Notebook pages! Journaling pages! Pretty stuff. : )  We are trying to do more notebooking this year and it is taking various forms. Obviously the Home Journal took precedence for mom but I am also trying to make more regular entries in my nature notebook. I was way inspired by some illustrated journal sites online. I doubt mine will ever look that good but it freed me to make pages that weren’t perfect – neither perfectly planned nor perfectly executed. Only perfectly pleasurable.

After a phone call this morning I took several pics of pages made with the templates from the Home Mgt Journal posts. Hopefully these will help you think outside the box(es) on the templates when helping your kids make their journal pages.

First of all, the templates work for any type of notebook page – history, religion, science, lit, etc. Printing on cardstock makes for a sturdier page. Don’t get into a color rut. Printing paper comes in lots of colors besides white and they make for considerably punchier pages. Those are notebooking "upgrades" that don’t cost time or money.

When planning a page consider whether it will contain mostly text or mostly images or a mix and then pick a template that works best. Narrations can be typed into the text boxes before printing or you can type in gray lines before printing as writing guides for handwritten narrations. Likewise net images can be imported before printing or cut and pasted afterwards. The text boxes also work great for bible verses, poetry exerpts or copywork. Bullet headers are acceptable at our house. Not everything needs a lengthy narration. We are just shooting for pegs to hang the information on to aid retention.

Anything can find its way onto a page. Coloring pages are trimmed and saved, leaf samples, charts, diagrams, you name it. The boxes serve as ‘containers’ to house these treasures neatly and bind them into easily stored books. (vs stuffing them into hidden corner of the house ; ))

I will try to upload more pages as we go. Please shoot me a note if you have pages to share!

Meredith asked for directions for the bank game Kieran was playing in a previous post and I figured I would post them here as well. Montessori World has directions for the decimal system activities that we have used. Shu Chen Jenny’s Math album has a similar set of instructions for golden bead decimal work. the bank game is basically what they call the addition and subtraction work. The tray with all the blocks on it is the ‘bank’ where the student can trade in ten ones for a ten rod for instance. 

I substitute base ten blocks because they truly are the same thing – just square. I can live with a variation like that. ; ) They are also very easy to come by locally. If you don’t feel up to making all the exercises yourself then an inexpensive workbook like Spectrum Math can be used for practice. You just use the blocks to present the concepts vs the book.  That is what ours are doing they are able to compute much larger numbers than their ages and grades would suggest.

Hope that helps!

We are getting school done in the midst of our organizing and baby prep. <g> Here are some highlights from the younger crowd:

Aidan learned to tie his shoes at the advanced age of ‘just turned 7’. He has lived in a velcro world up til now. We sat at the table for several minutes last week and he figured it right out. Boy was he happy! He was overheard saying this while tying, "MAN I am GOOD!" "I have GOT to teach Kieran to do this!!"

His other feat was mastering the Roman numeral combos for  X, V and I. We printed them off from here. Here are some worksheets to practice on. I told him it would be considerate to struggle just a big so I could justify having printed and cut lol!The boy has a photographic memory like his second oldest brother.

Kieran has been playing the bank game with the base ten blocks and the place value cards.(they are at the bottom of the linked page)  He can form numbers through thousands now. We just began adding these larger numbers without exchanging. You can see he too is rather pleased with himself. We started with these when he told me he could count to 100 and could read those numbers. Actually I am not quite sure how exactly he learned to do that but I am not questioning a good thing!

Otherwise he is busy writing letters and telling everyone how many of each they have in their names. He and I both have one ‘K’ and one ‘I’ each I am told.

Brendan’s new trick is to crouch over and wiggle his fingers under his face which is our cue to say something along the lines of "oooooooh scary!" He then squeals with satisfaction and runs off.  That isn’t Montessori fwiw, just darn cute. ; D

Tim Seldin, president of the Montessori Foundation, has just released a new book that looks to be excellent. It’s subtitle explains the book will describe ‘the Montessori way to bring up caring, confident children’. This fills a void in the market because most of the available titles focus on the academics of the method and are not specifically addressed to parents. This book, in contrast, appears to focus on the home and guides the parent to creating a supportive environment – not a Montessori school – in which a child can flourish.

Montessori principles are included in a natural manner as are some standard Montessori apparatus. Also included are practical examples of modifications one can make to the home to help facilitate independence and reduce frustration. All this is accompanied by loads of DK style photographs of actual rooms and children. To me, this is the book’s selling point. It is a visual feast and can serve to plant ideas firmly in our minds.

Check out the link and let the publisher know we appreciate their efforts to reach out beyond the school market and serve Montessori minded parents!

If you haven’t already been, stop by Montessori for Everyone and get your new downloads!  I like her monthly work plans even better than the Little City plans. Very feasible! No bells and whistles but you can be sure if you cover these things you will have a good foundation upon which to add great read alouds, art/music appreciation, and notebook projects. Bear in mind when you see headings in the plan such as "long vowel/short vowel" or "synonyms" or "addition problems" you can also insert file folder games into those slots.

Lapbook and manipulative fans know Dinah Zike is a household name in this industry. I just recieved this from her mailing and thought I would pass it on so as to increase the prayers heading her way:

"Dear Friends in Education,

On Sept. 1st of this year I was diagnosed with breast
cancer. Needless to say, the diagnosis was totally unexpected, very
shocking, and completely life-changing, but as hundreds of thousands
of women have experienced before me, it is surmountable! My husband,
Ignacio, has been by my side and continues to help me daily as he
does his architectural work from home, and Cecile (who has been with
me 18 years) and all the employees of my company are keeping things
moving forward as my energy level is greatly reduced.

