I Guess She's Ready for The Cards

Pre has been working on the geometric cabinet a lot lately. The first time I gave her a lesson on how to use a drawer as a puzzle she proceeded to do every drawer in one sitting. She's not great at tracing around yet, and I need to represent that though her motor skills may not yet be quite there. With the cabinet, to help move to abstraction, the shapes are first matched to their wood frames, then placed on cards with solid shapes, thick outlined shapes, and finally thin outlined shapes. Kinde was beyond the cards that go with it when she came back home, so I haven't had practice figuring out when to present them and haven't brought them out yet. Then today at the zoo Pre was playing with a shape sorter with little difficulty when she noticed the sunspots below the holes. She started skipping the holes and did this





Unfortunately I didn't get a picture until it had been bumped, but they were all perfectly matched and lined up. I guess at least the filled in cards are no trouble! I'm debating which to bring out; should I still start with the solid shapes, or skip right to the thick line? She seems happy enough to do the solid work, so I may still start there. It may also be trickier if the shapes are more similar, as they are in the cabinet.

They really do this stuff

We had an amazing afternoon playing under a glorious autumnal tree in front of the Bellevue Library today. The girls frolicked (well, one girl, one owl), we chased each other, leaves were tossed, there was dancing, actual Spanish spoken, and both girls spontaneously started sorting their leaf collections by color. It's nice to see that small children really do choose activities like sorting of their own volition, even in a completely unprepared environment. I guess Maria Montessori really did make accurate observations :)

Happy Halloween!

Woodland Park Zoo Pumpkin Bash - amazing views of the animals playing with their "gift" jack-o-lanterns (filled with meat if needed to interest said animal)


I am so pleased with how my owl costumes turned out against all odds. Both my and a back-up sewing machine broke, requiring me to sew two inches at a time and then deal with a massive thread jam. Slooow going. The girls loved them just as much as I hoped, though!








Cut-out crackers to have Halloween fun without even more sugar.

Kinde's First Story

Kinde has enjoyed making words and occasionally witing someone a note with the moveable alphabet. Today she announced she would write a story, and she worked out all the letters on her own. Occasionally she would start to ask me, and then would figure it out and move on. Here's the result:

Same Work, Different Skills

Kinde has finally been rediscovering the sensorial works after basically a year hiatus in our transition from school to homeschool. She asked for a reminder on how to build the house out of red rods. I'm not sure if that's as common as the maze, but one her teacher had in a batch of photos they could try to duplicate. I showed her, she recreated it, and then used the pink cubes and brown rectangular prisms to "furnish" it. I can't remember what she said all the pieces were, but the one in the middle is the bed.

Pre then decided to get in on the action. She brought over some pasta we have in nice autumnal colors for pouring, and proceeded to carefully place one pasta piece on each sensorial piece. When she had leftovers she poured them in the "attic swimming pool". It was fun to see her find a developmentally appropriate aspect (one-to-one correspondence) to a work that is otherwise way beyond her.

Following the Child All Over Seattle

Lately there have been lots and lots of things we've had to do, places we've had to go, and people we've had to see, and it has been wearing on Kinde. She's generally pretty flexible, but more and more when she realizes she has no choice about doing X she's asked if there could be a day where she gets to decide everything. I had been thinking that could be a good birthday tradition (and it still could be), but we decided to act a little more promptly.

Sunday morning Mark and I realized that Kinde had chosen breakfast, suggested our going to the park where we were, and we had been there much longer than usual to her delight. It *had* so far been her day and we had no other commitments (assuming we were willing to continue living in squalor). We asked her if she had noticed what a special day it was yet, and exclaimed that it was her day! She had a ton of ideas of course, and we pointed out that we only had one day, and certain technical challenges. For example, she really wants to go in the stadiums and we pointed out there were no games. Overall, though, she was really reasonable. She filled her hiking backpack with lunch and snacks for all of us, and we hopped on the bus (her first two requests).

First stop was the Pike's Place Market. We smelled the flowers, sampled the produce, saw a fish tossed, listened to street performers, saw one play a violin like a bass and another act like a gold robot, and tasted Market Spice's phenomenal cider. Then we caught the bus to Seattle Center.


Though we intended to be mostly exploring outside, it was just chilly enough that we headed to the Center House to eat after gazing up at the Space Needle. There we found ourselves accidentally attending TurkFest for the third year running. Apparently we have some cosmic Turkish connection, as we don't go to Seattle Center very often, and have never tried to attend TurkFest and it just keeps happening. We ate lunch and watched folk dancers and a fashion show. We were there for a while as Kinde *loves* to watch dance. We have logged something like 20 hours over 5 festivals watching folk dancers of various cultures. We worked our way upstairs to the kid activities where both children got their faces painted and made Turkish flags.



We walked to dinner by way of the Olympic Sculpture Park. We didn't make it down to my favorite piece, Wake by Richard Serra, but headed straight over to Kinde's; Eagle by Alexander Calder. She really wanted to create her own art by dragging the chairs at Eagle's base around in the gravel as she has done before, but Pre was losing it and needed pasta stat. We pressed on across the street to the Old Spaghetti Factory, where we secured a table in the coveted trolley. Good food was had by all and we enjoyed a leisurely stroll down the waterfront at sunset to our bus stop.

Amazingly (and luckily) Kinde made it all the way home awake. We actually ran into someone on the bus who had been at the park that morning and overheard all her big plans. She was too tired to regale him with every detail as is her wont, and just confirmed that we had managed to do it all. She seemed quite content with "her day". I hope it does refuel her for following the family's needs again for a while.

Sound Object Collection

Kinde spent a year in a toddler room and then a year in primary at a Montessori school. As such, we're always working with a weird mix of things she's already done, things she might have done, and things I present. Our language path has been no different. She knew many of the sounds before she switched back home, but I never knew quite which. We used sound buckets... sort of. I had them all out since she had seen them all already. Then I tried having one at a time out. Then I pretty much gave up, as she rarely chose the work, only used it for pretend play (a BIG issue with everything when we started), and seemed to have good phonemic awareness. I do plan to use them with Pre, and will probably start playing I Spy with her very soon as her vocabulary seems to be getting big enough to think about anything other than its expansion.

We've been clearing out and packing in preparation for our move. I had been storing our sound object collection in the buckets, but that didn't seem likely to go well in moving. I have many other miniatures we use for various things, and it seemed useful to have a record of what was actually in the buckets. Even though it could easily change just from what I already have elsewhere for our next go-round with Pre, here's what we have at the moment:

a: anteater, astronaut, ant, aligator
b: bird, bell, bucket, butterfly
c: car, camel, cockroach, cat
d: dog, die, donkey, drum, duck
e: elephant, egg
f: feather, flag, frog
g: grape, gorilla, golf club, goat
h: heart, hat, helmet, horse, hippo
i: igloo, insect
j: jack-in-the-box, jar, jet
k: kangaroo, kettle, key
l: lion, lioness, lizard, lantern, ladybug
m: mirror, mushroom, mitten, milk, mug, mouse, marble
n: nickle, notebook, nut
o: octagon, otter, octopus
p: panther, pumpkin, pan, polar bear, pig
q: quarter, quartz
r: rainbow, ring, rug, racket, rhino, rug
s: salt, snake, squid, sled, spider, scorpion
t: truck, turtle, tree
u: umbrella
v: volcano, violin, vase, vacuum, valentine, vulture
w: wagon, wheel, wood, watermelon, wolf
x: box, six, fox, x-ray, ax, onyx
y: yo-yo, yield, yarn
z: zebra, zero, zig-zag