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.

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.

I started showing word cards to my older son when he was about 6 months. He wasn’t really interested. So, I came up with a thousands of ways to get his attention: we were vacuum cleaning the words, wiping it, jumping over them, doing forward rolls, watching them in the car, hanging in the hallway (see more at Alternative Ways of Showing Cards to An Active Child)… With my first one I was freaking out all the time: “Is it working?”, “Is he learning?”, “Why he is just looking at the pictures in the books and not reading it?!”.

Have you heard of Waldorf? I often stumble upon that name, when I search on Montessori schools/materials. Is it an alternative? Is it another educational philosopher, scientist in search of enlightenment in children’s education? Enlightenment – surely yes, though not in the same way I envisioned… as “light” is the not only philosophical concept, but also the reality: due to the particular attention of the school to the artistic expression, black, brown colors are mostly banned in the school. Biblical Eve has to be represented with a fair skin and blond hair. You would ask, what difference does it make? Apparently, “search for light” can have a greater influence on the rest of the children’s education, then just reflection of number of crayons in the box.

Thanks to Orsi for sharing this wonderful resource:

America The Story of US — premiering on HISTORY™ April 25 at 9pm/8c — is a six week event that provides a fascinating look at the stories of the people, events, and innovations that forged our nation. It will provide you with an unprecedented opportunity to bring our nation’s history to life for your students. This 12-hour series will be supported by educational materials tied to curriculum standards and is copyright cleared for Fair Use in the classroom by instructors or pupils in the course of face-to-face teaching activities.