Writing center

Let's face it. Many times creative writing does not come so easily to children, especially boys :).
So I decided to create special materials to encourage creativity while making the writing process more enjoyable.

And that is how our writing center was born. It is all contained in a big folder, with enough pockets to invite new materials in every once in a while.

Apart from the obvious (a paper pad and pencil) it also includes:

* Our noun phrase game

* Grammar cards to make more phrases (For now we are just using nouns, adjectives and verbs, with their corresponding symbol in the Montessori materials). As a story starter, we pic two of each category and try to use them all in a story.

* Story cards: an assortment of photographs of  objects, people, animals, actions glue onto 3" x 4" cards. (we use old National Geographic magazines for all our projects). You can use these in the same way as the grammar cards to start a story, randomly picking one at the time.

* Any other pictures that could be inspirational.

You can include anything that helps getting things started...

Spelling ... and a great tool...

Today we were working again with our movable alphabet. It has become a really helpful tool whenever my 6 year old feels like writing without having to actually practice his handwriting...

It has been one of our most used Montessori  materials, and it definitely has a liberating quality to it. Since children this age (especially boys) are not particularly inclined to practice their handwriting, they need to find some other tool for those times when they feel like composing sentences or even short stories, and the alphabet certainly helps.

Here I have added some great resources explaining how to use it,  and some helpful extension activities for it:

Montessori Mom Movable alphabet

Movable alphabet Video

Simply Montessori DIY

Lesson Plan

Album page for movable alphabet

The history of writing

This is our first activity in the series “the history of writing”. We are following along the history units of the history of civilization, focusing on a “hands on” approach to the subject of handwriting, as emphasized in Maria Montessori’s “Five great Lessons”.

In this particular activity we replicate “cuneiform writing” developed by the Sumerians around the 30th century BC.

These are the materials we used

-          A wooden dowel, one end shaped as a wedge

-          A print of the cuneiform alphabet

-          A package of crayola magic model sculpey (any type of modeling clay would work)
- A small cutting board

-          A tray to contain all the materials.

After a brief introduction and explanation, we explore together the cuneiform signs, noting that they are basically composed of two shapes repeated and combined so as to form all the letters needed for their language.

After practicing this two shapes on the clay, we smooth it again and my DS suggested trying to write his on name on it. 

We left it to air dry and continue discussing how the storage of these tables would have been. We ended the activity by watching some pictures of actual tablets. (found here)