DuPage Montessori School is a school located in Naperville, IL. This blog is meant to share the materials we have created so that they can be useful to other educators around the world.
Here are the materials I made to go along with the Primary Phonics: Set 1 books.
With these materials, the students either have to: match a picture with a sentence, complete a sentence, or sequence a story using Set 1 words. There are some sight words such as animals and colors included in the set.
This taxonomy material teaches the children about animal classification. It conveys the narrowing of the diversity of life from the kingdom to the species by containing fewer pictures per card. They are self-correcting in that a higher classification card contains images of organisms from lower classifications. After the students put the cards in the correct order, they can add them to a handwritten tree of life in their notebook.
While this material is simple to use (all you to have to do is match picture-to-picture), it still contains a lot of information. Preschoolers are capable of using this material, however they tend to create a tangled mess without help. Each packet covers a specific biome. Each card shows an organism and what it consumes. The students connect the plants and animals using colored string. I use different colored string for herbivore and carnivore relationships. Some teachers like to add a Sun card so the plants have something to consume. While each card does not show the complete diet of each organism, we tried to get its main foods.
I made the food web packets using Pages. The images are from Wikipedia. I printed them on photo paper and then laminated them. You can use string to connect the cards or use something better.
Greek History is always a fun topic to cover. One way to make it more interesting is to teach the kids the Greek alphabet and do some vocabulary work. When we first created these Greek Boxes, we didn't expect the response we got from the children. The students actually preferred doing the Greek Boxes to the Latin Boxes. I think this is because having to learn a new alphabet is kind of like cracking a code. Also, many of the Greek letters are similar to the Latin letters, which demonstrates how one alphabet evolved from the other.
These materials are made just like the Latin Boxes. You just print them out and laminate them.
We have another material which teaches the phonetic sounds of each Greek letter, however students can get along just fine with a basic guide printed from the internet. It usually only takes them a couple weeks to memorize the alphabet.
Vocabulary is a difficult subject to make engaging for students. Taking the approach of connecting vocabulary with Greek and Roman history makes it more interesting for the kids. We typically introduce the Latin Boxes when we first start discussing the Romans. We also use the Cambridge Latin Course textbooks to do some translation of Latin.
These materials can be easily made on a computer. I made them using Pages. I then printed them out on photo paper, cut them, and then laminated them. Each Latin Box covers a specific subject and contains about 20 vocabulary words.