Day 83: More Aidan Pages

This weekend I'm going to go to Ambleside Online and look through trying to plan for Kieron and Paddy for the rest of the year. Perhaps I'm wrong, but I'm feeling that they need a bit more substance than they are getting right at the moment.

Paddy made another word sheet for Aidan (on the left). Also, I made a calendar for Aidan (below, center). He constantly asks: "Where are we going today?" partly probably because he is bored, and partly also I think because he wants to be prepared for things, and I think also because of intellectual curiosity (he's probably at the right stage developmentally to take an interest in time). Also, because of his PDD he tends to script.

Right now he's most interested in the pictures (which I helped him choose and which in some cases he chose himself, ie the front of the van and the light in our garage). But when he asks about our plans for the week I am hoping we can use this for a reference and to have some conversations that are more concrete to him than just verbal ones.

More information about Visual Schedules here.

If he finds this helpful I may do one where he can put cards in the right place. I did that once before but he wasn't ready for it. He's always liked me to write out the days of the week on little cards though so he can put them in order.

Lepanto Timeline Figures

Some timeline figures (pdf) to go with the Lepanto resources.

Continent Cards

I made some continent cards (pdf). You can see them on the left.

Here they are as half -sheets, but I didn't like 'em as much that way.

North and South America
Europe and Asia
Africa and Australia
World Map for control, and Labels

(I am afraid the colors aren't consistent and I don't think they match the Montessori color scale either)

They seem a bit bland, but I don't like using too much color toner and this way I figured I could print them out in greyscale and color, if I wanted to.

A few links:

A bit of this and a bit of that has cards for the continent folder.

Continents and Oceans flashcards

Welcome to My World! -- continent lesson plans for 2nd graders



Continent activity for small ones at Montessori at Home.

Some activities to do with the continent folder.

These are fun to look at and so are these.

Outline Maps and a flag theme page

Week 15 -- History Cards

Timeline Cards (both in PDF)

Early New World Discoverers
Scientists 1 (the scientists are taken from the first few chapters of The Boy Scientist, an Ambleside recommendation)

The weird borders on the jpgs are just artifacts from Word editing-- they aren't like that on the PDFs.

It is beautiful fall weather outside so the boys have been outside adventuring. I did do morning time but that is about all. I may work a bit with Kieron later... I was planning to have him work with these timeline cards but it took longer to make them than I expected.

Kieron has been doing a brain-game on the computer which includes a math component so there is that for informal learning; also, all the younger boys have gotten a fair bit of use from the whiffle ball on a string that the OT left behind.

Later I'm going to try to rig up some sort of timeline background where he can place the cards.

I can support these by making quizlets, too. I have one timeline quiz up already.

Food and Toy Sheets

I made these two sheets to deal with two household issues that have been annoying me recently -- toys, and food. With the toys, the problem is the lack of order. Some toys get buried and are never accessed, while others get scattered all over the house. I'm trying to figure out a better "flow" for this.

For the food, I want LESS flow, so to speak.

For both issues, I thought that having a list of goals would help me to work on things. For me, stating the problem is fairly close to solving the problem. The problem is getting the problem accurately stated : ).

There's something else -- I want to try to turn the negatives into positives, as so many things CAN be turned. I don't know if that makes sense.

Let me use an example -- I read a Montessori article where a teacher saw a toddler being reprimanded for "getting into" her daddy's office supplies at work. The teacher noted that what she was getting scolded for was exactly what small children are being encouraged to do in an orderly, constructive way at a Montessori school.

Rather than get irritated because the kids leave their boots in the kitchen (!) it would be better to teach them how to put their boots away, making it into something that is a sort of ritual in itself. Hmm, don't know if that makes sense, but when you read those sheets don't imagine me posting Rules Lists but rather just trying to focus on these areas for improvement.

I didn't make these as downloadables because I figured other people have different issues than we do here.... but let me know if I'm wrong!

Fraction Circles

Fractions for beginners -- see here and here. Also here for other fraction activities.

