back in the Montessori room

Yesterday was the first time we have made it into the Montessori room to work for heaven knows how long. As the room also serves as the spare bedroom we had to put the bed away and get out the equipment that had been put away too before we could even start to do some work. It then took quite a while for Ebi-kun to settle and do anything properly. He got out the brown stair for a while and then the magnetic sorting activity, whilst he was doing that I tried to prepare a new activity for the language shelf but of course he wanted to know what I was doing. So I presented the activity after his snack.

This uses words from the pink material set, as you can see my cards are on white not pink. I printed them out with the intention of sticking them to pink card and laminating but then I thought "what is the point?" I am only going to use them with Ebi-kun, I don't have any other students and don't intend to have any others. I understand the concept of the colour coding when working in a classroom environment or even at home when you have more than one child but with just one, is it really worth the extra time and cost? Let me know what you think.

Anyway... I put some of the cards and matching mini objects (after doing the swap we have plenty to play with now and I have mixed up the objects in the phonics pouches too). We placed the objects in a line, left to right on the mat and then he picked up a card and read out each letter (phonically) before trying to read the whole word. Since I had put objects all starting with different letters it was quite easy for him to guess from the initial sound even if he couldn't read the actual word.

finished

He decided he didn't want to do the exercise again so it went back onto the shelf, then he got the sound pouches out, he gets three at a time and three sandpaper letters (I choose these and put out letters I think he needs more practice with). He takes every object out and names it them mixes them up and sorts them with the sandpaper letters. Once he is done he put them back into the pouches. He really enjoyed doing this yesterday because there were 'new' objects in the pouches. I also have little letter writing practice books with the basket so he can practice writing too if he likes. 
Then he got the land form cards out - this surprised me but I left him to it. He first matched the form cards and then the photos that go with them and finally the name cards. Then he asked to draw his own, I had to help draw the actual form but he coloured them.
He did three all together so we have kept them with the cards so that when he has done all of them we can make it into a book. He labelled this one himself but I had to help with the longer words, since he starts off big and then runs out of space!