St George's Day Bunting and a Patriotic Muffin Tin Dinner!

I like to mark some national and multi-cultural festivals and celebrations with the children, but I like to keep it simple and make it meaningful to the children. I plan them all along similar lines - food, craft, story telling and celebrating. Keeping this format means that although the event may be from another culture, it is recognisable to even the youngest children as a special celebration to someone. It also makes it simpler for me to plan them as I know roughly what I am looking for and even if pushed for time, I can often pull them together at the drop of a hat - like I did this week for St George's Day! 

This was our lunch time meal - a Muffin Tin Dinner (MTD). I am proud of my creativity on this one with very limited fridge contents - I shall elaborate!!! From the top left there are carrots (for St George's charger of course!!), sticky rice horse shapes, spicy chorizo to represent the dragon's fire. On the bottom row from left to right there are bread shields (made using a heart shaped cutter then inverting the top to make the shield shape), these are covered with cream cheese and tomato slices to make the red cross. Next are boiled eggs painted as the English flag and lastly - red jelly - it has become customary to have red jelly in our MTD's!! Thanks Mum for the proper muffin tins to put them in!! Here are some more MTD's we've enjoyed.

We also made some very simple paper bunting using red paint on the edge of a piece of folded cardboard, that I cut into triangle shapes and threaded onto wool to hang up. Whilst we ate lunch under our bunting, I read to them two poems that tell the story of St George, which they found very entertaining - we had the paper mache castle and the happy land people out after lunch to play out the story!

Valentines Montessori Activities

I had a sudden explosion of creativity this evening after realising that the little one that I child mind (who has just returned to me after nine months off on maternity leave) needs a boost in fine motor skills. I had great fun putting all these together, some of them with things I have previously collected for the purpose and some cobbled together from crafting and the recycling box!

This is a simple activity sliding paper clips onto the numbered paper hearts. The paper clips are colour co-ordinated with the numbers on the hearts, as you can see in the picture below. I'm not going to mention that to start with to observe two things. Firstly if she can recognise the numbers and secondly if she observes the connection!

This pegging activity is made from an Ikea lamp box with a ribbon strung across it, and pieces of organza ribbon to peg along it.

This activity involves threading wooden beads onto a pipe cleaner in any pattern the child chooses.

I think this is my favourite activity that I put together! I wrapped a ball of play dough in tin foil and pressed it into a coffee jar lid, then gently pushed red golf tees into the dough to make a heart shape. I picked a mixture of fun marbles to be gently placed on top of each golf tee!

This is a slight twist on the standard 'spooning' activity: there are four measuring spoons in the pink rice and four glass candle holders to decant each spoonful into to allow a comparison of the amount.

Ordering by size (we've already used them for play dough and will probably be pinching them back for biscuit making too!!)

This is a fun one - inside the pipette bottle there is water coloured red with food colouring. The idea is to control the pipette to put one or two drops of colour into each of the suckers on the upside down anti-slip shower mat. When finished the child needs to get a piece of tissue and soak up the drops ready for the next child (almost as much fun as the dropping in the first place!

Pouring with sequins - there are three chunky shot glasses to pour the sequins into - again some control is needed as if the child just tips the jug, there are too many sequins for just one glass and they will spill over.

Tweezing - little paper flowers to tuck into each section of the ice cube tray.



This is an opening and closing activity with four different types of opening mechanism - each has a little confetti heart inside (see below!).

A wooden noughts and crosses game that belonged to my parents.

Opening and closing with locks and keys - each key will only fit one padlock. I threaded a bead onto each key as they are tiny and a little magpie that I know will fall in love with them and want to spirit them away!

This jewellery box housed the beautiful cross that my husband gave me three years ago and that I always wear around my neck. I put tiny gems under the necklace plate, the box hinges closed then is tied into another box which is tied into a bag. I put this out for the girls to practise tying bows which is a popular new skill!

As a final activity for building fine motor strength I put out these wooden nuts and bolts.

Just a note to say that Montessori activities of daily living cover more areas than this but this is what I could pull together in one evening! It should also ideally be made up of beautiful objects and be clearly spaced and set out in an ordered fashion to be found in the same place every time the child wants to use it. I do not pretend to have a Montessori class room however and the activities will be packed away for much of the day. I'll try and come back to say how it goes having them out for periods at a time and see if i can troubleshoot it and make it work well. I'd love to flex my Montessori muscles more, expecially as I qualified with MCI this summer as a 3-6 teacher!

By Pumpkin Light!

We had great fun going along to our local National Trust property for a pumpkin carving event. We got to choose our pumpkins, then scoop the flesh out before carrying them to the barn to carve! The one above is Eve's face - she wasn't too keen on carving as she had one eye on the craft table next to us with coloured pumpkin seeds to make pictures with and soon disappeared to make some!

Faith LOVED carving her pumpkin - so much so that she carved four faces on hers. I was slightly concerned about letting her loose with the little knife they provided, but she handled it really well and really enjoyed herself!

I couldn't resist having a go and made this little cat on the back of Eve's pumpkin! I was surprised by how easy they were to carve as last year Dewi really struggled to carve our pumpkin, but these were really thin-skinned so much easier!





 Here is Faith scooping out her pumpkin seeds!

Here Eve is checking the fit of her pumpkin lid - the man helping cut a wedge out of the lid to act as a chimney and stop the lid from shrinking too quickly once the candle was lit -  a great tip we didn't know about and had problems with last year!!

Here is my four year old wielding that pumpkin knife! She was very skilled with it!

We ate homemade wholewheat pizza's by pumpkin light that evening - it was such fun and of course we've lit them every evening since!