Birthday Celebration Montessori Style

There is a wonderful Montessori tradition of celebrating birthdays that we decided to do this year. T has had this celebration twice before when he attended a Montessori school but we didn't do it at home last year. This year I decided it would be fun to do it at home. You don't need much and it doesn't take long. You only need a birthday child, a globe, a candle and pictures of the bday child (optional).

I recently purchased a lot of used Montessori materials from a local school that was closing and found a lovely gold colored candle holder from India in the box. I thought it looked perfect for the candle's role as the Sun. T cut out a sun shape from yellow paper with 12 rays, on which we wrote the months of the year. We lit the candle and placed it, and its holder, on top of the paper sun in the center of the room. T held the globe and walked around the "sun" one time for each year of his life. He turned 8 this year so he walked around the "sun" 8 times. After he walked each time, I talked about a few special things he did for the first time at that age. Examples of special things: learned to walk, learned to ride a bike, went to school, became a big brother/sister, moved, etc.  During his walk around the sun we sang the following song (to the tune of the Farmer in the Dell)

"The Earth goes round the Sun,
The Earth goes round the Sun,
The Earth goes round the Sun and child's name turns one" continues to whatever age they are.

T, being an 8 year old boy, did not walk around the sun....he ran around the sun. B was sitting nearby but she didn't make it into any pictures because she had to sit far enough back that she didn't get trampled.

We used our Hugg-a-planet plush globe which was great because I didn't have to worry about it going flying out of his hands while he was running.

Some schools/homes also use beads in a dish for each year. The child gets to place a bead in the dish each time they go around the circle. T wasn't interested in doing this so we skipped it, he just started at the point where his birth month was and walked around and stopped at the same spot between years.