Knobless Cylinders

8/4/11

Materials used:

• Knobless Cylinders
• Stockmar stick crayons
• Main lesson book paper (we used DRAWING PAPER 17.5in x 11.5in)

Today Kamina wanted to do knobless cylinders at her normal job time. It's one of the Montessori sensorial work materials. Sensorial is one of the most important areas in Montessori. It reflects one of Montessori's fundamental philosophy: children learn through multiple senses. Through vision, tactile, auditory, etc, senses, the children's learning experience is enriched, deepened, and as a result better integrated and remembered. This is in line with Waldorf's idea, though Waldorf puts much more emphasis on artistic and story exploration experience.

We started today's exercise with having Kamina grading the four boxes of cylinders on her own with me watching over. Then we figured out what the differences are between the different colored boxes, using proper adjectives describing different dimensions: tall, short, big, small, fat, thin, and their comparative forms.

Then I had this brilliant idea of writing these key words down on our main lesson pages. So I write the words down for the red and yellow boxes, and Kamina copied them. This is both for having some printing exercise, and having a record of the language we used for future reviewing. Kamina responded pretty well with the writing exercise. I had her draw the frame around the edges of the paper with block crayons first. Then drew lines with yellow crayon to form the golden path. This is an idea I got from Donna Simmons of the Christopherous curriculum. It gives a pretty guide of where the letters should walk on. When she makes a mistake or when she's not satisfied with what she wrote, I have her draw a flower or butterfly around the letter to be erased. This greatly amused her and as a consequence she didn't mind too much making mistakes. She has had some practice printing letters at school, mostly only upper case letters. Even though she's made plenty mistakes, I was impressed with what she was able to do, and her ability to concentrate and persevere. It would be interesting to see how she progresses when we get more practice in the near future. This is the first time I actively combine material and methods from different teaching philosophies together, and I consider it a success.