Update

It is the first week of the second term. After a very busy two weeks' "holiday", which included a climbing trip away, work for the kids' climbing club, a visit from one of my lovely nieces and none of the gardening I had planned, I am enjoying getting back into our "school" routine. It's been raining all week, one of those weeks when I truly appreciate the homeschool lifestyle: it's so much nicer to be snuggled up on the couch reading together than having to go out to school and to work.

We are continuing much as before. Tessa found the quantity of independent reading she was doing in the first term onerous so she is rejoining Josiah and me for history work rather than continuing on her own, and may do the same for language.

I suspect I am clinging to my language plan in the face of evidence that it is not working well for Tessa. We are reading through R L Trask's Penguin Guide to Punctuation, an outstanding resource. The explanations are clear and detailed, with lots of examples throughout. But Tessa wants to be doing. She would rather do punctuation activities than read about punctuation. I have been creating a language worksheet for the kids every week to enable them to practice what we have read about, but Tessa is unimpressed. I've had another look at the Montessori Research and Development Punctuation manual and will make use of some of those activities but they only cover a few uses of punctuation. Over the holidays, I purchased Rod and Staff's Grade 6 English textbook, Progressing with Courage from the Building Christian English Series, which is recommended in The Well-Trained Mind. It looks good. Maybe I should give Tessa the choice to finish the Penguin Guide to Punctuation now and then move on to Progressing with Courage, or leave the Penguin Guide to Punctuation till she is older and start on Progressing with Courage immediately.

The indoor climbing competition season is just getting underway and will keep us very busy for the next two terms, attending out-of-town competitions, helping to run a competition at our home gym, and the kids training hard. I have never yet succeeded in keeping basic routines going when life gets really busy or when I get sick. I have this hope that Josiah and Tessa will carry on tidying their bedrooms and doing their daily chores when I don't manage to check up on them. But sadly they are happy to suspend normal practice at the first hint that I am doing so. I am trying to simplify my expectations of the kids so that even in busy times it will be easy for me to ensure that the basics get done. I don't mean that I am cutting back on my expectations, just that I am organising them differently to make them easier to check:

1. Morning routine: tidy bedroom (not entirely - just check for clothes, dishes and rubbish); clear the work table in the living room. Must be done by 11am.


2. Chores and whiteboard. Must be done by 9pm. The whiteboard is stuck on our fridge and is where I note any extra tasks the kids need to do, e.g. if I notice they have left something outside, rather than interrupt whatever they are doing to insist it be dealth with right away, I just write it on the whiteboard.


3. Weekly task list of independent school work. I need to work out an appropriate deadline for this and negotiate the consequences of failing to meet the deadline. Some weekends, Josiah has still had half his independent work to do and has only done it at all because I've nagged him all weekend. The last week of term, neither Josiah nor Tessa did all their independent work.

Another expectation we have of Josiah and Tessa is that they leave the kitchen and dining table clean after they make themselves a snack. Sometimes they clean up without being reminded but often they wander off leaving a mess or do half the job. It's a hard one to police because often I don't notice the mess till a considerable period after the event, and often there is conflict about who is responsible. It's impressive how strenuously each will deny the possibility that they could be responsible for crumbs or spilt milk on the kitchen bench.

Montessori Printables

Websites with Montessori printables for download

Montessori Materials

Livable Learning

Montessori Material Makers

My Montessori printables

Fraction circles

Fraction circles: whole to sixths

Fraction circles: sevenths to twelfths

Print onto coloured card and cut out.

Grid paper in Montessori hierarchical colours

Grid paper in Montessori hierarchical colours

This is a grid, colour-coded in the Montessori hierarchical colours, for children to record addition, multiplication, subtraction and division calculations on.

Montessori decimal fraction board

Decimal fraction board - file 1

Decimal fraction board - file 2

To make the decimal fraction board, print both files onto card. Cut the right hand margin from the first file. Glue the files together so that the right hand edge of the first file lines up with the left hand border of the table on the second file. Laminate.

