Over the past few weeks our blog posts have been 'Catching Up' with our four and five year old students. Our next two blogs will focus on the work being done by our three year olds and our youngest students.
These photographs were taken during the last week of November and the first two weeks of December.
The Sandpaper Letters
The Sandpaper Letters are thin wooden boards on each of which are glued one lower-case letter cut from sandpaper. The wooden box on the table in the photographs below consists of all of the letters of the alphabet. The consonants are pink and the vowels are blue. There are two 'y' boards as 'y' can be both a vowel and a consonant.
The purpose of this material is to help the child associate the sounds of speech with their written symbols. This material is preparation for writing and reading.
The Sandpaper Letters are in daily use in our Montessori classrooms. The letters are introduced to an individual child by his/her teacher. Each child progresses at their own pace. The letters introduced to the child should be of contrasting shape and sound.
E. has been introduced to the letters shown by his teachers. E. is not yet three years old and is one our youngest students.
In the following photographs, E. is lightly feeling each letter while saying the sound that it makes.
The letter 'm' says 'm' as in 'mom'.
The letter 'e' says 'e' as in 'egg'.
The letter 'h' says 'h' as in 'hammer'.
The Large Movable Alphabet
The purpose of the Large Movable Alphabet is to introduce the child to written self-expression. The children using this material know all of the first sounds the letters of the alphabet represent through their work with the Sandpaper Letters.
This material consists of two large shallow boxes with compartments containing wooden letters of the alphabet. Vowels are in blue and consonants are in pink.
This material is also in use daily in our classrooms. Our students are so enthusiastic about this work!
K. has just started his work with the Movable Alphabet. He has set out the objects in one of the Pink Object Boxes and is finding the first sound of each object.
In these photographs K. has found the first sounds for top, nut, jug, bud and bat.
The children in the following photographs are now spelling the words found in the Pink Object Boxes and the Blue Object Boxes.
D. is spelling the words in a Pink Object Box which contains two and three letter phonetic words.
O. has completed spelling all the words in her Pink Object Box.
R. is spelling words found in a Blue Object Box (containing phonetic words of four letters or greater including syllables and blends).
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