[seamama11]

Hi,
First of all thank you to all of you wonderful mothers who are doing such exciting and enriching things with your families. You are in inspiration. I recently stumbled upon waldorf philosophy and have loved learning all about it. A lot of it comes natural to me, and there has been so many things I have started to do after reading about it. Now I am getting very excited about Montessori, and feel like a balance between the two would suit me and my family perfectly. I love all the little activities, and feel that I could gather the materials quite easily. My question is set up. I have a 2.9 year old son and a 14 month old daughter. I don't think it would work to have jobs/activities on shelves because A. my son loves to pretend he is a garbage man and dumps all of his toys in a pile in the room and B. my daughter tears into everything as well. So how do some work it? I guess I can start small with a few trays up high and he can choose and I can help him get it? How do you store all your activities? Do you leave them set up, or rotate them out and store them in a garage?
Thanks!
Sarah

 

[MattBronsil]

Quote:

Originally Posted by seamama11 Hi, First of all thank you to all of you wonderful mothers who are doing such exciting and enriching things with your families. You are in inspiration. I recently stumbled upon waldorf philosophy and have loved learning all about it. A lot of it comes natural to me, and there has been so many things I have started to do after reading about it. Now I am getting very excited about Montessori, and feel like a balance between the two would suit me and my family perfectly. I love all the little activities, and feel that I could gather the materials quite easily. My question is set up. I have a 2.9 year old son and a 14 month old daughter. I don't think it would work to have jobs/activities on shelves because A. my son loves to pretend he is a garbage man and dumps all of his toys in a pile in the room and B. my daughter tears into everything as well. So how do some work it? I guess I can start small with a few trays up high and he can choose and I can help him get it? How do you store all your activities? Do you leave them set up, or rotate them out and store them in a garage? Thanks! Sarah

For toddlers, I've been taught to set it up differently. Rather than have trays on the shelves that the child has to constantly return, it's best to set up many stations they can use. If you want to have a water pouring activity, set that at a specific place where the child can do it, clean up that area, then leave it ready for the next time. A few trays on the shelf might be good, too.

Your son will soon be 3, so he'll move from an age of discovering order to an age where creating that order is important. (Dumping things out, for a toddler, is part of discovering order...as messy as it seems to us. Usually the game is played of dumping things out, then putting them back, then dumping them out, then putting them back, then...well...just having flashbacks of when my cousin was a toddler and I had to do that countless times with him over Easter.)

So with the older son, you might want to start to introduce some simple activities on the shelf that he can remove and take back.

Hope this helps some. You might want to check out this book as well:

http://astore.amazon.com/monteblog-20/detail/075662505X and
http://astore.amazon.com/monteblog-20/detail/0764142410

They have some great ideas for the toddler years.