A variation on the Montessori decimal checker board

A variation on the Montessori decimal checker board

This is a miniature, more abstract version of the Montessori decimal checker board. By the time I introduced multiplication of decimals to my son, he was moving very quickly from the concrete to the abstract on new maths concepts. I did not want to spend a lot of time making a decimal checker board for him to use maybe twice, so I made this quicker variation.

How to use

Please note: these instructions will only make sense to people familiar with the Montessori decimal checker board. To learn about how decimal numbers are taught in the Montessori curriculum, see a Montessori manual such as Montessori Research and Development's Decimal Manual.

1. Write the multiplicand horizontally along the centre of the checker board and write the multiplier vertically down the centre of the checker board (or vice versa).


2. Work out the product in each square of the checker board as you do when using the basic checker board: one row at a time, always starting at the right and moving to the left. Write each product in its square.


3. Just as with the basic checker board, any product greater than nine needs to be rearranged: the tens removed and one unit for every ten placed in the square to the left. Obviously digits written in pencil can't be “removed” and “placed” as straightforwardly as bead bars can. The best way to get around this will depend on the individual child. The rearranged forms of the products could be worked out on a fresh copy of the decimal checker board, with the child referring back to the initial copy each step of the way.
   
   
   
   Or the products could be erased one at a time and rewritten in their rearranged forms. Or, as my son chose, the products could be written in their rearranged forms initially.


4. Finally, just as with the basic checker board, all the tens need to be swept together and added up, all the ones swept together and added up, all the tenths swept together and added up, and so on. In my decimal checker board, the row above the centre line is the base row. Squares above that row should be swept diagonally down and to the left; squares below the base line should be swept diagonally up and to the right. Of course once again figures written in pencil cannot be “swept” as easily as bead bars can. My son did the addition in his head, writing the result at the bottom of the page one digit at a time. Some children may wish to write the addition problem out on a sheet of grid paper to work out. Or the decimal checker board could be cut into rows, the rows realigned and then added together.

The prerequisites for this work are the same as for the Montessori decimal checker board: the child needs to be comfortable with addition and subtraction of decimal numbers and multiplication of decimal numbers by whole numbers, and needs to have had an introduction to multiplication of decimal numbers by decimal numbers to the extent that they have worked out:

0.1 x 0.1
0.1 x 0.01
0.1 x 0.001
0.1 x 0.0001

0.01 x 0.1
0.01 x 0.01
0.01 x 0.001
0.01 x 0.0001

0.001 x 0.1
0.001 x 0.01
0.001 x 0.001
0.001 x 0.0001

In fact, some children may enjoy filling out a blank copy of my variation of the decimal checker board before beginning work with it.

Some children may appreciate the extra cues that would be provided by a colour-coded decimal checker board in Montessori hierarchical colours. An editable version of my decimal checker board is available for anyone who would like to add colours. If you make a coloured version and would like to share it with others, please leave a comment; I am happy to host or link to a coloured version.

Montessori Manuals

Manuals for ages 3-6

Discovery of the Child - Maria Montessori.

The Montessori Method - Maria Montessori.

Teaching Montessori in the Home: the Preschool Years - Elizabeth Hainstock.

Basic Montessori: Learning Activities for Under-fives - David Gettman.

Shu-Chen Jenny Yen's online Montessori albums.

Don Jenning's online Montessori albums at the Montessori Teachers Collective.

Montessori World Educational Institute online Montessori albums.

InfoMontessori's online Montessori albums.

Manuals for ages 6-12

The Advanced Montessori Method volume II (also called The Elementary Materials) - Maria Montessori.

Teaching Montessori in the Home: the School Years - Elizabeth Hainstock.

Don Jenning's online Montessori albums at the Montessori Teachers Collective.

Division by a 2-or-3-Digit Divisor: a Montessori-Style Teaching Manual - Lisia Grocott.

