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Thursday, November 15, 2018

Montessori-Inspired Peace Activities Using Free Printables

By Deb Chitwood from Living Montessori Now

I love the Montessori emphasis on peace education. I typically have a peace tray on my shelves each month. This month, I'm doing an entire peace unit. Our world needs more peace, and we need to do our part to help the children of the world grow up to be peaceful adults.

At Living Montessori Now, you'll find free peace printables. I'll be adding free mindfulness printables throughout the month as well.

You'll find many activities for preschoolers through first graders throughout the year along with presentation ideas in my previous posts at PreK + K Sharing. You'll also find ideas for using free printables to create activity trays here: How to Use Printables to Create Montessori-Inspired Activities.

At Living Montessori Now, I have a post with resource links of Free Printables for Montessori Homeschools and Preschools.

Disclosure: This post contains affiliate links (at no cost to you).

Montessori Shelves with Peace Themed Activities

You’ll find Montessori-inspired peace themed numbers, letters, and and more (part of my subscriber freebie pack, so just sign up for my email to get the link and password … or check the bottom of your latest newsletter if you’re already a subscriber)

I always have related books available throughout a unit. I have a number of beautiful peace books this unit, including What Does Peace Feel Like?, Peace is an Offering, and Peace.

One of my favorite peace books is the gorgeous National Geographic book A Little Peace. It has stunning photographs throughout with just a few meaningful words. At the end are the pages you see open on the right side of the top shelf. Those pages tell about each photograph and where it was taken. My continents globe is from Kid Advance on Amazon.

You could mix your peace-themed activities among your shelves according to curriculum area. Or you could have a special peace-themed area something like the one pictured. My shelves have a mixture of skill levels. Many of the activities can be adapted for a variety of levels. If you’re a homeschooler, just choose the activities that work for your child’s interests and ability levels. If you don’t have room for all the activities you’d like to do, simply rotate them.

Peace Books and Peaceful Character Work

Free Printable: Peaceful Character from Montessori Print Shop I

love that the 6 pillars of peaceful character are respect, caring, fairness, responsibility, trustworthiness, and citizenship ... the same as the Character Counts 6 pillars of character. So this work is easily adaptable for children at a variety of ages worldwide.

This was so easy to prepare and is very adaptable. I simply printed out the materials and placed them on a Multicraft tray. Because my 5-year-old granddaughter, Zoey, loves small books, I made the 6 pillars descriptions into a little booklet using a binder ring. I added crayons so she can color each part of the hand after writing the words according to the character trait listed on the control chart.

Children Around the World Sorting Activity

Free Printable: Children Around the World Cards from I Believe in Montessori at Teachers Pay Teachers

These beautiful photographs of children around the world can be used for a variety of levels. Toddlers can use a few at a time for a simple matching activity. Preschoolers can sort the cards by continent. Kindergarteners and early-elementary-age kids can find the country of each child on the globe. There are labels at the end with the country names. I'm planning to add the appropriate country name to the back of each card so that we can do some extra work with identifying countries.

P is for Peace Sand Writing Tray

Free Printables: Peace Symbol Letters for peace writing tray (part of my subscriber freebie pack, so just sign up for my email to get the link and password … or check the bottom of your latest newsletter if you’re already a subscriber)

For the sand tray (see middle shelf above), I used the wooden tray from the Melissa & Doug Lace and Trace Shapes. You can use whatever tray or container work best for you, though. I had gotten some lovely white sand for making kinetic sand and other projects. I used that sand to make it more like a peace garden.

I also used polished stones for letter building. Zoey loves these stones, and they give it more of a meditative feel. I added the wooden stick from our wood tracing board for letter writing, although a tool isn't necessary.

If you would like help with introducing phonetic sounds, introducing objects with sounds, or beginning phonics in general, check out my DIY Beginning Montessori Phonics with Preschoolers.

Peace Word Analysis and Word Building with Phonogram Cards and Movable Alphabet

Free Printables: “ea" peace phonogram cards and "ce" peace phonogram cards (part of my subscriber freebie pack, so just sign up for my email to get the link and password … or check the bottom of your latest newsletter if you’re already a subscriber)

Free Printable: "ea" Sound with Letters from MontessoriSoul

Free Printable: Hard and Soft C and G Posters (reduced in size) from Make, Take and Teach

"Peace" is a tricky word for young children to analyze. So I made two phonogram cards. You can introduce "ea" and/or "ce" (soft c). For this type of work, Zoey will read the "ea" booklet. Then she'll read the words on the soft c card. After that, she'll build the word "peace" with the movable alphabet.

I have a post and video on how to introduce words starting with phonograms, even with very young children. There's an explanation of soft and hard c on the free printable. It's fine to use that explanation for the soft c.

DIY Dove Cards and Counters

Free Printables: Dove Numbers (part of my subscriber freebie pack, so just sign up for my email to get the link and password … or check the bottom of your latest newsletter if you’re already a subscriber)

I love making DIY themed cards and counters to introduce odd and even and add interest and variety to cards and counters. I found these mini doves to add interest. You need exactly 55 buttons if you want to do the numbers and counters 1-10. The package contains 144 doves, so there are many for other activities, too.

For Zoey and other kids who are already comfortable with symbol and quantity, I’ll typically use the cards and counters for hands-on addition, subtraction, and other mathematical operations. (See some of my other themed posts for ideas.) But sometimes I like to use the odd and even labels that are in our peace pack. The doves would be fun for addition and subtraction because some could "fly away" for subtraction, etc.

