Teaching Trays Tuesday

I have never considered myself a follower of Montessori- as a teacher or parent- but it apparently has grown on me.

Julia is wanting to get more involved when we have school time. There are some activities she can do with Carter- and I have two shelves with materials just for her- but I've been trying to come up with some contained activities that will be new to her, somewhat challenging, and let her learn something in the process. When I saw the Tot Trays on the Totally Tots blog, I thought 'this is it'. We can make this work. Essentially they are Montessori-inspired activities arranged on self-contained trays that can be used for direct instruction or independently by the child. They are great for a wide span of ages and make so much sense for us with a 2 and 5 year old. So I browsed some blogs like this and this for inspiration and put together a list of 33 that I liked- as well as a few of my own. They are so easy to put together. I tried out two of them with the kids on Friday and it was a huge hit, so I decided to put it all together. I have a large Sterilite tub that holds all the materials for the trays. You can use actual trays or cookie sheets/pans for the activities. We arrange ours in one of the 6 cube shelves they sell everywhere. You can have them available to your kids all the time and vary the activities or only put them out at certain times. I am amazed how inexpensive (and fun) putting all this together has been. I started this past weekend and have put together 22 of the 31 for under $40 and by the time I'm finished I will have spent less than $50. There are so many things you can do for free or almost free. Here is one of my all time favorites...........

Pick up two sheets of several different colors of paint swatches. Using a glue gun, attach a swatch to each clothespin. You can use the extra to make mixed color cards (like the white square in the picture). The kids have to match the colors and clip them to the cards. This teaches color discrimination, attention to detail, and develops fine motor skills in squeezing the clothespins. To make it more challenging for older children, add different tones of the same colors. We have two blue cards of different tones. (I also attached the swatch cards to cardstock, with hot glue, to make them a little heavier) This only costs 67 cents for half a bag of clothespins plus one stick of hot glue!!!!

This next one is a great life skill, math lesson, and fine motor activity teaching dry measure (and you probably have this stuff lying around anyway) This way the kids can gets lots of practice at once instead of just the two or three times when you make a recipe.........

I love this next one, too for practicing shapes- and its virtually free! Using popsicle sticks, write the words 'triangle', 'square', 'pentagon', and 'octagon' on the corresponding number of sticks. Using markers make matching dots for each shape set. The kids assemble the shapes by matching the dots and at the same time learn the number of sides, corners, and the shape names. This was perfect for us because we have been working on the difference between hexagons and octagons. As they get older you can add 'heptagon, 'nonagon', 'decagons', 'dodecagons', etc.......
And this is something I had never seen before, nor even thought of- but lots of fun. Using a spice/cheese shaker (Garden Ridge) and dry spaghetti. The kids have to fill all the holes. If nothing else, this one definitely works on patience and task endurance.......
You should introduce the available activities to your kids and let them choose which to do. They work at each independently. There is opening of containers, arranging, and cleanup involved with each and is actually part of the process in teaching kids to be independent and responsible. They should be instructed to keep all items on the tray (the best they can) and have a dust buster and kid-sized dustpan available for cleaning up if needed.

I'll post more pictures and instructions next Tuesday. If anyone wants the complete list, please feel free to email me :)