Montessori Research and Development Montessori manuals available for purchase. I recommend the Montessori Research and Development manuals reservedly. Montessori homeschooling with my children, I have used the Decimals, Fractions, Maths, Geometry and Language manuals for 9-12. Both children have thoroughly enjoyed the maths and geometry activities. I do not believe there is a better programme available, Montessori or other, for teaching elementary maths. However, the Montessori Research and Development manuals I purchased in about 2003 are riddled with errors. Many of the activities are explained poorly and required modifying before I could present them to my children.

What is Montessori?

The prepared environment and the role of the teacher

In my opinion, the prepared environment is the base of a Montessori education. It is through the environment that the adult helper attempts to meet each child's individual, changing needs. The environment is clean, orderly and attractive. To begin with, the adult entices the child to work, through presenting and re-presenting a variety of activities, waiting patiently for the day when one of the activities will “call” to the child, and the child's concentration will be caught.

When that happens, the adult must quietly step back. The adult's role now is to protect that fragile concentration from interruption, for in the early stages, if it is broken, days or even one or two weeks might pass before the child's concentration is caught again. Even a friendly “How are things going?” or an awareness of being observed might be enough to shatter the child's concentration.

The child begins to make choices based not on surface appeal and whatever catches their eye but based on a deep inner desire to explore certain activities. The adult's role is to observe and consider, changing the environment and making new presentations and re-presentations based on the child's needs. The child will not be in this perfect state of knowing his or her own needs all the time; sometimes children will be slaves to whims. The adult must learn to distinguish between indiscriminate choices and the choices that stem from a genuine inner need.

Trust the child

I think the hardest task of a Montessori teacher or parent is to trust that children will educate themselves if allowed to follow their own interests as described above. According to Maria Montessori, there should be no compulsion. Children are invited and enticed to work, not coerced.

Respect

Closely tied to trust in the child is a great respect for the child. Not only are children treated with respect in all interactions, but their concentration is also respected. Adults do not interrupt a child who is absorbed in work, and children are taught to avoid doing so too.

Children's ability to care for themselves and the environment is respected. It has been observed that children derive enjoyment and a sense of pride and self worth from being able to look after themselves and their environment. To that end, presentations of practical life activities are made and children are premitted to do as much for themselves as they are capable of and as they want to.

The principle of respect encompasses every aspect of a Montessori environment. As well as respect between people, there is also respect for the things in the environment and for everything in the wider environment of the world. The Montessori materials are treated with care.

"Help me to help myself"

It is acknowledged that help can be a hindrance: when a child is capable, but only just, of doing up the buttons on a jacket and is trying hard to do so, it would be quickest to take over and do the task oneself, but that is not what the child wants, nor is it actually helpful to the child.

If a child completes a task or activity, ignorant of some sort of error, the child is not corrected. Instead the adult makes a note to re-present that activity at a later time.

The materials

Maria Montessori created a set of apparatus from which children can discover for themselves, and then practise, many different concepts. Even complicated mathematical concepts such as calculating cube roots are presented concretely with physical apparatus so that through seeing and building for themselves, children can reach their own understanding of each concept.

Blog Admin

If you visited my old website, you will probably want to ignore the next three posts. My old website ceased to exist a while ago when the ISP that was hosting it free of charge underwent restructuring. I have decided to post the articles I had on the website here on this blog and link to them in the sidebar so that visitors new to Montessori homeschooling can find them easily at any time.

In the sidebar will be links to:

• What is Montessori?


• Getting Started Montessori Homeschooling


• Montessori Manuals


• Montessori Homeschooling Photo Album


• Montessori Bells Online


• Montessori Printables

Catch Up

Josiah is enjoying maths. To combat boredom a few days ago, he decided to work out the surface area of a regular square-based pyramid of height 7.5cm and width across the base 5cm. He does this sort of thing from time to time; he whiled away part of the three hour ferry trip from Wellington to Picton at the start of our summer holiday with calculating the prime factors of 4444.

