Honey organized this amazing swap (7 moms putting together 7 boxes of materials relating to one of the 7 continents and mailing each other duplicate packages to ensure that everyone has continent boxes from all over the world! See more here: Montessori Continent Box Swap). Honey found absolutely remarkable swappers to provide her with one of a kind continent boxes!

Leann was one of the first to respond. Lean also was participating in Honey’s other swap and did Central America for 12 other moms… and this is the list of incredible items she put together for us!

I still cannot believe we did it! Thanks to Honey, the amazing Mondorfment Mom who wittily combines Montessori, Waldorf and Attachment Parenting, quite a lot of us had a chance to learn about the world and to find fun and interactive ways to bring this to our children.

Read more…

A very kind and resourceful mom is sharing an incredible idea she had for letting the kids understand the enormity of the geological time periods on Earth. The trick? Ingenious in its simplicity: using a very long multicolored ribbon. Different geological periods are indicated by different colors, their length – by ribbon length! On top of the ribbon the kids were putting toy-dinosaurs, toy-mammoths, toy-humans and home made fossils to make the results both visual and tactile. I loved this idea so much, that I am definitely doing one of those for our own Geology units! Read the full descriptions, to-do directions and measurements (and many more wonderful ideas) here: Geologic Time Line Activity by Homeschool Den Mom

Learning sign language? We still are. We found this fantastic site with little videos of the signs and even descriptions for memory associations, to learn it faster! It allows up to 5 sings at a time, or if you register (we tried their free registration) – 10 signs at a time. Fully registered users get unlimited number of searches, but then it requires a fee. 10 signs per session (we do a few sessions a day) is more then enough for us. Really worth to check it out: Sign Savvy.

In response to some requests to provide more illustrations for the diy projects that we undertook to enhance our baby’s environment, I finally started posting pictures. See our Pull-up post and its description here: Illustration of the Pull Up Bar for the most adorable pulley in your house.

It was a long break. But no time went wasted: I was working on a really fascinating project, that I’ll be thrilled to share: Montessori Continent Box Swap! Seven moms got into a game, seven moms picked a continent, seven moms created their own collection of items for the continent they picked and sent their collection to everyone else. I picked Europe and spent the next three months “traveling” all over this amazing place in my daydreams… While I am still preparing more details and the materials for posting on the web, here is one of the games that I’ve included into my “Europe box”.
Art Bingo: covers Low and High Renaissance.
I am planning to add a few more art-styles over the time. So far – we’ve got some pocker chips and my own kids absolutely loved it, while I tremendously enjoyed learning so much about the artists, and the paintings of this period.

Another wonderful free resource for baby’s development in music: Montessori Bells online. This is a free internet based program for discrimination of musical sounds by pairing and ordering, developing pitch identification. Presented in a form of fun and interactive game, this program mimics extremely expensive, but absolutely ingenious Montessory bell material: children manipulate “virtual” bells, ordering them, matching, having fun while their ear gets finer attuned to various musical sequences and notes. Very beneficial regardless of weather your are upbringing a professional musician, or just would like to expand your child’s horizons and developmental possibilities.

My older one, Sunshine, is a true fan of the Magic School Bus series. He knows every cartoon by heart. He loves every single book I could find. So when I found their phonics series, I was very excited – and there was a good reason: he loved it!!! Every book is on a different subject. Every book has list of words in the beginning. Every book has facts listed at the back. And, the best one – it has clear simple text with excellent illustrations. Not too busy, not too difficult, neither too easy. It doesn’t teach phonics, it is merely a set of Level 1 books. An excellent collection. Highly, highly recommended.

We had a rear and wonderful opportunity to spend the weekend with friends. Aaaah, the awesome pre-children days (did they ever happen?), when we could spend so much time just chatting, admiring the nature, the music… Now most of our friends are getting kids of their own and we finally get to see them more often: our kids enjoy a playdate; parents, as my teenage nephew put it – enjoy hanging out together. Though, I’ve got to admit that this time we came back with really mixed feelings. I can’t stop thinking about it.