Montessori Activity: Ring, Ring, Hello Mommy!

Age: From 3 years old

Objectives:
1. To enrich your child's language development with conversation game.
2. To develop your child's ability to express himself.
3. To train listening ability.
4. Provide a fun way for your child to follow instruction and complete his chore.

Materials:
1. 2 plastic or paper cups
2. 1 string of approx. 1.5m long.

Directions:
1. Hold a telephone receiver each and find a spot to sit down.

2. Ask your child, "Where are you?"

3. Your child would answer for example, "I am sitting on the sofa calling you."

4. Invite your child to ask, if he does not do it himself, "Where are you, mommy?", to which you answer, "I am in the kitchen" for example.

5. Invite your child to find another place and continue the telephone call game.

Tips:
Provide a fun way for your child to follow instruction and do his chore:

1. Mommy phone child and give him a simple instruction and ask him to your instruction to complete the task, e.g. Could you put on your clothes please? or Could you bring the newspaper to Daddy please?

2. Child complete the task as instructed.

3. Child phone Mommy back to inform Mommy and invite Mommy to give instructions for another task.

Additional Information:
This is a very simple activity and cost next to nothing. I learn of this idea from a Chinese Montessori book, which I hope to try with Joshua.

Montessori Activity: Playing Hide-&-Seek with the Stop-Watch (3D)

Idea adapted from the book "Phonemic Awareness in Young Children"

Age: From 2.5 years old

Objective(s):
1. To stimulate the development of phonemic awareness in children.
2. To further train your child's ability to focus their attention on specific sounds of interest.
3. To develop the child's ability to concentrate and focus.

Materials:
1. Ticking clock, alarm clock or stop-watch
2. Blind fold (optional)

Directions:
1. Show the child the stop-watch, start it and let him be familiarize with the sound.

2. Stop the watch and tell your child that he should cover his eyes, while you are going to hide the stop-watch.

3. While your child's eyes are covered, find a hiding place for the stop-watch and start it.

4. Ask your child to open his eyes, listen very carefully and try to locate the stop-watch.

5. During the search, everyone must be as quiet as possible.

Tips:

For younger child or child who is not so sensitive to stop-watch, try hiding a musical box until the child is familiar with this game. Then re-introduce the stop-watch.

Additional Information:
It takes discipline to introduce language activities to Joshua. I haven't been that discipline and consistent with it, as I find the Maths activities more fun and interesting to implement. But I will persevere on. This is quite an easy activity to do, so I will try to do this tomorrow.

Actually, I believe this activity would be also good for children with ADHD, to train their concentration skill.

I highly recommend this book "Phonemic Awareness in Young Children" by Marilyn Jager Adams et al from Amazon. It provides a very organized approach to teaching language, which I like:

Montessori Activity: Mommy Mommy, Where are you? (3C)

Idea adapted from the book "Phonemic Awareness in Young Children"

Age: From 3 years old

Objective(s):
1. To encourage the child's willingness to listen sensitively and thoughtfully, according to the book "Phonemic Awareness in Young Children".
2. To train the child's ability to locate the source of a sound.

Materials:
1. Blindfold
2. Musical instrument such as a flute (optional)

Directions:
1.  Tell your child you are going to play a game with Mommy, and that he is to sit in the centre of the room with his eyes covered.

2. Mommy goes to any part of the room and makes an animal sound, for example, moo, bow-wow, chip, bzzz, etc.

3. Ask your child to point to the direction where the Mommy is.

4. In addition, ask your child to name the part of the room to which Mommy has gone and indicate whether Mommy is lying down on the floor or standing on a chair. The purpose is to pinpoint from where in the room the sound is coming.

5. When the child has figured out from where the sound is coming from, mommy and child change role and the game is repeated.

Tips:
You can also use sounds other than animal sounds such as sounds tied to a particular theme being studied or musical instrument such as a flute.

Additional Information:
This is another version of hide-&-seek game which is more targeted to the purpose of language training.

I highly recommend this book "Phonemic Awareness in Young Children" by Marilyn Jager Adams et al from Amazon. It provides a very organized approach to teaching language, which I like:

Montessori Activity: Training Ability to Listen to Series of Sounds (3B)

Idea from the book "Phonemic Awareness in Young Children" by Marilyn Jager Adams et al

Age: From 3 years old
Objective(s):
1. To develop the memory and attentional abilities for thinking about series of sounds and the language for discussing them.