I tried baking some Sculpey clay into circles -- may try it again someday, but it was a flop -- the sculpey burned and gave off toxic fumes.

So I gave that up for now, but found these soft circle shapes in my closet that I cut into fractions. Simple but hopefully will work all right for now.


Side benefit--- my young collaborator Aidan took the rest of the shapes and went to town counting, classifying and displaying them on his felt board:

Base Ten -- paper beads

I tried to make some golden beads on paper -- here in pdf, left on gif.

It doesn't go up to thousands : ( and I think sometime if I can acquire enough beads I'll try to make some "real" ones). I'm just using regular beads or some other counter for the units.

Here are some base-ten activities and paper manipulatives (using base-10 blocks rather than beads)

Here are some virtual base-10 manipulatives.

Here's an online base 10 game Paddy likes quite a bit. ... it goes up to 100's but you can start with just units, or units and 10's.

Place Value

Number Cards, pdf:

Hundreds and Tens
Thousands and Ones.

The way I understand it, they are designed so you can overlay them to form numbers.... for example, 2345 would be a 2000 on the bottom, then a 300 hundred, then a 40 then a 5. That would give children a concrete sense of place value and how it works.

... Units are in green, tens in blue, hundreds in red and thousands in green again because thousands are the "units" of the thousands period (1 thousand, 10 thousands, 100 thousands). I got this information from Elizabeth Hainstock's Montessori in the Home.

More Math

Addition Beads (PDF) to demonstrate the teens.

Addition Strips (grey-scale PDF) -- these go with the addition board. I read somewhere that once you get past ten with addition, you can demonstrate grouping by replacing, say 9 + 6 with a ten and a five.

It is the same as these, except in black and white, but I realize I didn't picture them previously as gifs, because they didn't look good that way.

Here they are in laminated, file folder form:

a few more cards and things

First, here is the map Kieron colored. He got kind of tired of it so as a hands-on alternatives it wasn't entirely successful. I wonder if I have the only kids that seem to think of lapbook type projects as a penance. Perhaps the hands-on needs to be reserved for engineering projects, science labs, and arts and crafts that don't have an educational component.

To find out if it had any educational benefit I might have to ask him to narrate what the map is about. Then I could have just skipped the coloring in the first place.














Here is something I was experimenting with -- giving Kieron little "command cards" for his reading assignments, in the form of bookmarks.

















Here's a jpg of the printout itself.
















This was a mixed success, too. He did the reading all right but it still seems just as directed and "passive" as just following an assignment sheet. Also, the Native American Legend readings are obsolete now because Sean read the whole book yesterday and thought it wasn't very good, and narrated every single story in great detail, so I don't have the heart to make Kieron read them unless to add to the ongoing discussion.... that is a thought. Lissla gave me some suggestions for things to read that I plan to look into; perhaps more representative of some Native American thinking than the legends, and that was what I wanted to try to get across in the first place.


Here are the narration cards I mentioned the other day. I haven't used them yet but I like them .... : ).





















Here are the laminated bead cards I made the other day. So far, not much interest on Aidan's part. I think they are too abstract for him right now.




















I am looking through all these and thinking they seem very "schooly". And yet I am trying to move towards a more self-directed approach that doesn't rely so much on ME tutoring, and allows for more choices. Still thinking....

Aidan's Work

Aidan has had a busy week. Just to mention one thing, he has been devising all sorts of scissors activities for himself. .... I suppose he has been inspired by watching me make cards for him.

I printed out a set of numbers and he cut them out. Later in the week he did the same thing only with phonograms.




















Yesterday, after I printed out some Starfall materials and worked on them a bit, he devised a neat game. He wrote words on index cards (or I wrote them sometimes), then cut out the separate letters with craft scissors, then reassembled the letters to make words. This was quite a wonderful game, combining scissors practice with spelling, writing and whole to parts/parts to whole.
























Even though the card games take a while to assemble, I think it is paying off for this very concrete, hands-on child. He is learning some creativity and motor processing along with the 3Rs. I am getting lots of ideas watching how he reacts to the materials.

