Bring Autumn Into Our Classroom

It is Autumn, the weather is beautiful, and I have been trying to bring some of the season's beauty to our lessons lately to keep T interested.

We collected a big pile of pine comes on a nature walk and had to find something to do with them. We made a little display for our nature table.

T pulled this succulent from his terrarium and we placed it in this cute one that hangs in the window. I actually bought this for $0.30 on clearance from Target. Its one of those dollar spot items from a while back. I thought it was pretty.

T wanted to do something "spooky" with his pinecone craft project. He isn't a big crafter so it was fun to see him excited about doing something. I saw something I thought he would like recently at The Magic Onions and he gave it a try. A pinecone spider, using one pinecone, four pipe cleaners, hot glue and as many wiggly eyes as desired. My son ended up only doing 6 eyes even though he insisted that he knew that they have 8 eyes. He also added a yarn web strand.

Of course, we couldn't spend all of our time crafting since T is in elementary. We took our Autumn theme into our Grammar lesson. We have really been slacking on Grammar lately. T does not really find it interesting and so it is hard to get him to focus on it. Recently, he asked questions about our grammar solids that have been sitting on the shelf for over a year now. I took that opportunity to jump into elementary Grammar work. We have been doing the early presentations very quickly. He hasn't had a problem understanding or remembering so we are just moving as quickly as we can to keep his interest. When we go over and over things, he often gets bored.

Here we did a lesson on the Adjective using different colored leaves. In our manual, it describes the lesson using different colored flowers but we only had two colors of flowers left in our yard. We had several different colors of leaves just waiting to be the start of the lesson. I placed a red, yellow and green leaf on the table along with a label "the leaf." I asked T to read the label and bring me the item described. He read it and asked "which one?" I repeated that he should bring me what the label described. He chose one leaf (because it said "the" meaning one) and it didn't matter which, I told him it was not the one I wanted. He brought me another and I gave the same response, but added that maybe I should have given him more information. I cut the label between "the" and "leaf"and placed a label with the word "yellow" between them. He then brought me the yellow leaf.

He copied the sentence in his language notebook and labeled it with the correct symbols for Article, Adjective and Noun.

We also reviewed the Noun Family and the order in which they should appear. We rearranged the labels and read them. By doing this, we determined that this is the only logical order for Article, Adjective and Noun. 

I also gave him the lesson on the symbols used for the Noun Family. Why did Montessori choose the pyramid shape, the size and the color for these symbols? She was inspired by the Pyramids of Giza, which are strong and stable. The sizes have to do with the importance of the Noun over the other two, yet they are all related. We happened to have a small plastic model of the Pyramids of Giza from our Safari Ltd. Around the World Toob. He also looked at the real image of the Pyramids on our matching 3 part card.