Summertime here in the Herring household is mostly filled with days spent swimming, eating ice cream cones, syrup-y snowballs with marshmallow, and fishing…just enjoying living on the water. Since we spend so much time outside I’ve decided to focus on some Montessori concepts for Quinn this summer. Inspired by the Dear Ladies on the 4RealLearning Forums, I’m starting to put together a list of simple things we will cover this summer. I’m not ruling out creating a Summer Lapbook and probably will get one finished before the first tree starts to turn to autumn gold but I want to focus more on trying to expand Quinn’s fine motor skills, speech and learning in ways that will catch his interest.

At least we’re going to try to…Quinn may very well (and probably will) have different ideas. To help him develop the fine motor skills that he needs to put on his shoes and socks, I’ve been giving him my socks to put on. First off, he thinks it’s funny to wear Momma’s socks and second, he can actually pull them on, which he can’t do with his own socks. To further develop those finger and hand muscles, I also love the little lock box but am afraid it’s out of our price range so I did a quick search on Amazon and found a peek-a-zoo lock box and a Ravensburger lock and key puzzle that we can afford. The Farm Yard Hammering set is another item that I have on my wish list. Of course, Michael has questioned if we really want him to learn how to unlock and hammer things. *smile*

To work on his memory and cognitive skills I created a simple Summer Matching Cards created using the template (and some of the photos) from Montessori for Everyone. I saved the PDF document and then opened it up in Photoshop and customized it with half of our own summer photos. I’ve printed them (shown below) and all I need to do now is laminate and cut them out.

I also want to work on the Bug theme unit that I put together last year…the one that Quinn absolutely refused to even look at. *smile* Since we got the feeder crickets their own little house, Quinn really loves watching them so I’m hoping to be able to interest him with learning about insects, talk about their colors, body parts, and where they live. At Amazon I found an adorable little Klutz (Chicken Socks) book, “Tree House Bugs.” We have Usborne and DK books on insects and of course, a visit to our library will quickly add many more to our collection.

I’m going to hit the dollar stores and pick up items for the pool…plastic pouring utensils, brightly colored animals and sea creatures, small containers so he can sort his collections on the pool cap and a large container to store everything when it’s time to come out and dry off.

Catching lightning bugs, having ice cream runs (gathering the kids up at dusk and heading out to our favorite ice cream place), sleeping out in the tent in the yard, being in our local 4th of July parade, fireworks and cookouts…looks like it’s going to be a great summer. *smile*