Days of learning - elementary

Binx has had a pretty full week, these are just what I got pictures of - sentence analysis work, (she loves this and would do it all day, I feel like I have to come up with new sentences every single evening), exploring multiples with the bead chains, commutative and distributive laws, and spelling practice with a homemade small moveable alphabet.

The classification with buttons came about because she was looking at the six kingdoms of living things and was concentrating pretty hard when she suddenly looked up at me and said 'but why?!' 'Why do we put everything in different groups?' For an answer,, I went and got the button box and dumped a load out on the rug then asked her to find me one particular one. Binx tried to just nudge them around to find it at first and then started sorting them into piles of different colours of her own accord. I had a minor fanfare going off in my head, but tried not to let it show! I just sneakily dropped a few ideas in here and there like, 'ooh, I wonder if you could split those white ones up anymore?' And pretty soon she had me writing her labels (still a reluctant writer!) for the classifying you can see in the picture. She ended up answering her own question when she said 'it's much easier to find it once I've sorted them out a bit' "lightbulb moment!"

Last picture is of her experimenting with the thermic tablets, these are small pieces of different materials (wood, stone, metal, glass) which you can match together by feeling the differences in weight and temperature. I find it interested that she is still so interested in the sensorial equipment, she obviously doesn't repeat things over and over like a three year old would but she really seems to get a lot out of it. Maybe it's a sort of downtime activity as it does quite often follow a quite intense bout of learning, maybe it's just fun, or maybe it's a sibling thing (he's doing it so I want to as well?!), whatever the reason it's fine by me. I wonder if students at a montessori school get access to the younger students work? Anyone know?