Our "free choice" days are proving a hit although they are a little chaotic with both kids wanting my attention at the same time, and with other activities interfering because our weeks have been busy. Josiah is spending most of each free choice day working on a science fair project, studying how much prey spiders catch in their webs. Tessa, with her free choice days, has started a blog and learned to crochet, among other things.

Tessa is enjoying working more independently. To begin with she took notes of all her independent work, but she found that tiring and is now taking some notes and meeting with me to discuss the rest, so that I get feedback on her learning.

I am very impressed with Real Science-4-Kids Chemistry II. I wish there was a Real Science-4-Kids Physics II.

Planning

Just discovered I forgot to post this after I wrote it at the end of January ...

I did some school planning yesterday, working out a loose timetable and list of weekly activities. It all looks much more manageable and appealing than the workload we set ourselves last year; I am beginning to look forward to getting started. We are continuing with many of the resources we used last year but will be working with new science material: Real Science-4-Kids Chemistry Level II.

At homeschool camp last year, listening to other mums talk about how their families homeschool, I began to wonder if Tessa would like to do more of her work independently of Josiah and me, maybe in her bedroom. Just before the end of the school year, I asked her what she thought of the idea and she leapt at the opportunity to try it out. The trial went well and she is enthusiastic about working on her own this year. We will still do a daily literature read-aloud together - the three of us - and we will do French practice together (game of Fish), and seeing as both children are doing the same science course, we will do the science experiments together. As before, I will present Tessa a new maths lesson each week. For the rest, she and I have drawn up a weekly task list and she will work through the items on her own.

It means a change in the way I observe and check on Tessa's learning. Reading is an element of several of the subjects we study: History (The Kingfisher History Encyclopedia); Language (currently Penguin Guide to Punctuation); French (Hugo in 3 Months - French); Science; Bible. In the past, I have read aloud to the children and have seen and heard them taking in and processing the new information. Now that Tessa will be doing the reading on her own, she is going to take notes as she reads, for her benefit and mine.

Free Choice Days

Today, Tessa wanted to brainstorm with me ideas for her Free Choice Days (one "school" day a week). This is what we have come up with so far:

• Music lessons (of the teach-yourself-from-a-book-or-DVD variety) - piano / guitar / recorder / ukulele / singing.


• A patch of garden.


• Science fair project.


• Sewing, knitting, crochet, etc.


• Art lessons.


• Write a book.


• Projects: animals; history; geography; space / stars.


• Make a movie.


• Photography.


• Reading non-fiction.


• Political campaign: write to government, newspapers, radio; make posters, information pamphlets.


• Programming project - make a game.


• German, Maori, Latin, Spanish, other language.

We both think it looks like fun. In fact, Tessa has got started already: as I write, she is doing piano activities from John Thompson's Piano Course.

New School Year

The new school year starts in two or three weeks. I'm excited about the changes I have planned. At the end of last year, there were two things I knew I wanted to do differently. The first was the number of subjects we were studying: as well as what I see as our core homeschooling subjects - maths, language, science and history - Josiah and Tessa were working on Latin, French, typing, programming, Bible reading and critical thinking and we were reading various books together. It was too much; everything felt crammed in and bitsy.

The other change I want to make is to have more fun. For whatever reason, I feel we didn't have as much fun with "school" work last year as we have in the past. I floundered when I tried to identify what would grab the kids' interest. And sometimes I didn't try: as the kids get older, I feel more pressure to have them cover the same material other kids cover at school, rather than study what interests them. I might be making a gross generalisation here but I believe part of the problem was also that teenagers and pre-teens are more demanding and negative than younger kids.

Cutting back is proving straight forward. We'd already dropped critical thinking, with the intention of picking it up again when the kids finish the programming book they are working through. We are discontinuing Latin. It makes sense to restrict our family read-alouds to one book at a time. Typing will be next to go. Josiah has finished the online typing course we've been using. Tessa will finish it soon. I must observe the kids' typing to make sure they are hitting all the keys with the correct fingers but as long as that is happening, I see no need to continue with typing courses: the kids will get practice through doing some of their written work on the computer.

