Montessori Monday (okay Tuesday) : Asia Swap and New Math Work

This week, instead of doing a combined Making Memories & Montessori Monday combined post, have separated out the two, as I wanted to do a special post for Father's Day.

So, here is my Montessori post for this week...

Signed up to participate in another Continents boxes swap, this time through Honey at Mondorfment. It has been an awesome swap, largely due to Honey organizing it and the great gals in our swap group:)

We all had to choose a continent or part of a continent to focus on for our swap.
I selected Asia, primarily because we have an excellent Asian market so figured that it would expedite putting the swap box together...

Made the following:
An interactive Asian banner that can be used for several different works, including:

language - naming the animals and spelling their names with the movable alphabet, putting the animals in ABC order, grammar command cards, ordinal numbers work, grammar  work - sentences and grammar work - parts of speech.

Tiny Japanese Lanterns - for language object or for cultural object in the continents boxes.

Pin map flags - for pin map work

Asian stick puppets

Interactive pages that can be done as either an art project or as a language / cultural work...

these pages highlight three customs from Thailand and integrate either works, such as the metal insets and the parts of a flower.

Recipes, info. packet, and  a fingerplay...

Then, bought some items for the swap...

Soup spoons

Asian Figurines of little Chinese boys

Decorative chopsticks

and a few other surprises for my swapmates.

All in all, this has been a fab swap!

Can't wait to get all of the cool items my swapmates have made for this swap.

Looking forward to future swaps, too, as this one has been fun.

In addition to working on the Asia swap, I also got psyched as our order from Alison's Montessori arrived...yippie!

Then, got the call that the math items from Lakeshore were also in stock now...double yippie!

So in our Alison's goodies box, we got the bead bar hanger, the teens bead bar hanger, a control map of the world, another three part card tray, and some more bead stairs.

Since the items have arrived, the boys have been enjoying doing math works with the two hangers. Then, while perusing other people's Montessori inspired blogs, I came across a great post and a free download for some worksheets to use with the bead stairs. These new works and extensions have been a hit here in the Sunshine State!

A huge thanks to Evanspor - Walk Beside Me for her nice downloads of sheets that correspond with the bead stair. They have been especially helpful to Little Bro. Big Bro also wanted something similar to go with the teen bar hanger work, so he made up a sheet with the tens beads and then, I helped him glue the bead stair sheet so that it ended up looking like addition problems...turned out to be an involved work...big Bro was quite engrossed with it for much of the morning...

We then went to Lakeshore Learning and picked up what had come in for us...a set of Classroom Write and Wipe Math Mats, a Five Minute Math Journal for Big Bro, and some math extensions to go with Base Ten cubes. Big Bro has enjoyed working on the Fractions work as well as the base ten work...

Also did some laminating while at the store...Dear Hubby did a cost benefit analysis a while ago as to what was the most cost effective way to laminate...taking it to Lakeshore Learning to use their lamination machine, buying thermal sheets and a smaller scale thermal scanner, or buying laminate sheets that self seal and do not require a lamination machine...

Well, according to my Dear Hubby, taking items to Lakeshore Learning and using their machine and their laminating film for the teacher's discount price of 29 cents per foot is the best way to go...the laminate is wider, thicker, less expensive, and holds up better than the comparisons we did for this cost benefit analysis...just have to be sure to get a teacher's card for your homeschool or Montessori inspired school if you decide to take this route, too...

All in all, we are off to a nice start of our "summer camp" (pretty much what we did all year but with a catchy new name!!!)

Well, hope that you all had a happy Montessori Monday, as well as a terrific Montessori Tuesday!!!
Please be sure to visit Jody's Montessori Monday at Mommy Moment as well as Nicole's Montessori Monday at One Hook Wonder.