Valentine's Day meets Montessori approached homeschool!

Well, I would have loved to post all these fun things oh, say, a week or two ago, when we began all our Valentine's works - or even before that, in case someone saw something that might work for their home. However, seeing as how I didn't get my new camera until Valentine's Day, I wasn't able to take pictures before today, or catch my crew in action with these. But I figured it's better late than never, as mom used to say, so here goes:

   
This very beautiful container, which was most likely intended for a dry potpourri at one time, emitted the most wonderful smell for two weeks on our shelves - candy! When Nana gave the kids a bag full of large heart candy, I knew just where it was going and what it was to be used for. One of their favorite manipulatives, these were used for many things. 
One was to be accompanied with these:

I found these great chunky dice at Target in their dollar aisle, and they were used at all levels - basic counting and one-to-one with 3 year old Bug, Even/Odd practice and greater than/less than (we use our alligator math from Living Montessori Now) with 5 year old Miss Priss, and even the older kiddos liked to get their hands on them for multiplication and division practice, mostly because they undoubtedly snuck a few in their stomach when I wasn't watching! ;)

   

Another Target $1 find were these V-Day erasers, which were simply kept in a basket due to the variety of things we could do with them, such as....

                                                      patterns 

                                   and adding practice.

I originally had higher hopes for this particular work, which fine-tunes their skills needed for writing later on. However, it was *thisclose* to being a total failure! I only give it that much credit because of a few attempts at engaging some of the kids in it, only to see them pass on to do other things. So maybe we will wait a while before we try something like this again - maybe it was too simple???

I decided at the last minute, while finishing up something else, to make this sweet 'heart' moveable alphabet for the occasion. Sticking with the montessori method of isolating the consonants/vowels by color, I used pink for consonants, purple for vowels.
  

 And since these, too, were used for more than one thing, such as spelling practice for Hoss and sound baskets for Miss Priss and Bug, they were kept on our shelves in this bowl that I got in a gift package one year for Christmas. Sidenote - it's amazing what you can find and use to present materials in a pretty way and teach your children to be careful with what they are working with! 
     

I have several more things to share with you. but I think if I keep going, this post may never end! So I will have to make a Part 2 of our Valentine's work for you to see! This was our first time to have a good part of their work revolving around a theme, and I really enjoyed it, as well as the kids. So now I am wondering where to go next and what new works to create (or re-vamp from some of these!)