DIY Reusable Montessori Dot Game

I think the dot game is yet another brilliant method of  teaching high level math to kids.  Maria Montessori seemed to have a special kind of brilliance for taking difficult concepts and making them concrete.  The trouble is that it seems they're expected to use their dot game paper for one single math problem... and then what?  Recycle it?  This gets expensive (AND WASTEFUL!) very, very fast.  Especially when your daughter thinks the dot game is about the coolest thing ever and wants to do it all.the.time.  That's what you want, but not when it drains your pocket book!  I had been just printing it off and letting her use it that way, but then we went through a phase where she was sort of uninterested in doing any school at all and since it's summer I just let it be for a while.

Starting up again, I wanted something fun and exciting and nice to look at.  So I broke out my old scrapbooking stuff and found a pretty "dot" paper.  I printed off a copy of the dot game paper from this site and cut it out.  I stuck it on with tape because I didn't want to take the time, but if I had it to do again I'd use a glue stick or something to stick it on since it does seem to pop up a little funny in the middle of the paper.  Then I stuck on the letter stickers to say "The Dot Game".  Finally I used self adhesive laminating sheets to laminate it and then cut off the excess.

She's using embarrassingly large dry erase markers in the appropriate colors, but I'd like to get some that are a better thickness for the size of the dot game.  These are just what I happened to have on hand.

I love that I don't have to print off a thousand copies of the dot game paper and my daughter can math to her little heart's delight!

DIY Montessori Globe

Last week was my kids' last week of school at their tiny montessori school.  We can't afford next year's tuition for my kids, so I am officially starting homeschooling now.  I'd like to keep within the montessori style mostly because I LOVE the montessori math curriculum.  It's just so brilliant!  Also because my kids are just sort of used to that style now.  I'm not married to the rest of the curriculum, though I do like it.


Anyway, I was scouting out Michaels' looking for ideas for things and came across this globe:

It's just a small (maybe 5 inch diameter or so?),  presumably paper-on-cardboard globe that has just light brown for the land parts, though it has some darker and lighter areas to show the mountains and such, as well as the names of the various countries and borders drawn in black.  The kids saw it immediately and were all excited to have their own globe at home, and my immediate thought was "hey, I could make this all sorts of montessori!"... and it cost me all of $1.

This project was super easy.  All you need is permanent markers in the appropriate colors and then carefully color in each continent. I think if you didn't want to see all the borders and country names, you could probably use paint pens, but they're much more expensive and I sort of like being able to see what's underneath.  I already had the sharpie markers in the right colors, too, so that was lucky.

Colors you need:
Europe -  red
Asia -  yellow
Africa -  green
N. America -  orange
S. America - pink
Australia - brown

Antarctica did not need to be colored because it was pretty much white to begin with.

Montessori websites

Ok, I realize this blog kind of jumps around a lot, and I really haven't had tons of time to update frequently, but with three kids under 6, it happens. Anyway, I'd like to do a montessori based homeschooling with my kids, so I've been looking up montessori information. Figured I'd post it here so that I don't lose it. :)

http://homemademontessori.blogspot.com/
http://montessorird.com/index2.php?cPath=1
http://www.montessoriforlearning.com/FreeDownloadIndex.html