisfying chopping up junk mail! Another good tip is to have good scissors – and awful lot of scissors sold for children’s use are very poor and don’t cut well. I popped into our local small stationery shop (and had a nice chat with the assistant cub leader who runs it) and picked up Staedtler Noris club small left handed scissors for Smallest, and the ordinary Staedtler Noris Club Small Hobby Kids Scissors for Tigerboy. Conveniently the two pairs have different coloured handles so they are easily told apart, although when I tested them, I found I can cut left or right handed with either pair.

Smallest was utterly thrilled. Being left handed isn’t a huge deal for her, but the cheap scissors we already had didn’t work well for her, these were absolutely great. Like I say, big pile of bits of paper, happy child. Tigerboy obviously needed *very* close supervision, but physically he’s just as capable as Smallest, and whatever she wants to do, he wants to do, so I was happy to let him have a go. Unlike a traditional Montessori classroom though, I won’t be leaving these out for him to get his hands on at any time 😉

Picture to be added tomorrow. If you’re interested in our Montessori activities, check out the previous posts.

Getting hands on with Montessori education

23rd September 2014 by Jax Blunt 5 Comments

So, last week I took delivery of a very large box of Montessori materials from the lovely Anne-Marie from Child Led Chaos. And this week I started to get the resources out.

The first one out of the box was the Trinomial Cube (amazon), for no other reason than both Big and I adore it. Turns out that that is catching, as Smallest has spent hours with it already. As it contains the binomial cube, you can start by presenting that (some hints on trinomial presentation here here although that’s not quite how I do it), so I did, and it took her just two days to get the hang of that. (Not all of two days. Although I would guess she probably spent a good couple of hours on it, having me present it over and over, and trying a variety of ways to get it to fit before she cracked it.)

As soon as she’d got the hang of the binomial, she wanted to do the big cube. So we had a few goes at that.

I foresee many more hours with that one 🙂

And before all this had started, of course we had to clean down the table after breakfast, and sweep the kitchen floor so that it’s clean for the mat to be rolled out. Lots of incidental good habits in Montessori practices. After only a couple of days of it, she already rolls the mat up and puts it away without being reminded.

Tigerboy is loving all the new stuff as well. He’s spent a lot of time with the Latches Board (amazon) although oddly I don’t seem to have any pictures of him with that. But his real favourite is the Tower! (always with a !) which in this case is a not pink tower. It isn’t a classic montessori version of this, being natural, and nesting, rather than being solid blocks. This does make it more complicated to work with, as it’s possible to hide a block as you’re building the tower. He doesn’t seem to mind.

This is just the tip of the iceberg in terms of materials, but already, just a couple of days into use, I can see that both the little ones are responding so well to having the montessori influence brought into the home. It gives me a structure as well, which is good, and I’m really looking forward to reorganising the living room, so that we can have shelving with the materials available for easy access. For the time being, I’m getting them out early on a morning and putting them on the kitchen table, which means the children have to ask me for them, not ideal, but a lot better than having Tigerboy disappear with an important part!

If you’d like to read more about montessori, try our homemade spindle box or a post about Montessori methods and the materials

how to make a spindle box at home – cheap Montessori materials

14th July 2014 by Jax Blunt Leave a Comment

So, last week I wrote about the Montessori method and materials. I recommended a couple of books – I’ve now found Montessori’s Own Handbook (kindle) for just 36p. I can’t resist that myself quite frankly!

I also talked about making my own version of a spindle box. (The spindle box is discussed in Discovery of the Child.) Today I actually made it.

The materials – a file box, 5 toilet rolls, double sided sticky tape (Blue Peter eat your heart out) and stickers. You’ll probably need scissors and a pen too. (I did.)

I took the hinge thing out of the file box, and cut the toilet rolls in half, giving me 10 half rolls to use as compartments.

There are three pieces of double sided sticky tape running across the box, waiting for the toilet roll compartments.

First of all, I stuck the toilet roll halves together, figuring that this would stabilise the construction.

All ten in a row.

Now with the compartments stuck together and stuck down, it’s starting to look like a spindle box should. Just needs the numbers.

And here they are. Zero to five, written in and stuck down.

Ready and waiting for a child to interact.

With spindles. Every bought box I’ve seen has been beautiful wood with pleasing identical wooden spindles. My box is using craft and recycled lolly sticks. I actually rather like the effect. (You provide exactly 45 – if the child goes wrong somewhere along the way they will either run out or have spindles left over. That’s the self correcting aspect of the box. Of course, they could make two mistakes that cancel each other out, but this is less likely.)

The spindle box is used to link concrete numbers of items with the abstract numbers, and reinforce the nothingness of 0. You can find the lesson in Shu-Chen Jenny Yen online montessori albums here. We’ve already had one good run through with Smallest (although we weren’t sat in a good position for me to take pictures) and it led to an excellent discussion of zero. I’ll also make a zero game (again) which is just slips of paper with numbers written on, kept in a basket or box. Then you take it in turns to pull out a number, and perform an action, like clapping, according to your number. If you get 0, that means no claps.

It’s more fun that it sounds, and can be quite hilarious 🙂 Good article about the zero lesson on Muddlepuddle here.

Montessori

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