Montessori Mania

I'm going to go back through my photo archives and dedicate the next few weeks to posting about a variety of Montessori "tivities" that C and I did over the summer of 2009. She was right around 2 1/2 years old at the time of these activities. I am continually changing C's Montessori shelf, so I rotate through most of these activities routinely. I try to use regular, everyday household items to make most of my activities with an occasional run to Michaels or Jo-Ann's. I hope you're able to find some useful and educational information from these activities.

Styrofoam Shapes. . . Materials include a thick sheet of styrofoam (found at Michaels), toothpicks, and four different color markers. I used the markers to make dots on the styrofoam in the shape of a circle, square, triangle, and rectangle. Then I gave C a container of toothpicks and she poked one toothpick at a time into the dots to make each of the shapes. This gives her the opportunity to not only identify each shape (which she was already doing), but it helps her learn the pattern of actually making the shapes herself.

An extension of this activity would be to use different colored toothpicks to match to the shapes. I also let C make her own shapes using the toothpicks after she finished up. She had a blast with this "tivity."
Cereal box puzzles. . . Materials include the front of a large box of cereal (preferably something that your child likes to eat). C loves Rice Chex and Cheerios so that's what we used. I simply cut up the cover into three or four separate pieces and then C went to town putting them in the correct order. This develops a child's puzzle working skills using a simple straight cut shape. It's an easy way to teach them to match up colors and letters before moving on to more difficult puzzles with irregular shapes.
As you can see this took some time to master, but C stuck with it. Whatever cereal you use, I would recommend having one cover that's not cut up for your child to check his/her work against.

The mat in these pictures is C's "work" mat. She uses this whenever she is doing an activity to define her work space.