Our new Montessori stock is about to arrive which is super exciting!! We have increased our range dramatically so watch this space. New products will include the following:
Montessori Brown Stair
Montessori Cloth Box
Montessori Seed puzzle
Montessori Feet balance exercise
Montessori Infant coin box
Montessori Colour resemblance sorting task
Montessori Bells set
Montessori Land and water form trays
Visit our Montessori Section in a few weeks time to see these items in stock.
I am pretty sure that a lot of what I am going to say might not be new or original for experienced mums. But I am hoping that some new first-time mums might find these tips helpful.
If your baby is not crawling yet but already quite active and curious about the world around her she may get frustrated with not being able to explore it at her leisure. This can create a lot of crying, whinging and whining and cause severe headaches for poor mums who are already tired and sleep deprived.
Here are a few tips and tricks to keep your babies happy at home:
1. Create “play stations”: Find different spaces around your home where you can place toys and sit or place your baby on her tummy for play. Often toys are placed in one place in the house and it becomes the baby’s play area. But babies get tired of being in the same spot all the time. So changing it up a bit by moving toys to a different room or even to a different corner of the same room can really make a difference.
2. Hide and swap toys: This is an old trick but it works like a charm and often saves you buying new toys when babies get tired of the old ones. Split all of your baby’s toys into 3 – 4 lots. Keep one lot out and hide the other 3. Let the baby play with one lot of toys for about 1 week, then hide and swap for the next one. Rotate the lots at any frequency or order you like. Babies forget the toys they haven’t seen for a while so seeing a toy they haven’t played with for some time is like getting a brand new toy.
3. Tidy up: For me, personally, putting toys away is probably one of the most frustrating household chores – they get thrown around the room in seconds right after you’ve finished tidying. But this chore can be really helpful in keeping your baby happy and engaged with her toys. Babies love creating messes – tipping toys out of boxes, throwing scarves, puzzle pieces, balls around, demolishing neatly built block towers and generally creating lots of havoc. But if they are placed in a messy spot to begin with it is difficult for them to concentrate their attention on a single object as there are too many brightly coloured objects scattered around. Babies tend to be a lot less fussy in play areas where toys are arranged neatly because they can focus on things that interest them and it is easier to get to particular toys that catch their eye. So clench your teeth and tidy those toys even if you absolutely hate doing it.
4. Replace toys with other household items: When all the toys in the house are just not fun anymore you can turn some household objects into toys. Here are some examples of objects that make great fun toys – pots, pans, big plastic ladles, clothes pegs, plastic containers, sealed bags of chips or pasta (they make a wonderful crinkling noise but please supervise your baby to make sure that the bag doesn’t rip), scarves, belts, hats, old computer parts (e.g. mouse, keyboard) and many more. So be creative and turn your house into one big toy shop.
Hopefully, some or all of these tips can help you entertain your baby on those rainy days or just when you need to leave your baby to her own devices for a short while so that you can attend to other household chores. And one last very handy little tip that I have learnt after I gave birth to my second child is that not only it’s ok to leave your baby playing independently (as long as you know that everything around them is safe) but it’s actually good for them. So no need to feel guilty if you are unable to spend every single second of your waking hours with your precious baby – it will teach them the art of playing independently and give them the ability to initiate their own play.
Recently, a friend has introduced me to this wonderful new iPhone/iPad App for babies. It is an application that has a multitude of flashcards in a variety of categories such as First Words, Opposites, Food Festival, Animal Kingdom and many more. The brilliant thing about this application is that it is interactive and allows babies to control the flashcards all on their own. I have watched with amazement how my friend’s one year old girl wiggled her little fingers over the iPhone screen to flip the flashcards while listening to her mum’s voice and looking at the gorgeous pictures.
Yes, and that is another brilliant thing about this application – you can record your own voice to read out the flashcards labels. This means that for bilingual kids the flashcards can be recorded in another language. The written labels on the cards can also be changed and written in a different language if the language is installed on the iPhone or the iPad.
Overall, this is an amazing way to teach babies their first words and increase their vocabulary. However, if you prefer the real over the virtual flashcards please check out our range of JUMBO Reading Cards for babies and toddlers.
In the previous post about the Montessori Snake Game I briefly mentioned the difficulty some parents experiencing when they decide to try using Montessori materials at home. Sure enough, there are wonderful blogs and websites out there which have an abundance of information but it is often difficult and time consuming to find specific instructions for specific materials.
This is where teaching albums and instruction manuals and dvds can come in handy. The following website has manuals and instructional materials created by AMS and AMI accredited teachers.
Montessori Instruction Manuals for Home Use
And best of all, these manuals are very reasonably priced.
Many of my customers are mums and dads who just want to buy some great materials to use with their kids at home. Unfortunately, most Montessori products don’t come with instruction manuals and unless they are formally trained or attended Montessori workshops many parents feel lost when they decide to buy Montessori teaching aids.
