Here’s how Pomme has been showing off her developing smarts this week:

According to her, the one on the bottom is a cat, the one at the very top is a pig, and the rest are whales.  The spots are eyes.  She has labelled her drawings before (usually as whales lol), and she has drawn circles, spots, and lines before.  The new thing this week was deliberately making spots to represent eyes, using different drawing techniques to represent different parts of a whole.

She has also started to be able to trace shapes within a stencil.  I’d love to get the set of Montessori metal insets for this purpose, but can’t really afford them right now.  For now, I picked up a $1.50 wooden craft frame with an oval shape (which you can see in the picture), and we also use Flipper’s drawing tools triangles.

She loves to use Flipper’s dry erase board, and that’s fine by me.  It’s easy to clean the dry erase marker if she ‘misses’ the board, and she can erase and do it all over again, getting lots of drawing practice without leaving mountains of scribbled paper.

One Montessori item we did invest in was a set of wooden place value number cards.  I had initially put them out of her reach, because she’s not really ready for those kinds of math concepts yet.  But she found them and took them down and has been happily playing with them for weeks.  She sorts them by size and colour, identifies what digits she recognizes (for instance, she’ll say “one zero zero zero” for the one thousand tile), and practices putting them away:

We haven’t “instructed” her on anything with these, she has created all her own activities with them.

In fact, just after this picture was taken of her putting them away, I turned my back to her to focus on the stove and dinner.  When I turned back again a few minutes later, I assumed that I’d see them all put away, or perhaps taken out again to repeat putting them away.  What I saw instead, was this:

How cool is that?

Anyway, as I said, she likes to identify what digits she knows so far.  She has a wooden number puzzle which has pictures under the digits.  For instance, there are four dogs under “4″, seven hippos under “7″, etc.  At first, she would solve the puzzle just by fitting the shapes, but soon made the association with the animals.  She would pick up the puzzle number “7″ and say “hippos!!”  One exciting day (exciting for me as a proud mama), she saw a number 7 in a completely different context, just a regular printed digit 7, and very enthusiastically said “hippos!!”

Ah, the first step… the recognition that this particular shape, or symbol, represents something.  It didn’t really matter that she hadn’t yet made the connection with the symbol and the concept of quantity.  What mattered was the concept of symbol itself, of one thing standing for something else.  And what’s more, this 7 did not look exactly like the one in her puzzle, which is slightly cartoonish.  So she was recognizing that it was not the size, or the colour, or style, or the wooden-ness, or the texture of it that mattered… it was the basic shape itself.  Very, very cool indeed.

We haven’t done anything to “correct” her animal associations.  All we do is add to it… when she says “hippos!” for 7, we say “yes, seven hippos.”  Over time, she is picking up on this concept and has now substituted the real number name for most of the digits.  She identifies 0, 1, 5, and 7 consistently, 4 most of the time, sometimes mixes up 8 and 9, or 6 and 9, but she’s got the idea.

We have another set of smaller place value cards, that I made myself for Flipper before deciding to buy the wooden set.  She loves to pull them out of the baggie they’re stored in and sort them, and label the digits she knows.  As you can see in this video, she still uses the animal association for some numbers:

So that’s it! A week in the life of an unschooling, self-determining, Montessori-inspired 26-month old.

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