2. To stimulate the development of phonemic awareness in children.

Materials:
1. Actions with Objects that make interesting and distinctive sounds such as
- banging on wall/table/lap
- blowing
- blowing a whistle
- blowing nose
- clapping
- clicking with tongue
- closing purse
- colouring hard on paper
- coughing
- crumpling paper
- cutting with scissors
- dropping (various things)
- drumming with fingers
- eating an apple
- folding paper
- flipping newspaper
- hammering
- hopping
- noisy chewing
- opening window or drawer
- pouring water
- ringing a bell
- rubbing hands together
- scratching
- sharpening a pencil
- slamming a brook
- smashing crackers
- snapping fingers
- stamping
- stirring with teaspoon
- tearing paper
- tiptoeing
- turning on computer
- typing on keyboard
- walking
- whistling
- writing on blackboard
- writing with a pencil

Directions:
1. Ask your child to cover his eyes and listen very carefully without peeking, while you make a familiar sound such as closing the door, sneezing, playing a key on the piano, etc. Make only one sound and ask your child to identify just one sound.

2. Once your child has caught on the game, make two noises, one after another. Ask your child to guess the two sounds in sequence saying, "There were two sounds. First, I heard a ____, then I heard a ____." as advised by the book.

3. After your child has become quite good with pairs of noises, produce a series of more than two for him to identify and report in sequence. Complete sentences should be encouraged.

Tips:
1. With your child's eyes closed, make a series of sounds. Then repeat the order, but omit one of the sounds. Ask your child to identify the sound that has been omitted.

2. Invite your child to make sounds for you to guess.

3. This game is good to review your child's use of ordinal words such as first, second, third, middle and last.

Additional Information:
I will be doing this activity from Marilyn Jager's book "Phonemic Awareness in Young Children" with Joshua. I highly recommend this book:

Montessori Activity: Training Ability to Listen to Sounds (3A)

Idea from the book "Phonemic Awareness in Young Children"

Age: From 2.5 years old

Objective(s):
1. To stimulate the development of phonemic awareness in children.
2. To train your child's ability to focus their attention on specific sounds of interest

Materials:
Recording of various sounds such as:
- Birds chirping
- Buses passing
- Cars
- Clock ticking
- Dog
- Water dripping from tap
- Fan turning
- Footsteps
- Hair-dryer
- Motorcycle's engine
- Ocean waves
- Rustling of tree leaves
- Scissors cutting
- Swallowing
- Train
- Voices
- Washing machine
- Wind

You can download for free evaluation of the sounds here: www.sounddogs.com

Directions:
1. Start by talking about the difference between listening with eyes closed and with eyes open.

2. Ask your child to close his eyes and listen for a few seconds or 1 minute (depending on the age of your child. For younger child, start with only a few seconds and gradually build up). Your child will listen to the sounds in his surroundings or play the MP3 player.

3. Thereafter, invite your child to name the different sounds that he heard. He will quickly learn to listen actively.

Tips:
Repeat this game in a different location.

Additional Information:
According to the book, "Phonemic Awareness in Young Children" by Marilyn Jager Adams, Barbara R. Foorman and Ingvar Lundberg, the goal of this game is to develop the child's linguistic awareness in a way that cognitively prepares them for learning to read and write. The children are asked to listen to many everyday sounds. Through this game, the children will discover that if they pay attention and listen, they will b e able to hear sounds around them.

This book provides even a suggested schedule on how to introduce the phonic activities for kindergarten children. The whole program takes about 8 months. I highly recommend this book:

You can buy ready recorded sounds for convenience from Amazon below:

or you can download for evaluation for free from this website, which is what I do, since Amazon does not sell to our geographical region:

http://www.sounddogs.com

This year, I am focusing on Maths and Language with Joshua. I believe that this game can be started with younger children of 2 years old, but I didn't have the time to explore that then, being a working mom, as our last year curriculum concentrated on Montessori Practical Life.

This game is actually very similar to the Montessori's Silence game. Joshua had tried this today for the first time. I tried to make action to go with the sounds, incurring lots of giggle and laughter from Joshua. He found it fun. He could guess the sound of cars and voices of people easily from the recording. He could not guessed so well the sounds of birds, thinking that they were ducks. He mistook the sound of waves to be the sound of cars. He guessed correctly the sound of scissors cutting only after I made the cutting handsign to go along with the sound. Similarly for the sound of wind. He could not gues the sound of footsteps and clock. After listening to the recording of clock, we went to his playroom to listen to his clock. It made him more aware and interested in listening to the real clock, after this activity. After today, I think it has made him more aware of the different sounds in our surrounding. I am following the suggested programme schedule by this book and will be repeating this again soon.

References:
Phonemics Awareness in Young Children by Marilyn Jager Adams, Barbara R. Foorman and Ingvar Lundberg
http://www.sounddogs.com/