Sand tray

 

We dabbled with the sand tray last week.  Bubs really took to it well and has chosen it from the shelf consistently everyday.  Surprisingly he has only used it once for making pictures and there has been a minimal amount of sand on the floor.  Now....let's cross our fingers that it stays that way because Nito sits ever so closely to Bubs' table and watches rather intensely.  I occasionally hear "This is my work Nito NOOOOO!!"  Then I wait for the loud crashing sound of sand and the tray hitting the ground.  Yet to happen, but prepared nonetheless.

 

I started him on the sand tray to try to encourage his use of the good ole moveable alphabet.  Geez, he just doesn't like that thing.  (I guess you can't expect him to love every material.)  It has seemed to work though.  I thought maybe if he started writing out the letters then he would want to try to make words with the sounds.....well my thought was wrong.  At least for now, he just wants to make the letters in the sand.  I did just order him some language objects to create a phonetic box so I am hoping this will help.  Stay tuned for that post. 

 

In Montessori, the sand tray is used as a preparatory work for the child who has become interested in writing.  Now, Bubs did great writing his numbers straight from a chalkboard to paper.  However, he is struggling with the letters.  We also start with cursive in Montessori.  There is a great layout of the steps for the sand tray at Info Montessori.  She breaks it down and shows the progression from the sand tray to the chalkboard.  Then once the child is comfortable, he can move to writing on paper.

 

 

Yay, he made "cat".  Now he didn't want to put all of the sounds together, but at least it's a start. 

 

 

See the empty chair where Nito hovers?!?  During the photo, of course, he was asking to see the picture.

 

 

Then he just started pulling random letters from the sandpaper letters.  I was actually impressed at how well his letters came out.  It is quite different in sand versus on paper with a pencil. 

 

Moveable alphabet

Bubs has really been into his numbers lately, but I have also been trying to encourage the moveable alphabet material.  A friend of mine reminded me that he just might not be in a sensitive period for reading/writing right now, but I didn't want to believe it.  She mentioned a little game that I could play with him that might get him over that hump.  She suggested that I have him take one letter of the moveable alphabet and find that same sandpaper letter.  Then go around the house/classroom and find objects with that beginning sound.

Soooo that's what I did.  Bubs went over to the moveable alphabet and what letter did he choose first?? X. I couldn't believe it.  I was like "Oh dear.  How am I going to keep encouraging the fun of the moveable alphabet when he starts with a very tricky sound!"  So I played it off like any good ole teacher would and redirected him to b, b, b, bubs!!  Let's start with the beginning sound of your name.  Phew!  It totally worked and off we went searching for objects with the beginning sound of b.  At this point, my darling elementary child, Kui, was quite excited to be distracted from her letter she was writing (#shedoesnotlikegrammar).  She kept spelling words that started with b and giggling when Bubs walked past the objects.

 

 

As you can see he went a little crazy and chose quite a few letters.  It was great though.  He did it for a solid 30 minutes.  I am hoping he will continue to think it is fun so we can move on to some of those trickier sounds and eventually introduce phonograms (sh, ch, etc.)

World map

 

 

Bubs loves working with the continent boxes and that is really the only way I can get him interested in doing a map these days.  However, I enticed him to pull the world map out again by telling him that he would get to use his colored pencils!

He took out the world map and the plastic circle outline to trace the hemispheres.  He thought this was pretty cool because his favorite metal inset is the circle.  He said, "This is just a really big circle!"  (I was glad he was excited because he has been discouraged lately on some of the trickier metal insets.)  As you can see from the picture above, he chose to match each colored pencil to the correct continent.  He was quite perplexed when he couldn't use his white color pencil for Antarctica on the white paper.  I explained to him another way of tracing his map, but he insisted on doing it this way.  Baby steps I guess. 

Note:  For those of you not familiar with "the other way", I'll explain it.  The child can trace the hemispheres onto blue paper or simply color/paint them blue.  Then the child can trace the continents onto their respective colored paper.  (ie. Red for Europe)  Then he can cut it out and glue it onto the respective blue hemisphere.  Maybe one day he will want to do that and I will include a picture.
 

 

Don't mind the little baby hand in the photo.  He was quite excited to watch (and try to eat the colored pencils.)


 

 The finished world map is below.  Hmmm, looks pretty drab in this picture.  I might suggest to him "the other way" and see if he will go for it.  Nonetheless, we talked about each continent and I answered the questions, "Why are Antarctica and Asia on both sides?"  Great question!