Montessori Nature's Smile

The Montessori method offers a very reasonable way to organise your child's play area by rotating and replacing toys and activities on the regular basis. However, there are a lot of aspects that come into place when considering what is important for child's development and how to make their play time most effective.

I would like to share with you snapshots of our day in the Montessori classroom. Please forgive me for not including proper Montessori work photographs, like binomial cube or sound box activity. These are always there and children constantly use them. In this particular post I would like to share our new activities.
As a part of our cultural study we were talking about our state. On the news we read that paleontologist found dinosaur's fossils in our region. Children were fascinated to learn how people discover bones and parts of dinosaurs and collect all the pieces together to get a whole picture. As an activity I set up a tub with send, rocks and some pasta (for "bones") with tools for kids to dig out pieces of "dinosaurs" put make a skeleton picture.

It is an incredible feeling to reach this milestone of child's life - the first birthday. I wanted to make it very special for us. First of all, since she is only turning one, we decided to celebrate it in a quiet family circle and close friends - with the ones who were always here for us and who have shown so much care and support through out this first year.
Theme for our girl's first party was card game UNO. Once the theme was decided, it made it easy to pick the colours for the set up.

Here is a sneak peek into one of the Montessori Playgroups in Australia.
These are activities that stimulate and help to develop various skills such as fine motor skills, hand grip, finger strength, taking care of self, gross motor skills, hand coordination, logical thinking and problem solving on a basic level. However, it is important to remember that activities are not the purpose, but the opportunity of child to be independent, be able to concentrate for as long as they want with what they want uninterrupted. I hope these ideas will inspire you.
Here are only some fragments of the room. We also usually have easel set up for children for painting, simple craft activity, food activity, such as egg peeling and cutting and a book shelf with Montessori friendly books.