Transferring Beans, and Rice.

For his work today, Professor #3 transferred kidney beans from a large bowl, to a medium size bowl, using a small pitcher. This activity was a combination of two activities from the book Teach Me To Do It Myself, by Maja Pitamic The first activity we did yesterday, transferring rice. This activity, with the beans, was meant to have the child pour the beans from one large pitcher to another. I don't have the style pitchers needed for the activity, so I decided to give him a small pitcher from a play set, and have him scoop the beans from a large sized bowl, into a medium sized bowl, then dump the medium bowl, back into the large bowl.

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Getting Started

Some of you might recognize this pitcher. Its from a Tupperware play set. 

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 Hard at work

Masha' Allah this was a fairly easy activity for him, and he enjoyed it alot, wanting to repeat it several times. 

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After he was done with this I put out the tray he worked on yesterday, transferring the rice from right to left. He groaned and said 'This is the spilling one!' He was not happy about wanting to do this, because he gets frustrated when the rice drops. I told him its ok, that's why we do this, so we can practice. He wasn't buying it an literally rolled his eyes when I told him I still wanted him to complete the activity. 

You can tell by the way he's sitting he's not interested. He was a good sport though, and we got through it. 

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I didn't have it in me to have the twins do separate work today. As I've said many times, by the end of the week, we are all tired and, the housework has usually grown long and I am eager to get to work on that. That being said I had them complete the rice and bean transferring trays as their morning work. They loved it, and Professor #3 was eager to try the bean transferring tray again. 

Here they all are working hard, Masha' Allah.

Baby Professor kept busy with a flip book 

He wasn't the happiest camper today either, probably because he spent most of nap time yesterday jumping up and down in his crib, instead of actually napping, Masha' Allah. Little quieter all around this afternoon ; )

Transferring Rice.

Alhumdullilah, today I decided that it was time for Professor #3 to start doing some dedicated Montessori work of his own with me, in separate lessons from his brothers. He has shown interest in doing work in general, by hanging out with his brothers as they do their lessons, Masha' Allah, and he often wanders out of the playroom looking for something to do, well before I would like him to. So, I pulled out one of my favorite Montessori books, Teach Me To Do It Myself, by Maja Pitamic, and looked up an easy first work for him. The first one she had listed, and the one we chose, was transferring rice.

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Getting Started

This activity is as simple as the picture looks. Fill one bowl half full with rice. Have the child transfer the rice from one bowl to the other using a spoon. I showed him how to complete the activity until he said he was ready to try it.

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Working hard

He got discouraged, and a little distracted when he spilled the rice. I reminded him that his focus was to transfer the rice from the pink bowl, to the white bowl, and not to worry about the spilled rice, that's what the tray is there for. He felt better about things, and continued on, Alhumdullilah.

Almost done!

Masha' Allah, he worked hard, and you could see the concentration on his face. He worked on this, with a few distractions, for about 15 min. which was great. When he had a little left he asked me if he could dump it to the white bowl. I let him go ahead, Masha' Allah, he had resisted doing it earlier, and listened when I said to use the spoon. Alhumdullilah, it was a great first lesson.

Sight Words Grab Bag Bingo

We have been bobbing around in many subject areas this preschool year in preparation for Kindergarten in the Fall insha' Allah. We do have a loose schedule of things to focus on, but the main direction has been guided by the Professors interest. After spending a few weeks on writing in sand, and writing their names, we are back to reading. They want to read and be read and to, and are constantly at the fridge with their alphabet magnets creating words, then sounding them out and reading them, Masha' Allah.  This last week we have been learning some new Pre-K Sight Words. I am staying away from rote memorization, until we have learned the majority of the words we can sound out and spell, insha' Allah. A printable on education.com popped up in my Twitter feed recently, and we got to work on our own version of it, all last week.

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Because Baby Professor and Professor #3 could not participate in this lesson, I set them up with some busy work. 

Flip Board Alphabet

Sorting and Filing Sandpaper letters. 

These were left out from our sand writing, and since Professor #3 can't get enough sorting and filing in with these Masha' Allah, I thought it would be fun for him to sort through them and find the matching upper and lower case letters, then file, file, file.  

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Sight Words Grab Bag Bingo

The game consists of 4 Bingo boards, matching pages of sight words for each board, and a few sheets of 'free space' pages.  You play the game you would any other Bingo game, however the Professors are not ready for this step yet, so we put a small twist on things. 

I went back to my Grab Bag Numbers game roots, and decided to play this a similar way. I went through each board and picked out the words I knew the twins could sound out and spell. I separated the words in to corresponding sandwich bags and labeled them 1, 2, 3, 4. 

 I had the Professors sit with me one at a time, and placed Board 1 in front of them to start. They opened the sandwich bag and placed the words inside the brown bag, and shook them up. I didn't tell them to close their eyes, but they did anyways, Masha' Allah. They grabbed a word out, and first thing was to try to find the match on the board, once they did that, they had to sound out, then read the word. 

The first day we played, I used each word in a sentence afterwards. Masha' Allah, they LOVED this, and quickly started making up their own sentences, and by the second day we played, they did the sentences automatically. 

Insha' Allah, this week we are going to take the game a step farther, and build our bingo sight words with our moveable alphabet, and I'll do a small, separate post on that later. We are also going to start checking out decoder, and easy/beginning reader books from the Library, to see the words in print. Fun! 

Sandwriting: Upper and Lower Case Letters

Last week we got back to work on our sand writing. When we left off, we had begun writing upper case, english language letters.

Last week we began including lower case letters, in sets of three Aa, Bb and Cc.

Professor #2's sets:

Professor #1's sets

Some lower case writing:

What they did while waiting their turn to write:

Baby Professor, and Professor #3, kept busy with their own work:

Masha' Allah it was a good session for all, Alhumdullilah. Insha' Allah, we  will continue building on our upper and lower case writing, three letter sets at a time, till we complete the english language manuscript alphabet. From there we will move on to Arabic. Insha' Allah we'll post another progress update after a while.