day one: Montessori

Today Josh brought his new ruler to show me and I saw that it is 1 meter long. I told him I knew of something else that is 1 meter long and asked him to get out the blue and red rods. We measured ourselves and Samantha with the rods. He thought that was a lot of fun. Then we put them in order and played some games with them. I had him shut his eyes and I took away the 80cm rod. When he opened them he had a really hard time figuring out what had changed. I showed him the stair pattern of the rods and that each number rod is one bigger than the last.
Then we played again and I left all the rods in order but turned one around so that the blue and red columns didn't line up. Unfortunately, a hint did pop out of my mouth before I could stop it...BAD Montessori mommy! After Josh took a few turns trying to "trick" me, we made a maze to walk through...10cm, right turn, 90cm, right turn, etc. He told me that using writing to get through a maze is much easier than using feet!

Later on, while reading aloud to him to get him settled for quiet time, the doorbell rang and it was our shelves. Well, we forgot all about quiet time and worked on setting up our Montessori materials. After comforting a very scared baby (who we didn't hear because we were to involved in our setting-up activities) we had a 3 part lesson on the decimal system. He can't seem to remember the word "thousand" but that's OK! And we also matched baric (weight) tablets and set out all the tablets from color box 3 in a "sun" shape. At dinner, he wanted to continue the activity and compare the colors of different drinks.

I think he will learn with the Montessori materials, but I don't know about the philosophy. He might become more self-motivated, but for now I think we'll be doing most of our activities as games that we play together. It's not like he's at a school where there is nothing else to do, with teachers just there for him. I think we'll be using a more teacher-directed method, as much as I'd prefer for him to be more independant.