A Montessori Afternoon

Most Wednesdays, which are half days, Ebi-kun gets home form yochien shattered and takes a long nap after lunch but yesterday he wasn't so tired so he had a bit of a nap, 30mins or so then asked if he could do some Montessori work. He started off by writing the hundred board, it is the first time he has tried this, once he got to 40 he said he was tired so I suggested he took a break and picked something else to work on.

 So he took out the pink tower and brown stair and did a couple of the extensions. Instead of just putting them away I suggested he place the pieces all over his bedroom except for the biggest, then starting with the biggest he could rebuild the tower/stair where it belongs but he had to go and find the right sized piece that went next and he could only bring one piece at a time. If, he got it wrong then all the wrong pieces were returned to the other room (he missed one of the pick cubes, so instead of just slipping the right cube into place, I got him to take all the cubes above that one back and redo it). He though it that was a fun game! After that he did a couple more rows on the hundred board.

 Then he got the red rods out and built the maze but tried to walk round it backwards, not that you can really tell that he is going backwards in the picture!

Then I used a suggestion of Annicles, we took out the geometric solids, I asked him to feel the shape and tell me whether he thought he would be able to roll it through the maze, he tried it with the various solids. When he had finished we looked through the cards that we have that have everyday objects that match the geometric solids and he sorted them into two piles, ones that would roll through the maze and ones that wouldn't.

After that he asked if we could make a triangular maze, he was getting frustrated because he couldn't get it started so I helped out with the first 5 rods and then let him finish it off. He decided the geometric solids were too big to roll through so he tried with marbles and some of the knob less cylinders.

After he had put all that away he returned to the hundred board and finished off, he was very proud of himself for doing it and wanted to leave it on the dining table to show daddy in the morning.

Then, this morning he really surprised me, he suddenly said "ten tens are one hundred" and then he went on with nine tens are ninety and did the rest down to one ten, skip counting but backwards and we haven't really done any skip counting yet. I asked him how he knew that and he said it was his computer in his head LOL.