Starting with the Alphabet

As Nuh is 5 and not ready for YR1 Charlotte Mason, I have followed the advice of 'Charlotte Mason Help' and started teaching him how to write each letter of the Alphabet. I am looking for perfect execution ala CM methodology. This is perfect execution for a child of 5, I do not expect him to be able to write the letters perfectly, this will be a difficult concept for Nuh to grasp as he is by nature a perfectionist and I am prepared for many tears and much frustration.

I decided to work on each letter both, lower case and uppercase until he has mastered each, we will tackle two letters at a time. I am hoping that the fact that he will only have to complete a line of each will encourage him.

I demonstrated the correct way that each letter should be written using a small tray and some salt, like in montessori, we then practiced writing the letter on the small whiteboard. Nuh liked this a lot as he could erase any mistakes easily.

After the practice on the whiteboard we progressed to paper, I used one inch lined handwriting paper that I printed off of the net. I can't remember where I got it from maybe Simply Charlotte Mason. I even had to show Nuh what a typical 5 yr olds handwritting looks like on the web so that he didn't get upset when his letters were not as neat as mine.

Static Addition

Static Addition

We have been working on static addition for some time, we started out with the golden beads using multiple add ends. I followed the Karen Tyler album for these lessons. You start these lessons using multiple add ends, so you start adding numbers in the thousands together first.

This is one of the sums that Nuh did at the beginning of this process, when he was still using the golden bead material:

I used to write out the sum for him on paper using the correct colours for thousand, hundreds etc.. I know you are meant to use the number cards for this but I prefered to do this as it makes more sense to me, especially as we will be moving onto written sums eventually.

I cannot remember how long we did the static addition like this for, it was a good few weeks though. Once he felt that he had mastered it, he asked to do the sums with out the manipulatives. This is known as moving from concrete to abstract and is the goal of the album. I purchased some static addition sums from the Montessori Printshop. They were cheap and good value for money, I feel.

Globe and Continents

We are dipping in and out of Karen Tylers montessori geography ablum, the reason that I have not chosen to follow it rigidly is that Nuh is 5 so much of the earlier sections do not interest him, so I selected the parts that I thought might interest him the most.

I used the presentation from the album that explains about the concept of the Globe and what it represents.  We also made a paper mache globe and painted it with the continenets, Nuh really liked this, so did Zuh. Unfortunately I seem to have lost the imge for this.


This went down well, I also covered the continents breifly.



We also looked at the countries on our continent that are relevant to us as a family. So we looked at Spain as this is where Pink Nanny and Perfect Grandad live, we looked at Belgium because this is where Daddy lived during his teens and finally we looked at Italy which is where Little Nan is from.