Learning how to sew

A lot of people are intimidated by the idea of sewing. I lucked out and had a mom and aunts who were really in to quilting and introduced it to me at an early age. So when I finally got the chance to begin my own classroom from scratch I obviously sewed A LOT! And because life gets in the way I still had a lot of sewing (or repairing!) to do when class actually began.

My first year I only had 6 three year olds in my room, and I was careful not to make myself too available to them, trying to encourage independence. With such a small number I had to make sure that I was pausing to do a lot of observing. To keep my watching from being too obvious I spent a lot of time sewing at one of our classroom floor tables. A lot of times the kids would wander over to see what I was making and it made for great observation practice.

I give this first year a lot of credit for turning out some great sewers in my classroom. Before I left Minnesota those original three year olds were confident kindergarteners and boy could they tackle some big projects! Here's a great example of what one accomplished with me simply planting the idea in her head and providing the materials.

Sewing her own globe was a 2 day project and took surprisingly little help from me. However there was a lot more prep work than just gathering the appropriate fabrics for her. Here's some of what we did over the three years to build up to this:

• Needle threading
  • An obvious first step! How can you sew if you can't thread a needle? As soon as I discovered how frustrating any sewing could be for a child who couldn't thread a needle I immediately madea  stand alone activity for practice threading a needle and handling a spool of thread
• Button sewing
  • A classic Montessori work. Over the year the children helped me sew snaps onto the classroom aprons, repair buttons that fell of pouches and even fixed a dressing frame! That's real practical life and purposeful work.
• Embroidery
  • Tracing metal insets onto fabric and practicing the basic running stitch was hugely important for any more advanced sewing. Button sewing introduces the basic up and down motion, but embroidery expands on following a line.
• Knot tying
  • Ok, so honestly we're still working this being an independent activity. I've tried to introduce this one using thicker thread and a big needle but still have yet to have a child who can honestly tie their own knots. Anyone care to give ME some tips?
• Pinning fabrics
  • We had some random felt board shapes laying around that I used. The idea that  the pins need to not only go through the fabric but come back up was the trickiest part!
• Pillow sewing
  • Puts together the idea of a running stitch, flipping fabrics inside out and then stuffing them! We also had a puppet making for those times stuffing was a bit hard to come by, lol!
• Puzzle tracing
  • How could you make a globe with all the continents without practicing tracing them in the first place?

And of course once one student had done it others wanted to make their own globe as well! We had a line-up for that work right through the end of the school year!

I've heard that Sewing in a Montessori Classroom is a great resource. Has anyone used this book before? Or have some other sewing activities they've found have been popular?

A geography day

W and C started it by working on the world map today. I think W just really wanted to use the clay, but they also had fun putting the puzzle pieces in the frame. While they were doing that S took out the new little flag book I had made for them and was heading to the library to look at it when M caught her.

"I wanted to read that!"

"Ok," said S, who's always up for some socializing. So together they got out the reading mat and crowed around, flipping the pages to look at the different flags.

"That's South America," S said matter of factly as they flipped to one page. Now I know "South America' doesn't have a flag but hey, at least she was using geography terms! Then S got in trouble with the next page.

"What's that one?" M asked.

"I don't know." S replied after a short pause, quickly flipping away from it.

"How about this one?" M asked again. S just looked at it for a minute, struggling to figure out what to say. Finally she came up with,

"You have to read it silly!" and turned the page again and stated "That's South America." I couldn't help but giggle a bit as she kept trying to convince herself that she knew the names of those flags. After a few pages she did come and ask me to read a few of the names, but S was definitely determined to know them by herself. I have a feeling that girl's going to learn to read by sheer determination some day when she gets it into her head.

Afterwards C recruited M to do fetching with him using the flags. She happily pointed out the pictures in the book and sent him to bring them over from the stand. Unfortunately there were so many flags there that it was hard to pick out specific ones so I helped them spread all the flags out on one mat and work at a second with the ones they had already found. They were so in to their little game that when we noticed that some flags in the book were not out they asked me to check in the closet for them.

Soon they had ALL the flags for North and South America out on the mat or in the stand. They were bound and determined to find all the matches. M was having a great time directing C, who couldn't have been more pleased than when he brought back a matching flag. They made it through nearly all the flags before they finally got tired and went on to new work. I checked it later and that's about 35 flags....They went back and forth nearly 30 times matching the flags and pictures. Without any prompting or real help.

Now that's a great example of the kind of repetition we want happening in the classroom!

An individual presentatioin?

So I finally got tired of waiting for our world map to arrive in the mail. Though I only mentioned it yesterday I do have more than 24 hours of patience, I promise. This material has been on order since early August...I think I've been quite patient.

Anyways today I dug up in the attic of the school to drag out an old one. A large chunk of central america is missing and there are only 3 knobs on the entire puzzle but I decided it was better than nothing. W takes out the globes in our classroom almost daily and I have really been waiting to introduce him to more aspects of geography. I've talked about the puzzle maps before in this post: Montessori Sunday: Puzzle Maps, but today was the first time I've actually presented it to a child using all the steps.

