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Monthly Themes

I love a good monthly theme, some might say a little too much, so I’m excited that I’m making monthly themes one of my annual goals. My eventual plan is to create a bin in the basement for each month. (Excluding December and October lol. They will have multiple bins I’m sure.) I’m not creating some master checklist or anything, but some ideas for the bins include

  1. Sensory bin
  2. Wreath
  3. Couch Quilt
  4. Montessori Trays
  5. Mantle Decor
  6. Kid craft supplies (stickers, ribbon, paper?)

IDK. I think I’ll end up putting all sorts of things in them. And I love to shop at the dollar store, but I have to tell you that when I went in at the very end of December, they already had their St Patrick’s Day stuff out. Now I can buy it when it’s available (including clearance after the fact!) and I’ll have a place to store it.

The theme for January is snowflakes! I haven’t done much with the theme yet, but I did create a sensory bin for Mia and she has been thrilled!

I started off by turning her Ikea Trofast upside down. I don’t think the buckets would work very well (maybe you could use 2 instead of 3?) but I don’t like the buckets anyway. And now, there is a lip to catch all of the stuff that falls out of the sensory bin!

I dyed some rice teal by putting it in a gallon ziplock bag with a little bit of rubbing alcohol and some blue and yellow food coloring. Then I added these super cute Frozen buttons that I found at Joanne along with some numbers, letters, and pompoms from the dollar store. I then gave her a few plastic cups and spoons that we had from the power outage and she’s had a blast!

I for sure want to make her a Valentine’s Day themed sensory bin for February! Then we’ll see what other fun things I can create. 🙂

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Pumpkin Montessori Time

Hey guys! We had an absolutely amazing teacher conference with Mia’s teacher and it totally inspired me to make a new round of Montessori trays for the twins. Halloween themed of course!

I found these pumpkin upper/ lower case matching printables on Pinterest. How cute are they?!? I laminated them naturally. Today I pulled out a few at a time to work with and we talked about the letters/ letter sounds as we did them. She got up to 6 letters before losing interest. Xander was very interested until Mia said it was his turn and then he wanted nothing to do with them. Stinker. lol. I’ll pull these out one morning while Mia is at school and see if he’s more interested.

I also dug out all of our Halloween decorations and found this pumpkin counting activity that I made when Kate was little. I went ahead and laminated the pumpkins (natch) and then I created a mat to scaffold this for the twins so that they could do it independently. They love it! I didn’t really think Xander would want to use the mats, but he loves them too. I deliberately kept them non themed so that I could reuse them over and over again.

And I have to tell y’all that it was so much fun to create some fun seasonal Montessori trays. The last time I was making these regularly, I had all of this self imposed pressure to have 8 new trays every week based on a letter a week theme which obviously never happened so I was constantly feeling behind and guilty. But this is awesome! I made a total of 4 trays and I might switch it up with a few more before Halloween gets here or I might not. And if they’re still having fun in November, then pumpkins are totally our fall theme. Hell, maybe we’ll have Christmas pumpkins! lol. (But probably not because I love Christmas. lol.)

And in case you’re wondering, our other trays are sequencing and patterning because those are 2 of the main things she’s working on right now at school.

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S is for Snowflakes!

First project done!  I wanted to start off the year with my January Montessori trays ready to go and I got them done just in the nick of time.  I had forgotten how much fun I use to have making these.  🙂  I managed to repurpose some stuff from a long ago I is for Ice unit I developed for Kate and them added some new matching activities I found on Pinterest.

For those of you who haven’t seen this before, here’s my set up for Montessori trays.  RaptorDad made me doors for this cabinet years ago so we can keep this closed off.  Of course, the twins have figured out the latches, lol, so they have free access.  I used to try to do 9 trays at a time, but I’m simplifying y’all!  So I did 6 this month.  We’ll see if I can keep it up.  lol.

The first tray is some simple transfer work with some tongs and pompoms.

Mia got a new magnadoodle from Santa and yesterday RaptorDad was writing her name on it when she drew circles on the vertices of the M.  I figured this was something they were working on at school so I found some stickers and wrote her name to see what she would do.  She was thrilled!

Next up is some classic Montessori counting work.  Since this is the first time they’ll seen this work (and since I don’t have to be constantly looking for a ton of little marbles) I only went up to 5 instead of 10.

How cute are these snowmen!  They’re a free shape matching printable that I found on Pinterest.  I just printed and laminated them.

Another cute free printable!  This one is for matching snowflakes.

Last one!  This one was a big hit.  🙂  I took stripes of paper and drew cut lines on them.  Then the babies put a sticker in each square before cutting them apart.  A bit messier than I usually like these trays, but we’re working on scissor skills right now.  🙂