Tag: Early Years
Making friends
Easter is a time for family where we’re concerned, and today was family lunch round at Tim’s brother’s. 14 of us round the table, and there were hours of chatting, eating and drinking. And time to make friends. Tigerboy loves animals. He’s very good with them, neither too grabby or nervous. This is him taking…
Interested in (home) education? 7 authors you should read.
1) John Holt. Despite (because of?) his experiences as a teacher and lecturer, John Holt became the leading spokesman for the home schooling movement in the US, publishing a magazine called Growing without Schooling for parents teaching their children at home. It was his books, How Children Learn and How Children Fail that first introduced…
Imaginative outdoor play – the nowhere box (again)
The smaller children have discovered animal crossing and the Wii. I’m sure they are getting a lot out of this. Particularly in that they play with Small, which is lovely to see. However, the weather is improving, and they all love being outdoors. None of us are good with long dark days, and the return…
Charity shop resources: Usborne I can crayon.
In my perennial search for educational resources, I haunt charity shops. And I struck lucky with a copy of Usborne’s I can crayon the other day. So far it’s given us two days of art activities, which means cutting, sticking, colouring and drawing. All sorts of wonderful early year activities 😉 There’s a tiny bit…
Christmas present
I saw someone on twitter earlier say that people don’t need to blog today, because it’s Christmas and all. I’d noticed 😉 But before I blogged for all sorts of other reasons, I blogged to record family memories, and Christmas is a memory that’s kind of important. So if you don’t mind, I *am* going…
Who's that pokemon?
I don’t really get pokemon. But Small, Smallest and Tigerboy are fans, and watch it interminably. They also play various games on DS and Small does pokemon based art on the computer. He’s even setting up a fan site, which I would link to but I can’t find. (Must talk to him about search engines…
Montessori moments with the movable alphabet
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…
Montessori moments – paper cutting.
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…
Getting hands on with Montessori education
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.…
How to use Reading Eggs to help your child learn to read.
At the weekend, I posted a picture that I’m incredibly proud of, so I’m going to take this opportunity to share it again. This is Smallest. She’s 5 in November. She hasn’t started school – we home educate. And she’s reading her first book. We don’t do school at home. No formal sit down lessons.…
