this is one sturdy shepherd fold!

Here.

Montessori on a Shoestring - book

This website tells about a new publication for moms implementing Montessori. Scroll down and you can view a few of the pages free. There are some cute (and cheap!) ideas in there. I heard about this from 4Real.

early reading materials

(sara): I'd love to be posting more CGS presentations, but ds3 is so ready for more reading materials. Ds5 kindof skipped this part... but lately I put together what is known as "pink reading" materials in our classroom. I put the consonant "sound bins" in this shoe organizer on the closet door:


Each one contains a sandpaper letter, a letter book (from Discovery Toys), flashcards with words and images, and images without any words on them, which are used for a variety of activities. These were made from sticker books found at Target, and laminated.



I recently cleaned out my kitchen cupboards and was appalled at how many plastic containers I have accumulated. I decided to use these for the vowel sound bins:

And these for digraph (i.e., ph, sh, th, etc.) sound bins:

We also use the book Phonics Pathways extensively. There is a game at the beginning of this book called the "short vowel shuffle" to teach the short-vowel sounds. We have been playing it this past week - the boys love it!