We're back on the Tot School wagon. Actually, we never really stopped, I just stopped posting about it. I've been taking a combined approach to Xavier's early education--Montessori meets Charlotte Mason for the most part. In layman's terms, self-directed progressive learning mixed in with lots of books and outdoor time.
I've been trying to make most of our Montessori materials. In addition to being much less expensive, most of the materials are easy and fun to make with a little bit of ingenuity. I find the suggestions in Elizabeth Hainstock's
Teaching Montessori in the Home very helpful in coming up with alternatives. I love looking at the "real" materials at
Kid Advance and other similar websites and figuring out how to make similar items from what we have available. Fortunately, my materials don't need to be quite as durable as those for a classroom of 10-20 kids.
I do find though that beauty in the materials themselves is very important. Xavier (and perhaps all kids his age) has a keen eye for asthetics and beautiful materials draw his attention unlike anything I've ever seen. Here's Xavier with a set of color tablets that I painted using some wooden blanks.
They are meant to be homemade versions of these. I'm fairly happy with they way they turned out.
I have introduced these to Xavier before but each time he got easily distracted or frustrated. Each time I put them away for a few weeks before trying again. I suspect if I had Montessori training, I'd have a more sophisticated assessment of his response but I figure if it isn't fun or educational, we just shouldn't do it for now. To my surprise this week he was fascinated by them. He quickly caught on to the names of the colors, the concept of matching and even making patterns with them. After about 15 minutes, he progressed to turning them into imaginary doors by saying, "Open, shut. I shut doors. I open doors!" While this sort of imaginative play might be frowned upon by Montessori purists, I couldn't help but smile. My boy has an exquisite imagination.
We later moved on to cutting paper. Xavier is getting more and more adept at puting his fingers and thumbs into the scissors and cutting little strips of paper.
This week I'll try to paint more tablets to be ready for when Xavier is ready to graduate to this activity.
