What's on our Trays

Here are the tray activities I've put together for this week. Normally, I'd have a few more Practical Life activities, but since I am in the process of re-organizing the PL shelves to be more Montessori-friendly and we are introducing lots of new Sensorial materials, I thought one might be enough. If not, I'll add more later in the week...

Sorting Fruit - with so many new things, I wanted to put in something familiar. Although he has mastered this as a whole hand activity, he hasn't seen it for a couple of weeks and still enjoys playing with the fruit.

Puzzles - I have put out a single 4-piece puzzle. I will probably add a second soon, but am rather fed up of picking up box-fulls of puzzle pieces so have limited the number to make it easy for Nikki to tidy away himself.

Sandpaper letters - our first three letters - Nikki is used to seeing capital letters in print (very un-Montessori) so it is taking him a while to learn that these lower-case cursive letters are the same as the ones he knows...

Sound balls - we haven't had these out for a while. Nikki was very excited to see them!

Bead chains - we are focusing on learning quantity. Nikki is great at counting, but hasn't 'got' that each number has a specific quantity. We're working on 1-4 with our numeral board, so this should reinforce what he's learning.