What I am excited about, and where I hope the fun will be reinjected into our work, is an idea I have to set aside one whole day a week for work the kids choose entirely themselves. I am imagining that they might do one big project that takes a whole term, or lots of different things - something different each week. They might do more work on a subject we are already studying: science, French, etc. Or they might come up with something completely different. On the first kids' choice day of term, I plan to ask Tessa and Josiah to put together a proposal on how they would like to spend those days for the first term of the year.

Camp!

I have a new hero: K, who last week ran the inaugural (AFAIK) Wellington Home Schoolers Family Camp. What a fantastic time! Judging by the fact that the few small homeschool events I have organised have always ended up being twice as much work as I expected, I imagine this was a huge job, and I am grateful she did it as well as deeply impressed at how she managed to combine "well organised" with "relaxed and flexible". (I can do the former but not the latter.)

Our Camp, at Brookfield Scout Camp in Wainuiomata, started in the late morning on Wednesday. Those of us camping put up our tents; the rest unpacked into cabins. After lunch were icebreaker games, followed by an orienteering activity provided by Brookfield. The orienteering took us all over the camp and was an ideal way to quickly get familiar with it, including discovering the swimming pool, confidence course and lots of little tracks through the bush.

After tea, more games, the older kids wanting to stay up playing, us parents not wanting to spoil the fun but eventually rounding the kids up and off to bed. It was lovely hearing a morepork close to the campsite and tuis in the dawn chorus but I was very cold.

Thursday mid-morning, more families arrived to join us for the day. We broke into groups according to the children's ages and began the rotation of the four activities of the day: abseiling, kayaking, confidence course and treasure hunt. It was at this point that Josiah met one of the several new friends he made at camp; this one shares his name, which created amusement for the two of them every time either was addressed for the rest of the day.

I spent the day supervising the kayaking on a small, still lake, which was enormous fun, though also challenging because a tiny island and a jut of land into the lake meant it wasn't possible to see everywhere at once. The little ones were lovely, some of them kayaking by themselves for the first time, their faces shining with pride and excitement. Of course the only two children to fall in came from the oldest group. That group, which included Josiah and Tessa, was a lot of fun though. They were very adventurous - clambering from one kayak to another out on the water and pushing a wooden raft around the lake.

Tessa twisted her ankle on the confidence course. Unfortunately Tessa's high pain tolerance and correspondingly mild account of her injury, combined with how busy I was at the kayaks, meant that all I did was murmer sympathetically. I didn't look at her ankle till we got home on Friday, at which point I discovered it was considerably swollen. Since then, we have been putting ice on it regularly, wrapping it up firmly, elevating it and trying to get Tess not to walk on it too much, but it is still swollen.

On Thursday evening, we sat around a campfire, having a hilarious time singing songs and later toasting marshmallows. Josiah doesn't eat marshmallows because of the gelatine, which is an animal product, and the processed sugar, which he tries not to eat much of. He toasted pieces of banana instead. When some of the younger kids noticed this, they were astonished and went around telling people about it in shocked accents. But soon the banana toasting caught on and as the marshmallows ran out, there were a few keen kids toasting pieces of banana.

Having learned my lesson, I wore polyprops under my pyjamas and a woollen hat that night and was a lot warmer.

Friday it was time to pack up, but there was also time to play and time for a last swim in the very cold pool (the kids - not me).

Best thing about camp: all the conversations I had, making new friends and getting to know people better. Seeing the kids play together in large, friendly groups, laughing and having fun. I also enjoyed being outside in the sun, the peaceful kayaking and bush walks, and the bird song around the campsite.

Unfortunately I was too busy having fun most of the time to take photos, so all you have here is Josiah and a friend, their faces covered in shaving cream and burger rings during one of the icebreaker games on the first afternoon. The game involved teams of kids throwing burger rings at shaving cream clad targets, the winning team being the one that managed to hit their target the most times.