I had a mastectomy on Sept. 20th, and I am doing very well. The
cancer had spread to three lymph nodes, but they removed 14 to be
safe. I am slowly recovering a wider range of arm movement on my left
side, but still experience great discomfort from nerve ending
damage. I hear this, too, will subside with time. The cancer was a
Grade 3 cell (very deformed and fast growing), and I started
chemotherapy on Oct. 19. I will have six months of chemo and then 5-6
weeks of radiation. I was neither estrogen nor progesterone positive,
so I will not be able to take the new oral cancer medications, but
will take an IV drug called Herceptin for a year instead. I’ve had a
port/cath implanted in my upper right chest to receive the next 16
months of IV treatments.

They say I will lose my hair within the next few weeks, and I’m
definitely going to be thinner! Ignacio says he is going to shave his
head when I lose my hair, but I’m not sure I want him to. I think at
least one of us should have hair. I’m going to get a very short hair
cut the end of this week; I’ve always been afraid to try it–now is
the time!

My cancer was NOT detectable by self examination, and it could not be
felt once the mammogram showed its exact location. Please stress the
importance of mammograms to those you love. I want to share my
experiences with breast cancer in hope that other women will be
encouraged to go for regular tests. I was scheduled to go in May, but
postponed it until Sept. I am so fortunate we found it when we did,
what if I had waited another year? Don’t wait!

I am enjoying my time at home immensely, and I’m able to write and
design! I’m currently working on and supervising the production of
new Foldable Math manipulatives, my long overdue World History book
(which is nearly ready!) and four new language arts books for
phonics, vocabulary, and spelling. I am looking forward to being home
with my family this fall and holiday season.

My workshops have been canceled until late Spring ’07(hopefully I’ll
be doing short conference presentations by late Spring, too). We will
also continue Dinah Zike Academy trainer-of-trainer sessions in
February ’07. As many of you know, my Academy is held in historic
Comfort, Texas, in the beautiful Texas Hill Country, and I look
forward to working with visiting teachers just a few blocks from our
home. Check the DZAcademy website http://www.dzacademy.com for dates
and classes offered.

I thank you for your support through the years, and ask you to help
me continue to share my Foldables and three-dimensional interactive
graphic organizers with students and teachers.

My husband and I are blessed. We thank you deeply for your prayers
and best wishes, and I look forward to seeing you at workshops and
conferences in the near future.

Dinah Zike"

Someone on the montessorimakers yahoo egroup just posted this link to printable control charts for the science puzzles. They would make great templates for 3 part cards or whatnot.

   The little boys had a blast with a couple of extension activities we saw online.  For starters the ‘sandpaper’ letters are actually felt. I got the felt letter stickers from Walmart in the sign making section (where they have stencils and mailbox stuff).  I laminated index cards and stuck the felt stickers to the cards.

    Aidan knows his alphabet and is reading by now but he enjoyed identifying the letters by touch only.

    Kieran worked on the letter sounds for a bit and then he went on to practice making the letters on the cornmeal tray.

This pic shows my one-two punch for record keeping. In the last post I shared our weekly goal chart and the notebook for recording what actually got done in detail. This pic shows where it goes. I got large accordian files to store loose papers and projects as they are finished. The files are labelled by person and subject. I also have a file for "this week" which includes odds and ends in progress. We love binders for notebooking but love them less for looseleaf paper. The notebooks are saved for keep-it-forever projects like the book of centuries, the religion notebook, the geography copybook etc. Math, grammar drills, and so on go into the file to verify they are covering those areas. Binder/notebook pages often start out in the accordian file and eventually I will assemble them into the permanent binder when we have enough page protectors to house them.

   This system has a lot of advantages over the binder-for-everything plan which we tried years ago. No more binders with pages half ripped out for starters. I always felt that was instilling a habit of carelessness.  Many papers were lost as well. Page protectors for every single math page are impractical to say the least and add way too much bulk for everyday work. It also takes time to reinforce holes and sort into binders. Better to do that when you have saved up a bunch of work. The file takes seconds to open and deposit the work. At year’s end you can close it up and label it and put the whole file into permanent storage for high school transcripts if need be.

   The Montessori homeschool list was discussing record keeping and I was asked to post my checklist. Decided I would post it here while I was at it.  This year’s record keeping is very simple but we have been able to keep up with it well. I have this chart Download school_weekly_goal_checklist.doc  which I print out for the girls. They can still self-select but it helps to remind us all of the types of things we want to cover each week.  I took the categories from places like Ambleside Online and our Montessori work so its a CM/Montessori mix.

   The red boxes represent the daily seatwork time. The rest they try to hit throughout the week. We don’t do ALL these things every week, admirable as that would actually be. However, I keep the crossed off lists and use them to see if some areas are getting neglected over time so we stay relatively balanced. (academically anyway ; ))

  I also have one composition notebook – per Dr Raymond Moore’s suggestion –  I use as a journal of sorts to write down which pages were done and titles of real books read etc each day. We are enrolled in a private umbrella school and need to keep a calendar so monthly I refer to the dates in the notebook and transfer them to the attendance chart thing. I had once tried composition books for each child.  That was too hard to keep track of and we do much group work so it had to be reentered multiple times.  This way it goes in once for the day. Older kids write their own entries which helps too.

   We have tried computer programs and spread sheets and you name it over the years. Nothing beats ten minutes with the composition bk imo!