How to Tie

Here is a nice series of pictures of using the Montessori tying dressing frame.
Step one untie the bows and knots.
Step two open flaps of dressing frame and put one side back and pull back the ties, do the same for the other side.
Step three tie a knot.
Pull up middle of crossed over ribbons and pull through top ribbon.
This is a good place to stop for a first step. If your child is able, go on to making bows.
Step one-Place two fingers on middle of ribbon
Step two-make a bow around your two fingers.
Step three-loop the other ribbon loosly around the bow.
Step four-Pull folded white ribbon through the loop. Pull gently on both bows until secure.

If you are using shoes instead of the dressing frame just use two different colored shoe laces. Find ones that are thick as possible. Also, make sure they are the right length-not too short or too long.
Here are some more ideas-How to Tie Your Shoe

Teaching Your Toddler to Button

My kids loved this activity. Cut off the cuffs from an adult’s old shirt. Take off the old button and sew on a big colorful button. You’ll have to open up the old button hole to make it fit over the bigger button. Hand stitch around the bigger hole to make it secure. This is a first lesson you can do before the Montessori button dressing frame.
Your kids will love these button bracelets.

Beginning line exercises

Toddlers can do activities on the line besides walking on it. You can have your toddler sit on the line or next to it, crawl on the line, and run their hand along the line. Keep in mind the physical development of your children to help them use this exercise in a fun and positive way.
If you have cars in your toddler environment, make a double line that can be used as a road. Use a different color tape for the road to avoid confusion. Pushing a car along a line is a great exercise for eye-hand coordination, control of movement, spatial & physical exercise of keeping the car on the line, and it is just plain fun.
For a more advanced exercise, make roads with roundabouts that go onto a road in another direction. My older children loved making tape roads and designs on a special “road rug.”

The Anthropology of Writing & Drawing

We’ve been writing and drawing lately. It seems almost sad that after a certain age we quit drawing, and even writing ! I think that we give way to the rigors of writing and drawing, so much so that we loose our desire to draw and write. We usually quit drawing around the age of adolescence.

Maria Montessoir believed we should study those who write or draw to find out the science of the human writing, not have the method of writing dictate how the human should write.
In the Montessori Method she states:

Let us observe an individual who is writing, and let us seek to analyse the acts he performs in writing,” that is, the mechanical operations which enter into the execution of writing. This would be undertaking the philosophical study of writing, and it goes without saying that we should examine the individual who writes, not the writing; the subject, not the object. Many have begun with the object, examining the writing, and in this way many methods have been constructed.

But a method starting from the individual would be decidedly original–very different from other methods which preceded it. It would indeed signify a new era in writing, based upon anthropology.

A good book to get you back to drawing again is Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain. It has activities and insight on how the creative process works.