Homemade Montessori

So, in my last post before my blogging hiatus, I mentioned that I was going to start working again.  Well, I've been working at a small local Montessori school.  It's a great job and I love it.  I miss being here with the girls for their schooling, but I love Montessori and am really happy to have had the opportunity to take this job.  (I am also happy to have a regular paycheck again.  Yay, income!).  Over the summer, before school officially started here, we had the opportunity to go observe a Montessori school in Memphis.  I was already pretty familiar with the method for preschool (we wanted to send our older girls to Montessori school when we still lived in St. Croix, but we could afford it, so we incorporated a lot of the ideas and materials into our homeschool then and with Bijou and Zion now), but hadn't had the opportunity to see an elementary aged class.  I have to say that I fell in LOVE!!  I wished we lived in Memphis just so we could send our older girls to school there.  BUT, since we don't live in Memphis, I decided to incorporate some of the ideas and materials into our soon-to-be-fourth-and-fifth-graders school day.  The director of the school where I work was gracious enough to give us some of her old materials when her new ones came in.  I was immediately struck by how enthusiastic Ashni was to do pages of subtraction problems using the subtraction strip board (if you follow us, then you'll know that Ashni HATES math).  I really think that Ashni could excel in a program like this (and I think it would take some of the pressure off of my husband who, despite our homeschooling for the last 5 years, is very new to actually having to school the children).

So I guess a new addition to this little blog will be some of the Montessori type materials that I make for the girls to use (because the materials are terribly expensive, and we just can't afford it).  Today, i will leave you with a picture of Bijou making a list of words that she can spell.  She has the attention span of a flea right now, so after about 5 minutes, she was over making words.

Please excuse my husband's giant shoes that I didn't notice until just now...