This is the best time to turn to internet in general and blogs in particular. There is a multitude of Montessori information websites and blogs run by parents that describe how these materials should be used.
Here are some awesome videos that I found on how to use the Montessori Addition Snake Game
Positive Snake Game – Making Tens
Snap is such a fun and easy game to play and it can be used as a learning tool by adapting it to any subject. And since my son has recently developed a real fascination with all things astronomical I have decided to create a simple Snap Game of Astronomy.
I have used all of the planets in our Solar System (including poor Pluto which has been demoted to a dwarf planet) as well as several other solar system bodies such as Moon, Sun, Asteroid, Meteor and Comet. Each card has a picture of the astronomical body and 3 interesting facts listed underneath. There are four identical snap cards for each of the astronomical bodies.
I must say, it has been difficult distilling the information to 3 interesting facts per astronomical body but I have learned a great deal in the process. Hopefully, now I won’t have to resort to Google everytime my son has a question on the subject of astronomy. Although, knowing the type of questions he usually asks (e.g., Mum, can aliens land on Jupiter?) Google wouldn’t have helped anyway.
So I now present to you a new addition to our Free Downloads family – The Astronomy Snap Game for Kids. All you have to do is download, print out the 15 pages (use thick paper for better snap effect) and cut it up into snap cards.
I have been looking for a website where I could download flags of the world in an easy to print format. My son has a large poster of a world map on his wall and loves looking at it but the flags are small and hard to see. After searching for a while and not being able to find quite what I was looking for I decided to create one myself. This flags of the world download is organised in alphabetical order and contains flag images of 166 countries. You can download it here from our website’s free downloads page
A friend of mine, who is studying childcare at TAFE, told me about a dilemma she faced during one of her assessment pracs. She was at a childcare centre playing with a little girl while the supervisor observed and marked her. The task presented involved making a collage from various materials, using glue and paper. After enjoying a short period of time where she threw around rice and smudged red paint over paper the girl started to become slightly frustrated so my friend gave her a bit of guidance and showed her how a few things can be glued together to make a picture. She was immediately instructed by the supervisor that this was not the right thing to do and might affect her mark in a negative way. The supervisor was adamant that helping the little girl would stifle her ability to learn independently and express herself through play.
How does one keep that fine balance between guidance and allowing the child to enjoy the process of learning and discovery on their own? Independent learning is important but how effective is it when the child becomes frustrated with the task?
I found this amazing video of a little girl working with a Montessori Zipping Dressing Frame that shows how kids, left to their own devices, can eventually master a really difficult task.
Mastering the art of zipping a Montessori Dressing Frame from Karla Norgaard on Vimeo.
Although in the beginning the girl does say “help me zip it” and it takes her a while to get the zipper working, eventually, she achieves the desired result and zips the frame herself. Obviously, this achievement is reward in itself and would work as a motivator for future learning.
Independence in learning works really well in a structured Montessori environment where trained Montessori professionals are able to demonstrate the task effectively and subsequently allow kids progress at their own pace. Kids are also able to observe other children in the classroom as the Montessori classroom usually has a mixture of age groups working together.
However, when this principle is applied in ordinary preschools with less structured activities it seems that it can become counterproductive, cause frustration and de-motivate a child.
Construction sets are excellent toys for developing fine motor skills, visuo-spatial abilities and logical thinking. It’s such a fun activity and in the midst of all that fun kids are manipulating small objects (fine motor skills), visualising how the end result will look (visuo-spatial abilities) and thinking what comes next (logical thinking). All in all, construction sets make for a great fun and educational toy.
But the Mic-o-mic construction sets we have in stock right now are super special – they come in a variety of gorgeous colours and designs, look beautiful when assembled but best of all, they provide the child with an opportunity for open-ended play. There is no instructional guide on how to put each toy together so the child has to work out the process on their own which makes it so much more challenging and fun.
The new addition to our Mic-o-mic collection is this irresistable little sail boat:
It’s a tricky business, preparing your older child (children) for the arrival of a new sibling into the family. And it seems that boys and girls cope very differently with the issue.
A friend who is expecting her third child has told me how differently her two kids have reacted to the news. Her son who is six took it well but wasn’t dwelling too much on the issue afterwards. However, her little four year old daughter became completely obsessed with the idea of a newborn baby and all she played with for the next several weeks afterwards was a baby doll which she swaddled, rocked and pushed around in a pram.
Inspired by the story I added these wonderful newborn baby dolls to our stock
They are absolutely delightful, look like real newborn babies and come in a boy or girl variety. And there is a set of accessories perfect for these dolls that include a bathtub and lots of other cool stuff
I would have given my right arm for toys like these when I was a kid. But my 6 year old son examined the baby “boy” doll, inquired if his little brother is going to look like that when he is born and hasn’t touched it again since.
If this is not an indication that girls have an innate tendency towards nurturing play (and boys have no interest in it whatsoever) I don’t know what is.
