The Rainbow Connection

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Matching Two-Dimensional Shapes
• Color Tablets
• Graduated Rainbow
• Fun with Magnets
• Sorting

One downside to homeschooling? Having "real life" intrude on your child's school time. Our new-to-us Jeep Cherokee (the one that's been continually in and out of the shop since we bought it back in November) started overheating this morning, so I had to deal with that mess before my son and I could start our homeschool session. If he'd been in a traditional, outside-the-home school, our car's cooling system troubles wouldn't necessarily have interfered with his education. The hour or so we spent tracking down our mechanic and then transporting our vehicle to the big gravel lot where he works wasn't a complete waste, though: Parker now knows the word "thermostat," and has a rudimentary grasp on what an auto thermostat is supposed to do. This, in addition to the other words he's learned since we bought our lovely lemon: solenoid, (car) computer, radiator. Once we'd been dropped back home by our mechanic (Parker directed him to our house--a skill I hadn't realized my son had already acquired), we did have a good (if foreshortened) homeschool session. We're still working on sensorial activities, but I've also put some basic math (sorting) and science (magnets) materials out on Parker's school shelves, just to mix things up a bit.

There's a more traditional "matching two-dimensional shapes" Montessori activity, which I will prepare and introduce to my son soon. In the meantime, the mini-puzzles out of the Lauri Toys Primer Pack I bought Parker prior to our last big trip make for pretty good practice working with geometric shapes. He disassembles all four puzzles at once, then puts them back together, piece by piece. There are various-sized circles, ovals, triangles and quadrilaterals, so he has to identify size as well as shape to complete the puzzles.

Color tablets are insanely easy to make: you just cut up paint sample strips! In this activity, the child is supposed to grade the shades of one color, i.e. line them up from darkest to lightest. I saved half of each paint sample strip to serve as the control of error; after my son does his best to line up the color tablets in the correct order, he can compare his work to the still intact paint sample strip to see if they match.

Working with shades of purple.

Checking his work.

My mother-in-law sent me a box of Montessori goodies a while back, which we've been enjoying. Parker particularly likes an activity called the "graduated rainbow" (I made that name up--I don't know its technical title). It consists of pieces of red, orange, yellow, green, blue and purple felt cut into half-circles, graduated in size. The red half-circle is the largest and the purple half-circle is the smallest, so you end up with a rainbow when you do the activity correctly.

Another treasure from Grandma Betty: farm sorting cards. These are twelve square cards with pictures of horses, roosters and pigs glued on. There's one pink, one red, one yellow and one black horse; one pink, one red, one yellow and one black rooster; and one pink, one red, one yellow and one black pig. Parker can sort the cards either by animal or by color. Today, he lined up the pigs, pink, black, red, yellow. Then he copied that color sequence with the horse cards, placing them above the pigs, and then again with the rooster cards. Then he sat back and realized that he had rows of the same animal and columns of the same color. Cool stuff.

Magnet fun.