If answering the 5 W’s of homeschooling, you already know the who (us, and you if you want!), I shared with you the when, and the why. The where is easy, we learn everywhere! The world is our classroom; our garden, the zoo, the grocery store, library, living room floor, dining room table, hammock in the front yard, tree house… We even have a classroom, and if the occasion calls for it, we can sit in there and learn, though we usually don’t. It’s more of an activity access and storage center, with a couple of work stations for art projects and writing. Tune in next week and I’ll give you a classroom tour.
Today, though, I promised to show you an example of our “What,” as in what do we do. “What curriculum do you use?” is a common question that we field. Answer: I don’t have one. After examining several, they all had holes, none of them covered all I wanted to cover in a method that I wanted things covered, so rather than buy them all to piecemeal, I started off by writing my own preschool curriculum. I discovered the Montessori method of education, and really loved it. So a lot of the examples that I share are going to be Montessori and manipulative based.
These are called Grammar Boxes. This week, the kids received an introductory lesson to sentence diagramming. The boys have been familiar with nouns and verbs compliments of Mad Libs, this lesson reinforced their knowledge, and encouraged them to share their knowledge with their little sister. Macy mastered the articles (orange) and nouns (black)
Here is Eryk matching nouns ending in “f” or “fe” with their plurals ending in “ves”
And here Iain is constructing sentences using verbs (red), articles (orange), and nouns (black).
The Montessori method for teaching parts of speech and sentence construction uses color coded word cards, and a labled hard wood organizational box. The Montessori manipulatives can be expensive, you can make your own, or work without them. The boxes, while helpful for organizing and reinforcing the different categories of the parts of speech, aren’t entirely necessary, the key really is in the word cards and sentence strips. As you can see, my kids have no problem working directly on the floor.
I purchased the sentence strips and word cards from Montessori Printshop. They are well worth the money spent, and are a good middle ground if you want to try to make your own and still have a polished look. Print the cards on card stock, or laminate them to help them last longer. This is a great video on the presentation of grammar in the Montessori method.
