Reese... Tuesday/Wednesday

Rachel here. My original plan was to update the blog every Friday with what the girls were doing for Montessori, but we already had so much by today that the post would have been astronomical. Here is what we've been up to so far this week.

Grandma snuck this little number home with the girls on Saturday, and we love it! On one side of each block is a letter, and on the other is an object that starts with that letter. Reese had a ball finding the letter sounds she already knew and saying the sound and then the object. VERY CUTE!
This week's letters are "m" and "f." We've spent the last two days working on "m". Reese is doing a GREAT job with her letter sounds. I'm so excited! I can't wait until she really starts to get the hang of it, and we can start doing sound sorts. For art time we made a coffee filter moon (an idea I got from her spring art class). Dab it with a yellow bingo blotter and spray with some water in a squirt bottle, and it gives it a really cool effect. Reese stuck cute little star stickers around it to resemble the night sky.

She also worked on a super cute mermaid. I found the baby online somewhere... unsure where right off. I cut a little foam tail and hair out, and Reese added some buttons and voila.

The letter "Mm" sheet has macaroni and cheese pasta glued to it... under her art work is her "m" basket with her sandpaper letter.

Yesterday she worked on some pre-writing skills in her notebook. It cracks me up what you think kids can do, but I've realized you literally have to teach them how to do everything... it's amazing.

Instead of just putting materials on her shelves and seeing what she does with them, I'm starting to give her actual tasks to complete. Now that she's getting the hang of what we're doing, I'd really like to get more skills into our daily tasks. I pulled out her alphabet beads and typed up the alphabet for her. Her task was to string the alphabet in the correct order. It took her a while, and she attempted to give up twice, but I encouraged her as much as I could and gave her different strategies to find the matches. She completed it, did great, and was so proud of herself once completed.

She loves to cut, so I gave her some red and brown paper to cut for a project we'll be doing on Friday for the book "Cloudy with a Chance of Meatballs." Should be adorable!

I also FINALLY did the girls' laundry. After THREE weeks! The girls still had plenty of clothes, but Reese was nearly out of underpants and had pajama pants... but no tops. I purposefully left out their wash clothes and socks. I wanted to teach Reese how to fold the wash clothes. She was not all about it at first. She kept goofing off and doing it really messy. Once she saw that I was unfolding all the ones she was making messy, she decided to get serious about it and actually did a good job. That'll be a weekly (or monthly) activity for her shelves.

Same deal with the socks. She was being silly and making them into sock puppets, which was fine... but again when she realized I was going to make her try again for being sloppy she did a great job.

This was a last minute activity. Reese really wanted cookie goldfish for snack, so I made her earn them. :) She can count but has no concept for how many a certain number represents. I laid out numbers 1-10 and worked with her on placing the number of fish that matched the symbol.

She finally figured out what we were doing around 6. I would count as she put the fish under the number. When she reached the number, she moved on to the next. It was tough, but I know as we work on these things they'll get easier and easier, and she's not quite 3 yet... which I sometimes forget.

Separating word tiles by color.

This was her "m" word search. She told me she found them all, so I was checking over her work when I noticed not only did she blot the "m's" but also the "w's." I thought that was cute... wrong... but cute. She wanted more, so I grabbed another color and had her find the "a's" from last week.

I have some really fun (well I hope they're fun) tasks on her shelf for tomorrow. This is so exhausting. If she wasn't learning so much and we weren't having fun I may not have the energy to continue. So far though... this is so worth it. :)