It's done,we'll definitely try to do it every day for you!!! Hope everyone puts this little effort to help a good cause like yours!!!
Good Luck!

Oh, I just came across this book that inspired me many years ago & where I got many of my ideas from, It's terrific, practical, interesting1 I really recommend it! I had a very old one before & now couldn't remember the name & authors, but just came across it browsing a homeschooling curriculum site. I didn't even know it was in print any more! They also used to have one for elementary school. Pls let me know if you find that one!
Teaching Montessori in the Home
Pre-School Years
by Elizabeth G. Hainstock, Lee Havis
The author also gives instructions for making many of the Montessori materials at home, with common household items or easy-to-obtain craft supplies.

In one of my posts i mentioned about making my own Montessori materials & had a few PMs asking for ideas.
There are a whole lot of things for sale & it can get very overwhelming to decide what is right for your baby & how to pay for it all, as prices are exuberant!
Through my 15 years of teaching & homeschooling my own children, I can tell you one thing, simple is best. You do not need everything on the market, your baby will not be disadvantaged if you don't get everything & you can make many theaching materials on your own.
I love Montessori. It's a very beautiful way to teach our children, it opens amazing doors of discoveries & development for our kids. But to buy all of their stuff is unreal!!!!
But it is real to have a Montessori classroom in your home. For one, the stacking cups, puzzles, & many other toys do not have to bear the name Montessori, they can be any simple brand stacking cups! I also feel many things, like tieing shoe laces, for example, do not need to be a complicated process, just practice it naturally.
Here are a couple of things I did very easily & almost for free for my teaching.
1. sandpaper alphabet - cut letters out of medium/fine sandpaper & glue them on cardstock with white glue. Get daddy/grandparents/older kids, etc. involved in cutting & gluing - you'll save of time.
2. sound shakers - collect vitamin jars, baby food jars, any containers you get regularly the same of. Pour the same amount of rice into two, beans into two, flour into two, sugar, salt, etc. & close them tightly. The child, by shaking & listening to the sounds has to find pairs.
3. The same as 2., but with different smells - child can do blindfolded; different weights, etc.
4. Pouring practice - just use anything you have in the kitchen: spoons & bowls, your regular table pitchers (safer to have plastic ones, they're super cheap in supermarkets), your regular tray. They can pour or spoon from one container into another water, beans of different sizes, etc. Actually, just have you little one work with you in the kitchen (SAFELY!!!) & he'll get all the cutting, pouring, wiping practice he needs.
5. Shoe lacing, button buttoning, zipper zipping - for one, just let your little one try it when he's getting himself dressed, etc. But if you want, the "frames" can be made very easily bu either sawing zippers/buttons etc. on cloth & getting daddy to make a thin simple frame to attach them on, or cutting out from the old clothes parts that have those things & attaching them to simple wooden frames. For sawing practice - cut out an item your little one likes (flowers, dollies, etc. for girls, cars for boys), try to make it colorful, cover with contact paper on both sides. use a hole punch to make holes around the perimeter & let your baby poke in & out with a shoelace.
Hope these help. Please also share your ideas of how to create different materials for teaching & developing our children, i Love news ideas & you, amazing creative people sure have a lot of them!
looking forward to hearing from you

Congrats, Aysha!
POtty training is a very natural process & I strongly believe that doctors who teach you to wait training your kid to go potty till after two years old are paid by the diaper making companies.   Like in South Africa, most of poorer countries (or our parents for that matter) DID NOT have kids pooping in their diapers at the age of three!!!  (I personally find it extremely  gross & degrading for our children!) BTW, if kids can read at two, don't you think they're intelligent enough to poop in the right place?
I have five kids & the first four were out of diapers in the daytime around one year old. With a couple also at night, the other two were very deep sleepers.
It's very simple & natural.
1. I use cloth diapers. There are great diaper covers on the market right now that makes it even easier. You save a TON of money as well! They feel wet right away & want to change. They also get the point VERY FAST that peeing = discomfort, so when offered an alternative of where to pee, they catch it right away!
The reason we need diapers (or whatever other alternatives) is NOT because babies don't have bladder control, but because it's not important to them & they can't communicate it so well,.... well actually I'd even say that it's more like we, the parents don't listen carefully enough
2. I start at about 2-3 weeks, but it's never too late. At every change just hold the baby (squatting position, his back against your chest/tummy, your hands hold the little thighs, spread apart) over the potty (or sink, or basin, anything, really) & make a hissing sound (something like ps-ps-ps-ps-ps) In China they whistle (I think the point is a signal sound, not so much which particular sound, although i did find that sound of running water makes them pee ). Always also try a grunting sound for poo-poo. If a baby starts to poop in her diaper, take the diaper off & hold her over the potty to let her finish, & make your signal sound so they get the point that this is what's supposed to happen. They understand super fast! My 4 months old grunts when she needs to go potty & goes on the potty many tiimes a day! After about 7 months i DO NOT HAVE POO-POO diapers!
3. Another point for new babies, when it's warm, just put a rubber pad & a cloth diaper under their bottom & let them get sunshine & air on the little bottoms (mommies of boys, watch out! you have to have the cloth also over the peenie to avoid a shower ) It's so much healthier for babies than sitting in those chemicals! 
4. If you have time (don't be scared, you get a route down really fast!), about 30-40 min. little babies usually pee

