Vegetable Garden

Kitchen gardens are all the rage at schools around Australia. It is something parents, teachers and the wider community are all keen to get behind - and with good reason. There are so many positives to having a kitchen garden at school, especially when the children are able to take responsibility and ownership of it for themselves.

What's in the vegetable garden?

Geography Activities

Geography can be a really fun area to explore and with a little thought and inspiration you can turn geography into a cross-curricula activity to include language, maths and science.

Having great references for students to access can really spark their interest. I like to have a two or

Whales & Grasshoppers

One of the home-school families I do some tutoring with have started looking at whales, so to continue and extend the theme into our tutoring time I made a mini pack of materials that I think could be useful to others as well.

Number Cards

Ok, I will start by acknowledging there are great deal of number cards out there to download. And the majority of them are great/cute/fun/etc. But there is something special about the Montessori style ones you see.

Montessori mathematics is VERY clever and I could write oodles on the topic of just how clever the maths materials you see in Montessori classrooms are. Essentially though, everything has a direct purpose and an indirect purpose (laying the foundation for something else to come). Which brings me to the number cards.

The Montessori number cards, and the way young children are taught to lay out the corresponding counters, are purposeful in the pattern they use. The direct purpose of the cards are for teaching the value of numbers, but the indirect purpose that the pattern prepares the child for is the more abstract concept of odd and even numbers. So whilst it is not explicitly taught at this stage, it is preparing them for concept for when the time comes and providing an opportunity for the child to make this discovery for herself. You may see this pattern in other numeracy materials I have developed.

The file has a set of cards with the numeral and a set with the word. They can be used as three part cards or flash cards depending on your preference and environment. Want to know more about three part cards? Read this.

You can find a FREE set of number cards HERE and HERE.

Linked to Learn & Play

Colours in French

My own children are learning several languages, through school and through their own interests. My youngest is learning French at school so I have been making some resources to help him revise and extend himself at home.

Colours in Japanese

I have made some three part cards for the Japanese names of colours. For some idea's on how to extend the use of these check out this post.

You can find the file for free HERE and HERE.

Colours in Italian

Learning colours in Italian? These three part cards are great way to reinforce and revise the child's knowledge. Looking for idea's on how to extend the use of this resources? Take a look at this post.

You can find the file for free HERE and HERE.

Easter Freebie

For my tutoring students this week I have made some Easter themed activities as little take home gift, which I thought I would share with everyone as well.

This mini-pack has two Sudoku puzzles and a page of cutting strips.
You can find the file HERE and HERE.
Enjoy!

Linked to Montessori Monday

Desktop Cursive Cards

Last year I made a cursive writing desk top template for some of my students. These are a really handy reference to have for students as they develop their penmanship.

I made one side upper case letters with numerals and lower case with numerals on the reverse side. I have also included a template of upper and lower case letters together, and a set with dotted thirds also.

These are available in two different fonts, D'Nealian and Learning Curve.

This FREEBIE can be found HERE. It was included in my April newsletter first. For future advanced copies you can sign up here:

Mammalian Orders

I love classification work! It is so much fun, I think because language and etymology really come into play and it can be one way of engaging students with some lively discussion.

This set of mammal cards serve as an introduction to the main orders within the class mammalia. There is a picture card and information/description card for the orders covered (18). They have been colour coded as these are the first in a series of resources, as I hope to cover each of the classes.

Rainbow Frog Adjective Game

One Montessori activity I love is the Detective Adjective Game. You can find an outline of this at HERE, but essentially children learn to discern the different types of triangles through a guessing game using adjectives as clues.

Last year I made a different version of this game for a tutoring student with learning difficulties. I got the idea after we had a session discussing their favourite book Rainbow Frogs.