I don’t know about you guys, but my Christmas decorations are not surviving a house with two toddlers. Last week, L and N completely dismantled my last remaining Christmas centerpiece on the coffee table, so I threw in the towel and remade it into a Montessori-inspired work. While they were busy playing with all of the pieces, I chose 5 pine cones of differing heights and put them in a basket.
Once L was finished destroying my decoration, I showed her this Pine Cone Size Ordering Work. I took all of the pine cones out and placed them at random on the table. [The presentation of this work is similar to that of the Pink Tower in language].
First we found the biggest pine cone and placed it all the way to the left. Then we found the next biggest, and the next biggest…
…all the way until we placed the smallest pine cone at the very end of our line up. This work is great for discriminating objects by size, and the left to right motion is actually a pre-reading activity!
My Christmas decorations may all be destroyed, but at least I found something productive for L to do with the remaining pieces.