Montessori Home Tour: A Montessori Toddler’s Room

Next on our Montessori home tour (for our first home post on the big boys room, go here), I thought I would share some current snaps of our toddlers room.

8 Montessori Friendly Books We Are Reading For Autumn

Hey friends! You know it's autumn here when the kids start helping Tharin rake in the yard, read: playing in massive piles of leaves. We have some huge, beautiful trees at our new house, and the kids have been having a blast. 

With the changing of the seasons comes the rotating of our seasonal reads. Changing over our books with each new season is one of my favourite traditions to mark the transition, and one my kids really look forward to. 

Here are the ones we are loving and learning from this year, as well as a few I hope to add to our collection.

* This post includes affiliate links at no cost to you. The Fishies in a Row earns a small commission on products purchased through these links and are so thankful for your support. 

1. Ox-Cart Man by Donald Hall and Barbara Cooney / 2. Autumn by Gerda Muller / 3. Why Do Leaves Change Color? by Betsy Maestro / 4. The Pumpkin Book by Gail Gibbons / 5. Thanksgiving A Harvest Celebration by Julie Stiegemeyer / 6. Red Leaf, Yellow Leaf by Lois Ehlert / 7. Winter is Coming by Tony Johnston / 8. Yellow Time by Lauren Stringer

What are your favourite autumn reads? I would absolutely love to hear about them, just leave a comment below and we will add them to our list!


For more posts on books: My Top 5 Parenting Books | Book Wishlist 2018

If you have any questions or comments, please feel free to contact me. And if you are interested in following along in our daily adventures, follow us on Instagram where I post daily.

God bless,
Olivia Fischer

Montessori Simplified: Preparing the Environment

As I begin to set up the spaces in our new home and prepare the environment for my children, I am considering the principles for preparing the environment from a Montessori perspective.

While reading the Secret of Childhood, I was really moved by the importance of considering our children when preparing our homes from this excerpt:

Suppose that we should find ourselves among a race of giants, with legs immensely long and bodies enormously large in comparison with ours, and also with powers of rapid movement infinitely greater than ours, people extraordinarily agile and intelligent compared with ourselves.

We should want to go into their houses … the steps would be each as high as our needs; we should want to sit down, but the seats would be almost as high as our shoulders. 

If we knew that these giants had been expecting us, we should be obliged to say: they have made no preparation for receiving us, or for making our lives among them more agreeable.

Montessori Simplified: Why Use Breakable Dishes

We've officially moved into our new home, and among so many things to get used to, there are ceramic tile floors in the kitchen and dining area. Which has resulted in two broken dishes within the last day.

Though our toddler has used glass dishes and real silverware ever since he started eating solids, this ceramic floor introduces a whole new level of difficulty for him, and for our dishes. I've quickly realized we need to reinforce the lessons required for using glass dishes with him.

Montessori in Real Life: the Truth about Kids in the Kitchen

I still remember when our first started asking to help with more tasks in the kitchen. One morning I was making scrambled eggs and he asked to help crack them.

How Can We Help Our Children Reach Normalization

If you, like me, read about normalization and wonder what you can do to help your child. Or if you have a child you would describe with some of the less-than-peaceful descriptions I shared in my last post introducing normalization, and have no faith in the idea of it, know you are definitely not alone.

However, there is so much we can do to help our children develop to the best of their ability, there is so much we can do to guide our children toward normalization.

Simplifying Montessori: The Beginning of Normalization

Have you ever heard the Montessori term normalization and wondered what it really means?

If every child is so different, as Montessori itself teaches over and over and over, how can you, in the very next breath, teach that children are also capable of something called normalization?

Maria Montessori adopted the word not because she believed all children should, or could, be shaped into a version of what is considered “normal” but because she found that, over and over again in her study of children, every child, with different backgrounds, personalities and countless contributing factors, reached a similar level of development that she recognized as a normal aspect of human development.

If Parenting Advice is Giving you Whiplash, This is for You

In the parenting climate, we are currently trying to navigate, advice is at our fingertips.You can type something into Google and instantly have thousands of articles. 

But, so many of them are conflicting. 

Potty training with rewards, or not using rewards because it takes away the natural reward.
Giving rice cereal as first solids and avoiding meat, or staying away from rice cereal and going straight to table food.
Using a soother, or avoiding them.

How are we supposed to know which advice is sound, and which isn’t?

I felt like I had whiplash trying to decide what was best for my children.

Until I started reading Tim Seldin's How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way and it changed my motherhood.

Parenting advice abounds, but much of it doesn't seem to work that well. This is part because it tends to offer a cookbook approach with detailed suggestions about what to do in specific situations rather than a comprehensive, systematic, approach to parenting. 

This comprehensive, systematic approach to parenting is part of why I have come to love Montessori. 

How to Use the Montessori Three Part Lesson to Teach Anything

I have had a few people ask me how I taught our oldest his letters, so I have promised to write a post on the Montessori three-part lesson. He learned his letters so gradually and so painlessly, and with such a firm grasp. It was honestly magical to watch, and has made me a firm believer in the Montessori three-part lesson.

First of all, I started giving our son lessons on his letters when he started showing interest. He would ask me about letters he saw, bring me alphabet books to read, and was so excited to pick up his letter work as soon as I provided it for him, which were all sure signs that he was ready.