The beautiful weather that pops up every now and then lately gave us the chance to move our gym program outside. Getting the children active outdoors is a big part of their development, and it helps them to work with more focus and concentration when they return to the indoor environment. Plus, playing soccer is a lot of fun. Check out the video below.
Back indoors, some big work took place this week with the Reading Cards material we developed. These cards ask children to match adult animal names with the names of their young. It is a material for, usually, 3rd-year Casa students who already have a good grasp on reading. Reading is an essential skill for moving up to the Montessori Elementary program, so materials like this help children to continue to develop their skills while also giving them an introduction to work with zoology and classification that they will undertake once in Elementary. “Tiger and whelp, and turkey and poult,” are two of the interesting new discoveries one Casa North boy reported. Once students have laid out the cards as they see fit, they check against a control set that allows for self-correction.
Above, a child is using a Montessori Puzzle Map to learn the Canadian provinces. We often extend the materials in these ways, and doing so allows the children to experience both the sensorial aspect of the material as well as the added bonus of furthering their work on language development.
Another big language development material is the Story Alphabet. For children who know how to write, this material helps them to start to learn to write sentences. This skill is an essential part of the development of the whole child because it gives them a voice and is the beginnings of children learning to communicate their thoughts and opinions in more sophisticated ways. Other advantages of the material are the fact that it gives the children the chance to practice reading cursive, to see well formed cursive that they can strive to achieve, and can get straight to such practice by copying the sentences they create onto paper.