Montessori notes

The plan was to have an entirely different angle on my post today, but then someone got up from his siesta (a tricky word I use around here to define "4 year old nap") early and immediately began grumbling about how I never ever EVER play with him any more.  He seems to have forgotten our rip roaring ice hockey match, played this afternoon on the ice right before his siesta.  Whatever the case, I gotta go, so I'll start this week with the post that was gonna end this week and hope that your evening is going a bit more smoothly than mine.  

I finally broke down and tore apart and laminated our gorgeous alphabet book, A Farmhouse Alphabet.  I have no regrets.  Now we not only get to view the pages, but use them as learning tools, as well.  The wooden letter pieces are from Handwriting Without Tears.  I first used the method when teaching kindergarten and loved it's elements.  Now I use a lot of the terminology from it and have purchased some of the materials to help teach Bear.  No need to go overboard as I don't homeschool and Bear already attends preschool, but using elements from the program in our day to day going ons has proven to be quite beneficial.  Officially, Handwriting Without Tears does not follow the same path as traditional Montessori, but it is easy to use the program in a complimentary way; this post explains it quite well.

I've also been using some quality FREE resources to help with our religious exploration. 
ABC Jesus Loves Me
and the blog, Catholic Icing  
 
Through these spaces I've been able to come up with a simple study guide and activities to correlate with it.  And by study guide, I just mean a general guide I use to help introduce our faith to Bear.  I really had no idea where to start and these sites have helped steer me in the right direction.

 
Notice this post didn't even go up until after 7pm?  Yeah, Mondays are sometimes like that, aren't they?