Multi age activity - fruits

Food and particularly fruits have been on the topic lately for my little one.  And finding these cards fueled my first idea, that once again was used by my children in their own ways.

I am a huge fan of Michael Olaf.  Not only their store, but of all the material, videos, catalog and everything else they do to promote Montessori home learning.  I love how they do not promote using montessori material in the home for learning, but instead adapt Montessori learning to a home setting.  I read regularly Children of the world and a Joyful Child which are 2 excellent ressources.

THis video of theirs gave me the push I needed to create a similar activity for E.  Now that he walks VERY steadily (!!), he is into talking.  A lot...  perfect timing

Activity for E, 16 months old:

Association between an object and a card:

I used a basket to put some common fruits in it, and used the cards I linked to earlier on for this activity.  I love these cards for a toddler as they are bigger then standard size 3 parts cards.

For maximum strength, I glued these cards on a piece of cardboard, and then covered the whole thing with plastic I would use to cover book.  It is not something I would want to do for my older, but I love how thick it is for E.

He used the fruits in the basket to match then to the cards:

and we named them at the same time (I say we, as M was also naming them)

Activity for M 4 y.o.


She started playing with E, but she quickly started to want to change the rules of the game.

After seeing the letters at the left corner of the cards, we turned with into a first sound game.  Since we didn't have that many fruits on hand, I started to help her notice the middle and end sounds of these words.  She is starting to be really good at this sound game.  Reading is not far!

She also wanted to name all the letter that are composing the words

Activity for X, 6 yo
He saw the cards later that night.  For his part, he was interested in 2 things:
-the phonems that were in many of the words.  He read them, asked a lot of questions about them, and read them some more.
- the script and cursive way of writing the words.  In fact, he practiced penmanship for a while, both in cursive and script after seeing those.

He also tried to write these words without looking at them.

The cards are currently in rotation in E's picture ledge in his room:

yes, just beside his bed...

I'll come back to that later

Kylie at How we Montessori had provided a very interesting art oriented extention to this activity.  We are surely going to give it a try this weekend!
It is here