Narration Cards

I liked the Spelling Command Cards here and decided to try to make a set of Narration Command Cards (PDF) (or Idea Cards, maybe). I used some of the suggestions from Simply Charlotte Mason, dropped others that I knew my boys wouldn't do, and added some that I thought they might actually do. I can already think of a few more that I didn't include, but this will do as a start!

I know some people use a narration jar and this might be somewhat similar, but I'm going to make cards out of them.

Here's a nice Narration page at Squidoo. It's pretty, and has lots of ideas and resources.

Game Cards for File Folders

I was researching file folder games yesterday -- and made these two very simple board game cards, just to get the hang of it:

Travel-theme Game Board (pdf)
New World Discovery Theme Game Board (pdf)

The way I understand it, from this site, you can just get a set of cards for things you want the child to remember -- vocabulary, etc. -- a die, markers and then go.

Here are a couple of sets of cards I've made for geography and discovery:

Vocabulary for Empires of the Americas
Geography Cards (pdf)



Enchanted Learning has file folder games, and they seem to be popular for use with autistic children.

Bead Worksheets

I made 3 different kinds of worksheets with beads:

Horizontal Beads -- Handwriting (pdf)
Vertical Beads -- identification (pdf)
Vertical Beads -- numbers and number words (pdf)

I found this PowerPoint Presentation on working with the beads to add and subtract, and there is this E-How article on teaching addition, though it uses red and blue counters.

Here's an E-How on teaching counting using the beads. And here's one on teaching squaring. It will be some time before we get to that!

I found this Addition Worksheet generator that lets you control the size of the font, number of problems, maximum and minimum numbers, etc, and print them out in PDF.

What I plan to do is to have Aidan match the beads with the number words and symbols until he is quite familiar with them, and then start simple addition. Paddy is already basically past this stage.

I apologize a bit for using the word "Montessori" for these when lots of times they are my adaptation and may not be at all like "real" Montessori. However, I do want them to come up on searches and the like. I did use the visuals on places like this to give me a guide for what colors to use. I am sure Aidan would love to use actual wooden beads but we don't have it in our budget atm.... and little manipulatives get scattered quickly in this absent-minded household. Cards, I can print out again and again.... and for Aidan, watching me make them is like a presentation in itself... he gets so enthusiastic watching them get cut and laminated and backed with cardstock.

Cards for Brain Gym Activities

I made two cards or sheets for Aidan and Paddy's OT exercises that I mentioned last week.

There they are in gif form on the right, and I made them into PDF as well.

Pease Porridge Hot
Shoulder Owl

Where I used online sources, I put links to credit the sources. I shall have to find out if that is kosher, though, or if you have to ask permission.

Word Cards for Aidan

I made some word cards for Aidan. Paddy worked at them too. They are below in gif. They are short vowel sound CVC's, except for "eel" and "bell" and "egg" which Aidan wanted me to put in near the end since he knows how to read those.

Picture Cards -- pdf
Words for Picture Cards -- pdf.









Aidan helped me type in the words and then hovered around anxiously waiting for me to cut them. He is really enjoying all these projects. Later I am going to back them with posterboard and cover them with clear contact paper so they will be sturdier. I wasn't going to cut the pictures out, but he wanted me to, so I did.

Paddy did them too.

Next, I will try some sentence strips, and possibly sight word match-ups. . This might work well with the simple stories we were writing together during the summer.

Numbers and Matching

Perhaps you've noticed I haven't been posting daily logs. The honest truth is that my brain thinks that Exam Week is planning week. And I've been trying to rethink how I do my logs, anyway. Do I really need daily logs? In the past, when I've tried alternatives I've found that I DO need them to keep my brain from free-floating off into planning-land and forgetting about the inconvenient necessity of actually DOING my plans. But I am considering alternatives, still.

