5 days of Elementary Montessori: Day 2 Sentence Fun

Welcome to another fun episode in 5 days of Elementary Montessori.  Today I want to share a couple of non-traditional Montessori style ideas for Sentence and Grammar activities.

I have the Farm Game for Nathan and he still enjoys playing with the set up we have even though the farm game is meant for a younger student. I also have several other printed materials for grammar and parts of speech. Eventually I will finish his grammar boxes and his sentence modeling set, but for now he is enjoying creating sentences with a set of plastic tiles a friend gave us. The colors don't coordinate with Montessori, but that actually has an advantage for Nathan as he was starting to memorize the colors instead of what part of speech we were working on.  

While his older brother works on a variety of other activities, Nathan can play a variety of games with the letter tiles and work on creative writing.  Recently he created a sentence that led to a discussion on verb tenses and how to make the verb tense match to the rest of the sentence. We also worked on writing the sentence on our home printed paper (we use Handwriting without Tears model currently, so I created a custom size paper for him).
Write the sentence and then write 2 additional senteneces that expand on the subject in the initial sentence is one of our daily tasks. Another thing these tiles have been very good for is self directed clean up, they have their own bucket with lid and when we are done with the activitiy the tiles fit in the bucket and are returned to the Language Arts Shelf in the Resource Room. As a way to encourage sharing with Daddy, Nathan is allowed to leave his completed paper on the table until he shows Daddy the work, then the paper is filed in his workbox under finished works.
We have also played a couple of rounds of Story Cubes to encourage Creative Writing and Creative Thought. 
I do allow Nathan to explore writing with either hand as he shows ambidexterous tendancies and I want to encourage whatever is most comfortable to him. 
Later this fall, I am going to have Nathan help me "build" grammar boxes and a few custom sentence strips. I am thinking we will use a modified idea, but still work with each part of speech progressively.
We are taking it at his pace rather than falling into a pattern of what the books say he is suppose to.

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