well said, Krista G, karma to you...
Nikita, my prayers are with you... homeschooling is so very wonderful (although a big commitment & a sacrifice, esp. on the mother's part) - I'm in a situation beyond my control & have to have my three oldest going to school, after being homeschooled for the past 12 years!!! & it's a daily trial & a daily prayer that i will be able to bring them back home. Al l the opportunities for scholastic education are described pretty well in the acrticle, but the "socialization" repair work i have to do is way beyond anything I had to do when theywere at home. My kids are no angels, but they've always been helpful, caring, friends with their brothers & sisters, respectful, etc. I'm having to do a lot of damage repair in their character after everything they pick in in school
Nikita, dear, I know one, the most important thing with teens, is to connect with them, listen to them, be there for them. Take time to listen! Let her know you;re there for her, get interested iin the things she's interested in... my computer is dying, i'll have to finish tomoroow when i can get some power... TAKE TIME WITH HER before it's too late!!! i'm praying for you

Excellent job, very good presentation for older children! We, not so computer literate teachers & homeschool parents would really appreciate more of such presentations
MERRY CHRISTMAS & HAPPY NEW YEAR TO ALL YOU WONDERFUL & DEDICATED PARENTS & TEACHERS

WOW! Tx, everyone, terrific ideas! I'll definitely use some!
I'd add rollie-pollies - kids love those, balloon volleyball (string something between two chairs (or anything else) & hit a balloon to each other over the string.
The Ladder is a dream! Get it, it's an investment that will last you for years (your kid will pass it on to his kids! A friend of mine had it made, actually her dad made it. One of those ladders against the wall, like at a gym & from it, built like a frame, with a pole to climb, a bar to hang & a ROPE WITH A KNOT - to swing on, Kids love it & never get tired of it, thier friends will love it. It takes little space, just make sure it's connected to the wall very well
Dear khaty, my heart goes out to you though, it sounds like quite a place you live in, is it an Eskimo village of sorts?
All the best & MERRY CHRISTMAS to all!

oops! i forgot to include the website:www.khanacademy.org - again, i really recommend it, tremendous resource, excellent teaching (a math teacher speaking here

Merry Christmas to all!!!
Here is an article about this amazing site I found with video tutorials for any technical question you'll ever come across in educating your child.
Math master of the Internet

James Temple, San Francisco Chronicle, December 14, 2009

During the years Salman Khan spent scrutinizing financials for hedge funds, he rationalized the profit-obsessed work by telling himself he would one day quit and use his market winnings to open a free school.

Instead, he started one almost by accident. It began with long-distance tutoring in late 2004. He agreed to help his niece Nadia, then a seventh-grader struggling with unit conversion, by providing math lessons over Yahoo's interactive notepad, Doodle, and the phone.

Nephews and family friends soon followed. But scheduling conflicts and repeated lectures prompted him to post instructional videos on YouTube that his proliferating pupils could watch when they had the time.

They did--and before long, so did thousands of others. Today, the Mountain View resident's 800-plus videos are viewed about 35,000 times a day, forming a virtual classroom that dwarfs any brick and mortar school he might have imagined. By using the reach of the Internet, he's helped bring education to the information-hungry around the world who can't afford private tutors or Kaplan prep courses.

"With so little effort on my own part, I can empower an unlimited amount of people for all time," Khan, 33, said. "I can't imagine a better use of my time."

That, along with last year's Wall Street meltdown, is why he finally gave up his hedge fund work and dedicated himself to the academy full time in the fall of 2008. The nonprofit generated thousands in advertising revenue this year through YouTube, which shares cash with popular content providers, and could become self-sustainable as a one-person operation within a year. Khan is in talks with several foundations for capital that could enable him to expand the organization's reach.

He didn't originate the concept of free online education, of course. The YouTube EDU channel features tens of thousands of so-called open courseware videos on economics, mathematics and more from Harvard, Yale and elsewhere. Apple Inc.'s iPhone App store features free Spanish tutoring, math drills and SAT vocabulary tests.