I mentioned that I wanted to think through what I'm doing with the little ones during this week. Aidan is a natural Montessori child. Not only is he special needs (I wish I had a better term than delayed and more targeted than special needs), which puts him in Montessori's original target classroom, but he LOVES matching, sorting, and that kind of thing. I suspect he loves it because it fills a developmental need. He is working hard to transition from straight concrete to concrete-operational, and he seems to find symbol-based manipulatives a valuable transition device.

We have an old bingo calling board from a multiplication bingo game and Aidan has been matching the numbers to the spaces on the board.... so much so that the calling board is getting shredded. So I decided to make him some numbers on Monday. I used to have a pdf set of numbers from 1-100 that I downloaded from somewhere but I couldn't find it online this time. Anyway, I did want to color-code them by tens to give him visual clues. So I made my own -- number cards up to 100 (PDF). I also made a set in grayscale.

I printed them out and backed them with posterboard and sealed them with clear contact paper (my laminator broke and anyway, I find I like the feel of contact paper so much better than laminating plastic). Aidan hovered over me the whole time I was making them and set right to work. But I need to make a board that shows him where to put them properly. I just gave him the rest of the poster-board for the time being -- he likes to have a board to frame his work.

He took this picture himself.

Now if you look at the gif below that shows what the PDF looks like, you will see how differently Paddy learns from Aidan. Paddy saw me making the numbers on a Word document, and wanted to try it. So I emptied the Microsoft template, leaving only the frame, and he built it up again from scratch. Not only did he type in the numbers in order from 1 to about 40 (before he got bored) but he color-coded them by tens just as I had done.

If I did Montessori with Paddy I would have to focus on creative things, like this, and on sensorial/practical life activities, because he can use some help with those types of things. He could probably benefit from some tracing activities, too. His fine motor lags behind his conceptual thinking as it tends to with all my kids.


Resources for the Future:

I found this neat Practical Homeschooling site with explanations of the Pink Level that made sense to me, and some visuals and even downloads.

I am so NOT a Montessori type mother so it is a bit of a stretch for me to wrap my brain around these things, but Aidan gets a lot of use out of the things I find and make for him so I'm trying.

To Do List, and Binder Organization

List of organizational things to do -- ones that are done or mostly done are in italic.

-----------------------
* Write week in review
* Summary of first half term -- goals for next half -- this can wait if I don't get to it.
* Plan next week's things
* File things in last week's folder-- move new folder into basket.
* Plan history for Year 7 -- next 3 weeks.
-------------------------

I wanted to write out what is working for me right now with organization. It will probably change over time but at the moment, I am happy with it. So at the risk of being even geekier than usual, here goes:

First of all, my main binder. It has a cover, not very pretty on the front side, so I didn't show it (maybe sometime I will try to sew some nicer fabric over it; it was a dollar store find). What I like about it is the nice pockets for pens, cards, cell phone, journal, whatever.


Here I put the picture upside-down so that the tabs were more visible. They are divided into the days of the week, Monday - Friday.


This picture shows the section behind the Monday divider. I have the daily layout there, and then a list of things to do that day (my "Agenda"), and sometimes a few other things -- handouts or worksheets for the kids, whatever.

The other days of the week are set up in the same way. There is another section in front of the binder for general things.

I try to keep only the things that I will need for that week in there. I have another binder for the bigger picture things -- it's the red one on here:

(The green one is for my son's stuff -- I'll write that out sometime, too -- here's a couple of pictures).

This is my basket -- simple but quite effective -- I can put anything "loose" there. Here it holds some math squared paper to use with my son next week, and a couple of drafted checklists, plus a local town newspaper and a Veritas Press magazine.

I keep my folder for that week in the basket, too -- you can see it's underneath -- a sort of maroon color.


At the end of the week, as I listed in my bullet points above, I take the old papers out of the binder and go through my basket, tossing what's really no longer needed, and filing the rest in the week's folder. The folder goes in its proper place in this box.



This is how the system I wrote about here has evolved. For now, it is simple enough so that I actually use it, and I am hoping it will also make it easy to go back to a particular time and open that week's folder and retrieve whatever I might need.

