Bottle hide-and-seek for readers and toddlers

I made a special toy for Alex who only started reading this year. I collected nine small objects, making sure that Alex would be able to read their names. Some are from the pink series and some from the blue. Alex has to read the first word on the laminated cards attached to the bottle and find the corresponding objects inside the bottle by shaking the lentils around.

I am preparing a toddler version of this: I took photos of the objects I had picked for the bottle, printed and laminated then. They are ready to go, I just need to find an empty bottle!

A busy morning



Playing the Ghost Game



Exploring designs and patterns with the pink tower

 

Finding pairs of objects by touch

 

Completing a puzzle blindfolded



Montessori Insets for Design



A special request for this Christmas peg activity



Painting rocks

Today I showed Leo, almost 3, how to mix colours. As he had never done it before, I let him choose pairs of colours from the six different ready mix paint bottles we had. He mixed black and white, red and blue, and red and yellow. With his homemade grey, purple and orange, he painted rocks of different shapes and textures.

 As it was very windy today and we were outside, the paint was drying almost instantly and changing to a much lighter shade. Leo didn't like that and so he kept on dipping the drying rocks into a bucket full of water that was next to him, noticing that his wet paint looked brighter and more vivid than his dry paint.

Colours, textures and experimentation were definitely the focus of this fun activity.

Handmade Colour tablets

Montessori colour tablets are used to teach children the names of colours and refine their visual sense. Box 1 teaches the primary colours, Box 2 teaches primary, secondary colours, pink, brown, black, white and grey. Box 3 has shades of the above 9 colours except for black and white. The child has to arrange the shades in order.

We made a Box 1 set some time ago. We bought a wooden strip of wood the same width we wanted the tablets to be, cut them to length and sanded them well. Then we put sellotape onto the sides and painted over both sides with acrylic primary paints. We had to apply several coats to make sure the colour was absolutely opaque and even. We painted two red, two yellow and two blue to make the Montessori Colour Box 1. I made a little origami paper box to contain them but it turned out to be too weak and it broke as soon as a child used the tablets.



Toddler activity

This is a work I put up almost a year ago and never talked about on here. I bought in Ikea a set of child size cutlery that came with a sorting tray for about £5. It has aluminium blunt knifes, forks, soup spoons and tea spoons. For this activity I simply offered Carla (23 months) the empty tray and the cutlery mixed in a pot. I deliberately omitted the tea spoons as they were too similar to the soup spoons for Carla's stage. You cannot see it in the photo but I had glued shapes of the different items cut out of dark paper at the bottom of each compartment for an easy start.