An essential reading list to get started with Montessori at home.
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Baby Steps Towards Montessori
How to start Montessori from birth without spending a penny or rearranging your home.
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Montessori at 8 Months
A look at the Montessori Inspired work we are offering to our 8 month old.
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Wooden Egg and Cup
The joy of simple Montessori work can have complex rewards for a child as seen with the Egg and Cup at 8 months.
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Treasure Baskets 6-8 Months
The benefit of offering treasure baskets and sensory play to babies. I love everything about Montessori but one aspect of its current interpretation is the consumerism it encourages. Deciding to create a Montessori home should not cost a small fortune and require masses of materials because Montessori is not defined by the materials but rather by simplicity and a sense purposeful play. This is where treasure baskets come in! Treasure baskets are collections of themed objects that you have around the home which provide children with the opportunity for sensory play, (sensory play being anything that engages one of the five senses). “Everything we know about the world has come…
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Introducing a Newborn to Dogs
What are the practical precautions to take and preparations to make when bring home a baby to a house with dogs. Preparations Having a baby means lots of new objects, smells and sounds, dogs are naturally curious and will want to explore these new aspects of their home so it’s a good idea to get your dogs used to this before the baby is born. While I was still pregnant we got Holmes and Claude ready for life with a newborn. We let them sniff his blankets, his talcum powder, the nappy bags we’d be using, we pushed the empty pram around the house and set the bouncer in the…
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Sensitive Period: Gross Movement
Developing children will go through several Sensitive Periods as they grow. During each they will experience a preference for working on a specific skill. The Sensitive Period for Movement is 0-4, broken into two distinct phases; the acquisition of gross and fine motor from 0-2.5 years, and the refinement and coordination of movement from 2.5-4 years. Now that Alfie is finally rolling (applause and sighs of relief please), I thought it would be a good time to look at how to accommodate his entrance into the Sensitive Period for Movement. As we were living in a building site we didn’t have the luxury of a Montessori Movement Area, there were no…
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Here Come The Girls
Chick, chick chickeeeeeeeens! Oh how exciting! Our hens arrived last Friday and I am besotted already. To say ‘arrived’ is possibly an overstatement, it implies they jetted in from somewhere exotic with monogrammed luggage and an entourage, though when you see them its not hard to imagine that being the case. Introducing Joan and Zsa Zsa, two fine looking birds named after two fine looking broads (Collins and Gabor, keep up). In reality there was very little glamour save for that found in the fetishising of all things rural and inefficient, they arrived in an apple box. I picked them up from a man in the village who keeps…
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Our Experience of Baby Led Weaning
Why we made the unpopular decision to give up on Baby Led Weaning and embrace spoon feeds. Baby Led Weaning has become another way of saying “good parenting”. Baby’s who are weaned the BLW way are less fussy eaters, more independent and have better motor skills than babies who are are spoon fed. Allegedly. There are definitely pros and cons to BLW and spoon feeding, but for us the way if the spoon was the way to a happy, full baby! I loved the idea of Baby Led Weaning because I love cooking, I’m fairly confident that the majorly of meals served on Cnoc na Gáire are healthy and tasty.…