My favorite part is using clay to demonstrate how a round sphere (like the globe) can be cut in half and then flattened to make the two flat circles of the map. I started the presentation with S and as soon as she started bringing materials to the mat the other two little girls in the class had also wandered over to watch. By the time we had discovered that the colored continents were the same on both the globe and map the boys had all joined us.

So I presented how a globe can be turned in to a mat to the entire class. Now in my album this presentation is written up for an individual, and I did insure that S was the one who actually got to do the squishing down of the clay, but who am I to tell a group of quiet and attentive 3 & 4 year olds to go away. I just figure I saved myself having to repeat the exercise 4 more times!

The puzzle itself was no problem for S, and I hadn't thought it would be but it's a doorway to other things for her later down the road. What I hoped would happen is that the other children would be eager to try the giant map out for themselves, seeing how fun and easy it was for S. We'll find out tomorrow when there's more time. I'm quite curious to see how W especially does with it....he's still in a bit of a wandering mood and needs some work to engage with. Hopefully geography is it.

Buckling down

There was work galore happening this morning, and really focused, challenging work.

I was so amazed this morning when I brought in the tray for food work and after setting everything out found that I could sit down and observe the children work for a little while. I thought I'd get maybe a minute or two, but I got closer to 10 minutes of uninterrupted observation. This is what we're striving for in our classroom; children who can make choices and work on those activities independently. A couple of girls were playing a game with the pink tower, an older boy was setting up the farm while a younger child observed him, two children were walking carefully on the line. Every where I looked children were engaged in activities or walking to the shelves with purpose.

It's great to be able to watch these children mature and settle down in to the routine, especially the older ones. Some have never stayed for the afternoon, or have napped during that work cycle so having an extra two hours every day has really exploded their abilities. M is one of those who has always gone home after the morning work cycle, this is her first year staying all afternoon. She just turned 5 in November and over the past month has discovered she can read. It started with the little slips we have for clean up jobs at the end of the day and went from there. This morning I watched M use the moveable alphabet with a friend to write little commands (like "sit on a mat"), read them and act them out. Now that's awesome progress, not only being able to read the words but really interpret them as well. 

Below is the work of another Kindergartener. T traced each country from the puzzle map of Europe, colored them in, labeled them and then wrote the name of the country on a separate piece of paper. Not a bad way to practice and learn capital letters!

Another example was with another M girl. We've always known she was very artistic and musical, she takes piano and her older sister plays the violin so there's a lot of formal music education as well. The other day though I heard her playing Christmas songs on our melody harp--from memory! We have little cards that slide in under the strings of the instrument so the children learn which string to pluck, but I'm not ever sure that we have the songs she was playing. Anyways I asked M if she'd like to learn how to play little songs on the bells, she was a little hesitant, telling me that she didn't know how to read regular music. But after talking to me, walking away, coming back again she finally decided that in the afternoon she wanted to learn some more work with the bells. Together we labeled the bells, learned the parts of the staff and the placement of the notes. M was really in to it and was even more proud when she realized that she had had the most presentations on the bells of any of the other kindergartners.  Ok, so we're not supposed promote competition like that but it really was an accomplishment she could be proud of since she puts so much work in to her music.

Montessori Sunday: Puzzle Maps

Children love puzzles. So why do we insist on giving them puzzles of cartoon shaped animals and people? In a Montessori environment there are still puzzles, but they are more realistic than what you find in most toy stores. Many classrooms have puzzles of plants or animals where each distinct part of the animal (ex. the hind legs of a horse) is a separate piece. The geography puzzle maps follow the same concept, each different continent or country is its own piece of the puzzle.

The puzzle maps are introduced after the child has been shown the globe of the world, and introduced to the idea that the world is round and made up of land and water. The globe and world map are both brought to a working mat and together the teacher and child explore how they are similar and different. The teacher then demonstrates with clay how a round sphere can be flattened into the two circles that make up the puzzle. After demonstrating how to lift the pieces carefully using the knobs the child is encouraged to practice the puzzle on their own.

After mastering the world puzzle the child is introduced to the continent puzzles, which are more complicated due to the larger number of pieces. Additionally the child will be introduced to a puzzle map of their own country, which is divided into either states or regions. There are large, laminated control maps for the children to fit the pieces onto if they accidentally take out too many. These maps may be labeled with the names of the country/state or left blank.

Puzzle maps help children with their fine motor skills, spatial reasoning and introduce them in a concrete way to the world around them. In Montessori we work from the whole concept (the world) to the parts (the child's own country/state). This is to help them learn things within a context. It's hard to really understand what a continent is if you don't know that the world is made up of land and water. The children are introduced to the idea of geography though a material that they can see and manipulate. Other activities also branch off from the puzzles. Montessori classrooms have flags of different countries for children to learn about. Cultural folders share with them pictures from different parts of the globe.

Cool fact about the puzzle maps: the knob for each country is strategically placed where the capital of that country is located. How neat is that!