Folder System for 2008

I've been working on making a file crate system -- the link is to Dawn's posts on that subject. Sorry, the picture is blurry. My camera was running out of batteries so I couldn't take another one.

More File Crate Systems:

Here's another one at Three Plus Two.

And another one at My Thoughtful Spot.

Last year I had a simple one. It is described here. It actually worked really well. I didn't use it 100%, probably more like 70%, but that is about 50% better than most earlier years.

The way I used it was mostly retrospectively rather than prospectively. I didn't generally get around to putting flyers and plans into the folders ahead of time as Dawn explained she did in her folders. Once in a while I did, but only when I was really cruising. Instead, I would put the kids' completed work and various little mementos of things we had done -- little art projects or maybe a bulletin for an event, that type of thing.

At the end of the last school year, I simply retired the whole box as it was, folders and all. Now I will be able to go back and look and save the longterm treasures; it won't be perfectly organized but it won't be a jumbled pile like it generally has been in past years.

This year I'm doing it a bit differently. Instead of seasons, months, weeks, and days, I took folders that were color-coded by semester. I haven't labelled them yet, as you can see, though I have put them in order. Each folder stands for one week so there are six for the next six weeks of summer, then 40 for the schoolyear (counting vacation weeks). The colors are as follows:

• Light blue is for summer and Christmas and other breaks.
• Burgundy is for the fall trimester
• Dark blue is for the winter trimester
• Teal is for the spring semester
• Grey is for the review weeks I put in twice a term. There are three weeks at the end of the third term for review/catch up.
  

(see here for proposed calendar for the year)



Here is the binder I have been working on, that I described here. See, it's pretty basic but it is helping me. I start a new page for every new subject as I walk mentally through the first week. I probably won't have to have a page per lesson all through the year -- I hope not, since that would be one big stack of paper -- but I already have benefited from being able to mentally/spatially separate different things on different pages.



The folder system has the same effect. I can put things in where they belong and not have to shuffle through them again until it is time to do so. I am aiming to try to put things in there ahead of time, this time. Kim explains how she does this, (with photos of binders and crates) and here is another one about the nitty-gritty.

Aidan and his Flannelboard

Aidan just loves these counting felts that I mentioned in the last post. He has been playing with them all day. For a child with sensory and developmental issues, the tactile (and non-plastic) nature of them, plus the bright colors and concreteness, are very attractive.



There is a simple workbook included in the package (picture below). Very simple, more for a preschooler than a kid Aidan's developmental age. But you could use them as Montessori type command cards. I can think of all sorts of things to do with the "numbers", as Aidan calls them -- color, shape, sequencing (patterns), categorization -- plus adding and subtracting.

Generally speaking, for abstracting the universal from the material. CF this cute video Elmo vs Aristotle made by some students at TAC.



I got them from the Felt Source. It would also be easy to make my own shapes (here is a handbook online and I'm sure there are all kinds of other resources). But the prices were reasonable for buying the ready-made ones, and though the felt is not all-natural, the feeling of it isn't so phoney, to me, as that of plastic or enamel-painted wood.

I told my kids that flannelboards were a staple of my years of going to Sunday School as a child from an evangelical Protestant background! But only the teachers got to handle the flannels, and the stories were usually a bit contrived.

..."Here is Joseph.... his father Jacob.... gave him a .... many-colored coat..... his brothers.... were very angry." (the ellipses are where the teacher scrambled to get the new visual on the board.

Just a bit twaddly, though it must have had an effect since I still have all those Bible stories down cold. Probably more from my mom reading aloud and my later independent readings though, than from that hour a week of crafts and stories and cute little songs.

I have some Bible story felts that I am going to introduce later when the thrill of the counting ones have worn off a bit.. But I'm going to present them rather than do the Sunday School thing. ...let the kids handle them. I imagine that the Bible figures won't be nearly as interesting to Aidan as the numbers and multiple pictures of the counting set. But we will see; now that he has fallen in love with the felt idea maybe I can use the Bible figures to introduce some of the stories he isn't developmentally ready to have read or told to him in abstract.