The teacher Never Rests!

The hubs and I spent the last week in Amelia Island, Florida celebrating our 8th anniversary...sans kiddos! What a great time we had! What might this have to do with teaching you ask?!? Well, the longer we walked up and down the beaches the more groovy ideas I came up with for great Montessori lessons! I collected shells for four different lessons and of course decided to start the year studying the beach...tied in with North America.

The lesson above allows the children to size varies shells from largest to smallest. There are 6 different colored sets of clam shells, each with four shells per set in graduated sizes. I cut a piece of felt for the child to layout the lesson on. I will most likely add words (small, medium, large) for my readers but we'll see.

This next lesson will be great for my younger kiddos. It is a simple spooning lesson where they will spoon the tiny shells from one dish to another. I started out hand picking these little babies so there we're no broken ones and the hubs gave me that look...so I moved on to dumping them into an empty water bottle. If they fit they made the cut!

The third lesson is a simple matching lesson. The child will pull from the large selection of shells, coral and drift wood and put all the like items together.

The final lesson is my favorite. Amelia island is probably the best beach I have ever been to for treasures! We found sooo much great stuff! So, I looked up all the random items on the Internet and I'm making an identification sheet of all of them with picture and name included. The kids can pick out an item and match it to the picture on the board.  Pictures to come of this one!
I have also sent out a message to my families via Facebook (we have a private group) to give them a heads up that we are starting the year out with a little beach action so if they visit the beach they can gather things and bring them to share.
Stay tuned for more beachy ideas!