Happy weekend friends!
Our week was full of doctor appointments, therapies and other shenanigans. Somehow we managed to almost complete our weekly to-do list.
Sensorial:
I had great ambitions this week for completing our constructive triangle work and adding some tasting bottles to the shelf, but we just ran out of time for those this week; what we did accomplish was pretty epic.
Sound cylinders are a favorite.
The girls were excited to complete the table of Pythagoras. It’s pretty cool, a visual representation of what basically works out to be the multiplication table. This is the sensorial version of the work. We have a decanomial yet to make (using beads) coming up after we’ve practiced this version a few times. Mary did it quite easily. Josie had a bit of trouble but ultimately did really well too.
Goals… need some pots for my pretty plants ASAP.
I got this great book from Amazon called, “What’s Your Angle, Pythagoras,” and it’s brilliant.
That’s inching into elementary work while we are still striving to complete our primary album. But I’m sure we will be there before we know it.
Math
We’ve been really paying attention to all the squares our numbers make this week.
Bead chain squares:
Look we made another square! This is new work for Mary: the multiplication board. I didn’t get any good video of this in action, but I highly recommend checking out Jae from Pinay Homeschooler‘s very easy to understand video on this work.
Mary’s direct quote upon finishing the 3x table was, “Hey this was really fun. It was like fireworks went off. Boom!”
Gathering bead chains:
Think this was for a snack break?
You can see we’re doing golden bead work with cheerios.
Josie is highly motivated by food. We’re focusing on formation of numbers primarily, but also two digit static (no borrowing / exchanging) and dynamic addition (exchanging ten ones for a ten bar).
This isn’t a beautiful picture, but I thought I’d show how we store our cheerios that haven’t yet been eaten. 🙂 We reuse the pipe cleaners. By the way this great idea came from Jennifer — find her at Etsy shop Branch to Bloom. Thanks Jennifer!
I recorded some of this work too — but I realized my presentation here could use a lot of work. I need to slooooow down. Noted!!
We spent around 4 hours this week working on our Cheerio math! Trying so hard. She did a bead chain every day but Thursday too, and while building with Cheerios is still super fun, she’s getting tired of the bead chains. Gotta dial it back next week I suppose. The plan is to incorporate more songs to help with memory. We’ve been there, done that with pretty much everything at this point. But we haven’t sung or done any memory work in a couple months, so we will go back to that. Rotating through our options trying to keep this basic level of math fresh!
This girl loves the clock work. She needs more skip counting practice too. I see a five, long bead chain in her future next week. Guess we should add some five skip counting songs too. I don’t think we’ve done any of those before. Mostly we’ve stuck to various 10s songs and the “Numbers of the Hundred Chart” song by Heidi Songs.
Independent fraction work. They really love fractions.
We read a new book. I had planned on making apple muffins this week too but life. Hopefully next week?
Here’s the addition strip board again, a variation where you build tens in multiple ways. I have one more presentation with it I keep forgetting to show them, but all three kids are consistently practicing and enjoying what they already know to do. So don’t mess with that, right?
Practical Life
Mary’s been in charge of keeping all the plants watered and flower vases filled with fresh flowers from the yard. She’s pretty proud of that. Natural green thumb.
Language work this week was super fun:
Language shelves
Here’s the conjunction presentation basket:
We wrote out, “The white flowers” and “the pink rose” and found the adjectives, nouns and articles.
Then we tied our flowers together using the pink string. But our words were not joined together, so we remembered the conjunction joins words together like a pink string.
And we played with our words by cutting them up and moving them around to create a new phrase.
Then we had some practice writing our phrase we created, and we stamped the parts of speech with our grammar stamps.
They really love this and are so proud of their pictures. They asked if we could frame them, and I told them we would try to put these into a book later when we have more. They liked that idea a lot.
What else… we got a gorgeous tracing board from Treasures FromJennifer on Etsy! She is just so nice, and they really take great pleasure in putting out a beautiful, quality product. Go check out the goodies there. 
Mary worked with the Grammar Farm and moveable alphabet a lot this week while Josie and I did our one-on-one math.
Art:
Homeschool Pottery has started up again. All three kids are learning to use the wheel. That is just the coolest thing to me. I cannot wait to see what I get to take home!!
Violin: The girls are working hard practicing for orchestra. They also received their Spring recital pieces. Josie is beside herself excited about hers: “Hedwig’s Theme.” We’re now hearing her play Harry Potter all day long (there are worse things right?)!!
Mary is learning a piece from Disney’s Moana and is also extremely excited — but I don’t think anyone could match Josie’s enthusiasm at the moment. 🙂
Mike is learning the “Popcorn Song.” Should be cute.
Lastly a blend of Cultural / Geography / Science / Biology:
We’ve been focusing on the Everglades this week thanks to this stunning work mat from Waseca Biomes. We love it.
Here’s a quick photo dump and video link to our work. We’ve done three presentations and will wrap up our last one (two?) next week. The girls especially love this work.
This is the girls feigning exhaustion from working so hard to label EVERYTHING. They had also just acted out ALL of the verbs and associated a verb with the animals. Really cool practice for parts of speech too!
Pointing out North America. Trying to get her to remember where Florida is on the map. Won’t stick, but we keep trying.
This is by no means ALL the things we accomplished; however this is all that I’m posting for now! We have a cute saint box for St Joseph’s feast day I’ll post in a couple days too for sure. As always, hope this in-depth detailed look is helpful to someone. Even if not, I have so much fun going back over all the craziness of the week. We get a lot done, and I’m really proud of that and how hard my kids work. Homeschooling rocks. Look for Montessori homeschooling week in review VOLUME 3 next Saturday!!
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As for fun stuff I’ve found this past week, there wasn’t too much time for Pinteresting or reading for fun — barely even time for working my “real world” part-time job.
I did find a couple cool things:
1. Really excited about this conjunction extension work. Look for us trying it out, hopefully, next week.
2. This post has some gorgeous practical life trays for little ones. *swoon*
3. Excellent post on Montessori’s view of development in regards to obedience and behavior. I’m trying to re-read The Discovery of the Child when I find some time… oh precious time.
4. Speaking of precious time — baby countdown: I’m 30 weeks and counting! Yikes.
5. Lastly, in prep for baby and for a more Montessori-inspired boys’ room (love saying that), we’re getting some IKEA bins to hold clothing. Soon I hope. Can’t wait to work on all of that because I have been a nesting-fool lately. Post to come in the future!!
6. Sneak preview of some beautiful play silks we just got in the mail today. I’m planning on a giveaway here on this blog in the next few weeks (realistically probably May). I cannot wait to write up some posts on these and introduce various invitations to play / sneaky grammar work / writing centers to my kiddos.
Love our sweet, tiny Playmobil critters too. 
That’s all she wrote folks — for now! Thanks for reading. 🙂
<3 Jeni
P.S. Absolutely nothing in this post is an affiliate link. So click freely! Ha 😉
I absolutely love your post and your work. It is awsome how your girls manage the work! My daugther is 4yo and is a homeschooler. Your blog will be our big inspiration 🙂 Thank you very much
Thank you so much!! I appreciate your kind words 🙂 Enjoy homeschooling your daughter. It is crazy how they get so big so fast. <3