Montessori Birthday Celebration and Fall Challenge

O and A celebrated their third birthdays this week.  In their Montessori classroom they celebrated by holding an earth marble and walking around a candle representing the sun.  The parent or teacher talks about the first year of life, and then the child walks around the sun.  This is repeated for each year that the child has lived.  It is a cosmic and magical representation of the time that the child has spent on the earth.  As they walk, the class sings this song:

The earth goes around the sun, the sun
The earth goes around the sun
It takes 12 months, 52 weeks, 365 days

As a teacher, I have led many of these walks around the sun, but none was as emotional for me as O's and A's.  I am so lucky to have two happy, healthy, handsome boys!


p.s.  I am going to take part in Joanna's Fall Challenge this week:  To not watch TV for a week, or at least, cut way back.  Wish us luck, and feel free to join in!

Everyday Storytelling

     Storytelling is something that I am asked to do all day. Almost every time we are in the car for longer than 10 minutes, I hear 'moma, tell a story!' I make up all of our stories. They almost always involve a forest, any kind of animal, and something specific that happened in our day, or week even. Little foxes end up getting lost from their mother at the park, a bird hurts his wing and has to go to the doctor to get it checked out, three kittens have to learn to share a toy that they find in the sand. My stories are very simple, but can go on for 10 or more minutes. Even when driving with multiple children in my car, everyone stops to listen to the stories. It may be the different voices that I do, or the dramatic emphasis' that I put into the animals and their specific problems, or solutions. At any rate, story telling has saved our lives many-a-tired drive home from nana's house. My two year old likes to choose the animals for the stories, and from there we just improvise.

     A few months ago we bought Tell Me A Story cards from eeboo. We LOVE them. They give children the chance to tell their own story. Each card has different artwork on it, and in each pack all the cards have a similar theme. Kids who are not yet reading love the chance to 'read.' I highly recommend them, they make improvising a story very easy - with a photo to nudge the story along. The cards come in several different sets; Little Robot's Mission, Animal Village, Fairytale Mixup, Circus Animals Adventure, and the one that we have, Mystery in the Forest.