Hundred Chart Counting to 100 and Skip Counting Work with Peace Symbol Charms

Hundred Chart with 100 Silver Peace Symbol Charms for Counting to 100 and Skip Counting

Free Printable: Hundred chart from Creative Family Fun

I found these pretty vintage antique silver alloy peace symbol charms (100 pieces) inexpensively on Amazon. I like to use printable hundred charts to extend Montessori hundred board work. They're also wonderful for skip counting as well as adding and subtracting practice.

Filling Hundred Chart with 100 Silver Peace Symbol Charms

Zoey loved the little silver peace symbol charms and had fun counting to 100 while she placed a symbol on each square.

Counting by 5s to 100 with Silver Peace Symbol Charms

Then she enjoyed skip counting with the peace symbol charms. She used them to skip count by 2's, 5's, and 10's. It was a great activity!

Peacemakers Cards or Booklet

Free Printable: Peacemakers Cards from Natural Beach Living

The cards on the bottom right of my shelves (see above) are some inspirational peacemakers (including Maria Montessori) and short biographies of each.

This is very easy to prepare. You can use these for matching or make a booklet like I did.

Montessori-Inspired Peace Pack (Living Montessori Now Subscriber Freebie)

Montessori-Inspired Peace Pack for DIY Cards and Counters, Number or Letter Matching, Number or Letter Basket, Bead Bar Work, Hands-on Math Operations, Number or Letter Salt/Sand Writing Tray, Letter Tracing, Phonogram Work, DIY Movable Alphabet, and Creative Writing (subscriber freebie, so just sign up for my email to get the link and password – or check your inbox if you’re already a subscriber)

More Free Peace Printables

Go to my post at Living Montessori Now for links to free peace printables from around the blogosphere: Free Peace Printables and Montessori-Inspired Peace Activities. And be sure to subscribe to my email list if you'd like to get an exclusive free printable each month (plus two more awesome freebies right away): Free Printables.

More Peace and Mindfulness Activities and Resources

I'm including mindfulness activities because feeling peace within is a great step toward expressing peace toward others.

If you'd like to focus on manners with children, please check out my eBook Montessori at Home or School: How to Teach Grace and Courtesy! It's written for anyone who'd like to feel comfortable teaching manners to children ages 2-12. I'm also one of the coauthors of the book Learn with Play – 150+ Activities for Year-round Fun & Learning!

Have a happy holiday season!

Deb Chitwood is a certified Montessori teacher with a master’s degree in Early Childhood Studies from Sheffield Hallam University in Sheffield, England. Deb taught in Montessori schools in Iowa and Arizona before becoming owner/director/teacher of her own Montessori school in South Dakota. Later, she homeschooled her two children through high school. Deb is now a Montessori writer who lives in San Diego with her husband of 43 years (and lives in the city where her kids, kids-in-law, and grandkids live). She blogs at Living Montessori Now.

Tuesday, May 13, 2014

Peaceful Parent, Peaceful Child

Two pianos were sitting next to each other in a room. A person sitting at one piano pressed one key, causing a tone to fill the air. Instantly, the string responsible for creating the same tone on the OTHER piano began to vibrate. This isn’t the start of a joke, but an experiment that has been tested by physics experts. The tone created by the first piano is a wave of vibrations that are absorbed by the strings on the other piano. The one string on that other piano capable of producing the same tone that filled the air, responds by amplifying its own vibration.

People behave in a similar manner as pianos. When one person enters a room expressing emotion, it is quite likely that one or more other persons in that room are likely to instantly take on that emotion. Has this ever happened to you; your significant other or child began to express an intensified level of joy, excitement, worry, fear or anger, and before you realized it, you too were feeling a similar sense of that same emotion?

We are emotional creatures and we are each capable of

taking on the emotion of someone we care about. A close friend stops by with sad news and instantly we feel sad. Our child arrives home announcing ecstatically that she’s won an award and we too are now feeling great joy. Our significant other wakes up in a bad mood and we seem to absorb those vibrations, suddenly becoming moody ourselves.

The parents I work with complain to me about their children; the kids won’t cooperate, they scream “NO” at their parents, they talk back, they have frequent meltdowns, and they won’t help out, just to name a few of the common challenges. Some of the common causes of these types of frustrating behaviors are created by the parents, and include: a lack of consistency in rules, little or no boundaries, talking too much, too many outside activities for the kids to keep up with, too much ‘screen time,’ and not enough parent/child connection time.

But one of the biggest causes is a lack of peace and calmness in the adults who care for the children. Like the pianos, parents who have not been taking good care of themselves transmit negative frequencies to their families and then wonder why they aren’t getting the level of cooperation and peacefulness they desire. If you want peaceful children, you must first become a peaceful parent.

When I prescribe this solution to some parents however, I’m quickly met with resistance. I hear comments such as, “When I can afford a nanny or a housekeeper, then I can become more calm and peaceful.” I remember the challenge myself; employed full-time, working hard to maintain a peaceful home, and raising three young children who liked to fight and challenge me every step of the way.

I realized that it was my responsibility to do whatever it took to learn how to calm myself and to take better care of me. I quickly discovered that during weeks when I made time to take care of myself physically, spiritually, socially, and emotionally, it became easier for me to know how to handle situations at home and my children became easier to care for. So what will YOU do this week to take better care of you? Start by giving yourself permission to MAKE the time and follow through.

Bill Corbett has a degree in clinical psychology and is the author of the award winning book “Love, Limits, & Lessons: A Parent’s Guide to Raising Cooperative Kids,” in English and in Spanish. He is happily married with three grown children, two grandchildren, and three step children. You can visit his Web site www.CooperativeKids.com for further information and parenting advice.

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