I was mentioning in this post that I was busy making more Blue Series materials as laid out in my Montessori Research and Development Manuals. I thought I would share what I made. I cannot speak for any other manuals or their contents, as these manuals are what I have been using from the start. I also use Montessori for Everyone materials, and they are wonderful but I had always intended on making my own according to my manuals.
MRD divides Blue Series Reading into sections AB&C. All three sections contain versions of the same components. To see exactly what is in the manuals you can check out the table of contents page here.
I am storing our Blue Series in these locking boxes with handles (easy to carry) from the dollar store.
There are three for boxes A B & C. All of the work contained is in individual hand written envelopes (my son loves envelopes). I could have printed these, but thought it was a good way to get Xander used to reading hand written text. I also bought three boxes in green for Green Series work. They didn't have pink so I bought red, and will spray the handles. We were using a parts cabinet for Pink Series, but (for us) this is working really well, and makes the work much more portable.
These are the Sandpaper blend and phonogram cards that I purchased from here for our Green Series work.
I LOVE these, but MRD introduces 43 BLUE Series blends throughout AB&C and it felt like a lot of sandpaper cards to make so I created and printed a set for our Blue Series materials in similar scale. You can add clear textured contact paper as an overlay. We'll see how that works out, it would be easy and provide texture. My cards fit really nicely in the box with the wood versions for storage.
Our manual does include a series of high frequency digraphs at the beginning of Blue Series. Some may find it confusing because these digraphs appear again in Green Series along with other phonograms later on.
We found this invaluable to us to that they included high frequency digraphs like "th" "sh" and "ch" among others, in that they helped Xander to progress in reading other material far more quickly than if these high frequency digraphs had been withheld until Green Series.
"I Spy" is played with objects at the beginning of AB&C. I do have many objects for this, but did not show them in this post. It is a very large amount of objects, so I have substituted with many pictures. I made a full set for all three boxes with images, and will swap out when I get all of the objects or most. These are the cards I made before I cut them out as are the rest to follow.
There are a LOT of images contained here. I did my best to use images that I thought would appeal to Xander, and also to switch things up a bit. There are lots of duplicates of images used throughout, so when I was searching for "drum" for example I used three different types of drums, flags from different countries, dresses, colours and types of crabs etc. Some may say not to do this for various reasons and I think it depends on your child, but in our case it is working extremely well, and Xander loves it!
Then comes sandpaper letters intro in sets, and sandpaper letters with pictures. Then moveable alphabet with objects, and then also with pictures.
The same set of pictures are used for both of these. Again I am showing the pictures for the sandpaper letters/moveable alphabet for boxes
A & B.
Then comes matching words to pictures for AB&C.
On to matching sentences to pictures. MRD has sentence labels for the photos - I decided to list the sentences, and he finds and lines up the photos.
Booklets are next. The "A" booklets are simply with single words. Booklets in "B" are sentences and "C" contains single words. I made these very quickly by hand as it's nice for him to see hand written text. The booklets I made for box "A" are pictured below.
Word lists are last (in my manual) for A B& C. Below are the word lists for box "A".
I found this manual extremely easy to follow, and to make materials for.
Anyone can do this very easily.
All of the materials I purchased from Montessori for Everyone fit very nicely along side in the boxes.
I ordered small black and small red moveable alphabets from here as used in my MRD Manual.
We created a blend power point presentation for a little added variation.
I created the large set of blends simply because the sets you could purchase are intended for Green Series work, and I really needed a set to work with our Blue Series work from our Language Manual. This has been a wonderful set to have!
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It is great.. I'm teaching at one of kindergarten in Indonesia which use Montessori method, but i think yours are excellent..
ReplyDeletei do hope i can share my experiences here, and to have your advice so i can learn more and more again...
thanks a lot for sharing this...
Thank you!!!!
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