Looking for something special for your Continent Boxes?

I fell in love with toobs since first discovering them about a year ago. They are so handy and can be used to really bring activities to life. The girls love to work with them and they can be used in so many different ways. We decided to start stocking a small selection a couple of months ago and have been amazed with their popularity and we have gradually been expanding our collection and bringing in some that have been specially requested by our customers. Personally though I don't have as much time or expertise as I would like in order to help me make the most of the toobs but there are some really amazing bloggers out there who have created some wonderful montessori activities to go with the toobs and many of them are giving printable activities away for free too. So I have decided to list some below so you can all get some ideas for your continent boxes (and also so that I can come back later and find these activities again when I'm making our boxes - so far we only have a Europe box, we'll be working on the rest soon.)

North America

Toob  - North American Wildlife
Toob - New York

A blog from The Natural Homeschool bursting with ideas for this toob and lots of free printables too. Click here

Some more great ideas from The Pinay Homeschooler click here

Australia 

Toob - The Land Down Under

A map and matching activities from Living Montessori Now click here 

Africa 

Toobs - Ancient Egypt, Wild, Monkeys and Apes

Another lovely unit about Egypt from The Pinay Homeschooler - click here

Some inspiring ideas from Imagine Our Life - click here

Europe

Toobs - Wild, River, Pets, World Landmarks, Around the World

More from Living Montessori Now - click here

South America

Toob - Rainforest

Lovely blog by Imagine Our Life combining the toobs and some lovely felt work - click here

Antarctica

Toobs - Arctic, Penguins

A great blog with loads of ideas to download. Trillium Montessori has a wealth of activities that can be bought at a great price. click here

Maths and Mud

Aliyah seems to prefer maths activities over language ones at the minute. She has been doing some simple multiplication with the bead bars, simple addition with the addition strip board and some long addition using the stamp game. 

Here's a picture of her and her friend concentrating very hard on their maths work.

Here she has traced around the horse puzzle and is writing labels to stick on. Although she enjoys labelling and glueing she still gets very upset when her letters don't quite come out exactly how she would like them to.

Hannah's favourite pass time is definitely still playing with mud! Here she is working with her friend to 'paint' the playhouse in mud. They did a pretty good job. 

Apart from mud she has been working on the decimal system, reading and counting numbers up to 1000. She has also been doing some simple addition with the coloured beads. However, I soon realised that her writing skills are not really up to writing the answers down yet so I decided to put the answers down on card for her so she could choose the correct one and glue it on her sheet.

Hannah is showing much more interest in the pink / blue / green series than Aliyah ever seemed to and she will even do the activities on her own if she is in the right mood. 

I don't have many photos of Livvy during our Montessori time but here's a picture of her at our fortnightly forest school. She is following in Hannah's footsteps and loves the mud.

Hooray some cursive at last!

Aliyah's very first real attempt at cursive writing in an Easter card to some friends. It may not seem very legible but this is really impressive after struggling to find ways to make the sandpaper letters interesting and Aliyah mainly just wanting to write in block capitals. She was even quite pleased with it herself.

Hannah becoming more independent with the pink box work.

A new activity - flags of Europe - which I bought from www.montessoriprintshop.com

Over Easter we did Benjamin's Box and filled up our treasure box with things to remind us about the Easter story. They could take this out during our Montessori time and look through it themselves.

Hannah doing some basic subtraction.

This took a while to make and a few attempts where I kept getting the colours wrong for the different parts of speech! But we now have a grammar farm and Aliyah is excited about making the sentences.

February and March

Recently the girls have been very interested in the map of Europe. Aliyah can name almost all of the countries in Europe and Hannah knows quite a few too. Aliyah is keen to get the next map out now but I think we'll work with some flags of Europe first. 

One day when Aliyah had chicken pox and we had to stay in, we decided to trace around the continents of the world and paint them. 

Here's Livvy with some of her recent activities:
The Imbucare Peg Box, an animal puzzle and working hard on pulling herself up.

Aliyah has been enjoying looking at and painting some of Monet's pictures with a friend.

We have just bought a juicer to try to get a little healthier at home, which has provided lots of opportunity for peeling and chopping practice.

The days are getting slightly warmer now so when it's not raining I try to put a couple of activities outside so they can go get some fresh air if they want to. They loved the trampoline being outside.

Hannah was delighted that the water table could again be part of our Montessori time and on this day it was particularly exciting as the water had frozen and trapped a toy octopus in it.

One day they even wanted to eat outside with their friends.

They are beginning to get a bit better at working together now.

 Aliyah working with Grammar Farm 1.

Livvy's Space

Here's a few pictures of how Livvy's space has changed since she was born.

First we started with a mat and some black and white pictures to entertain her. She was happy there and everything seemed very easy.

As she grew we added the mirror and various mobiles to give her more to look at. She wriggled and batted a little at the mobiles.

Then she learnt to wriggle a bit more and started to get herself off the mat.

Then she learnt how to roll and could move around easily - that's when the trouble started :) She was now able to get her hands onto the shelves and all the little pieces on them.

I tried having her things on the bottom shelf and she did love helping herself to these but it soon became apparent that the beads and puzzles on the next shelf up were of course more interesting to her.

So that's when I decided she need her own space closed off. Here she had her first bookcase with 4 cubby holes and a nice soft cushion to keep her in. She still felt part of the room as the cushion was very low. However, it was only a few weeks till she had learnt how to climb over the cushion.

So it was time to give her more shelves and make her space more secure. Now she has 8 cubby holes. The table and the bookshelf close off her area.

This worked well and she enjoyed watching her sisters work.

However, now she can get her hands on the table, so no one can work there without her taking pieces of their work to chew on. She spends most of her time trying (and succeeding) to squeeze through the gap between the bookcase and the table.

So time to think again now about her space. She can pull herself up easily now and I'm guessing it'll only be a few months until she's walking. Does anyone have any ideas about creating a safe toddler space within a classroom for older children. I'd love to see how anyone else has set up their toddler spaces.

Competition Time

I'm very excited that we have a new product range in stock. It's the Safari Toobs. I love these. The girls had the Landmarks and Around the World toobs for Christmas and recently they have just had the instrument set. We've had so much fun with these. Not only have they matched them to their 3 part cards (downloaded from www.imagineourlife.com) but they also matched them to their sounds played through a tablet and later even watched clips of the instruments being played. This certainly covers a lot of learning styles.





We are starting out with about 10 different toobs but we hope to have a much bigger range soon so if there are any specific ones that you would like us to stock just let us know.

So to lauch the new Toobs we're running a competition. To enter just use the Rafflecopter below:

a Rafflecopter giveaway