Last year, Stanford University's engineering school rolled out gratis video lectures, handouts and assignments for certain courses. Meanwhile, UC Berkeley has been posting classes online since 1995, on iTunes since 2006 and on YouTube since 2007. The university is fast approaching the 100 million download mark, said Ben Hubbard, the program's manager.

"We feel that opening this world of access to the rich intellectual resource of a public university is core to what we do," he said. "Anyone around the world, whether a taxi driver in London or budding computer engineer in Africa, can tune in."

Students who take all or part of their classes online perform better, on average, than those who complete the same courses only in a traditional classroom, according to a meta-analysis--or a study of studies--released earlier this year by SRI International.

That could reflect students using online tools on top of face-to-face learning or that these materials tend to draw an audience that, on average, is particularly motivated. But in any case, it suggests the Internet legitimately helps people learn.

Among a field crowded with exalted institutions, Khan Academy stood out enough to be named as one of three laureates in the education category of this year's Tech Awards, organized by the Tech Museum in San Jose.

"We were tremendously impressed by Sal Khan's simple approach to generating user-friendly tutorials in straightforward, to-the-point videos," said Michael Kevane, chair of the department of economics at Santa Clara University and head of the judging panel, in an e-mail. "We felt like he really showed people the right way to do video content--the wrong way being the 'talking head' or the 'professor at the blackboard.'"

Indeed, many universities simply post recorded lectures, while Khan stresses hands-on learning, moving step by step through multiple problems and encouraging students to work alongside him. He's also more focused on K-12 learning, with videos already posted for nearly all the math and physics encountered in those grades, and has created a math program that spits out problems that grow more difficult as students progress.

But the automated software and videos are just a glimmer of the potential that Khan sees for technology to revolutionize education. Khan's students say he's already opening doors they never could have squeezed through on their own. He says the most rewarding part of his work are the e-mails he regularly receives from people saying he helped them get into college, earn higher grades--or in the case of one woman with terminal cancer, achieve a life goal like learning calculus before it's too late.

Last week, Matthew Smith, 31, of San Pablo, applied for entrance to Berkeley City College, where he hopes to study mechanical engineering. He had only completed pre-algebra in high school, and his life was sidetracked shortly after graduation when a semi T-boned the vehicle in which he was a passenger. He suffered traumatic brain injuries and lay in a coma for more than a week.

Smith needed considerable remedial training before he could tackle any math-heavy engineering coursework. He stumbled across Khan Academy while searching online for California Standards Tests. After several months with the videos, he scored well enough on his assessment exams to start with pre-calculus in college. That's two levels above where he stood the last time he sat in a classroom.

"Without Khan Academy, I don't think I'd be in the position I'm in now," he said.

This is truly a great site! Thank you for sharing! This is great for homeschooling or just for solidifying learned in school!
 Karma to you!

wow, pretty amazing! great tools, although i don't think you can replace the actual abacus & doing it on the actual beads, not just clicking buttons... these sites are great tutors
thanks for sharing

A friend wrote to me saying how her little girl is always sick, asking me for tips how to strengthen her immune system. I am not proud  but can boast of very healthy kids. I thank God for that & for His guidance in helping me to learn & find good sources on healthy living.
It's not comprehensive, I put it together pretty quick to get it off to her & then thought to share it with everyone & to get other ideas from all of you, wonderful parents, on how to strengthen children' immune system & your natural remedies. i'M REALLY LOOKING FORWARD TO HEARING FROM ALL OF YOU!!!
(Disclaimer: this is not to replace medical advice & I'm not a professional doctor or nurse, this is just a mother's experience)
I want to give you some tips on strengthening your daughter's immune system. Most of them are just common sense ones, but I know they really work.
1.   I'm sure you know & do already, but i'll mention it anyways - NO JUNK FOOD!!! That destroys their immune system.
2.   Exercise – ourdoors is best & a must at least 4-5 times a week. It has to be vigorous! Of course if she’s weak, you want to start slower, but it has to have her heart beating for an extended period of time & her sweating to strengthen her. Do be aware of the winds & esp. drafts, but also do not overdress her – when she’s going for an active time overdressing can cause more problems than underdressing.
3.   LOTS of water, fruits & veggies!!! As much as possible, use only whole grains, makes a world of difference!
4.   Garlic does wonders. If you can get her to eat it on a regular basis raw – it’s the best, if not, add into her food cooked as much as only possible, you can’t put too much. Garlic toast is always a favorite.
5.   When she does get sick, unless it’s at a danger point, NEVER give her any medicine, it makes it worse, ruins the immune system! (again, I’m not a doctor & I don’t know your child, pray if medicine is needed, possible at night to allow for better sleep, or if she might be in danger, etc.) Here are a few things I do: Raw garlic chopped up tiny, mixed with natural honey (see if you can get natural, directly from the hive, not processed in any way – a miracle working stuff), give a tea spoon AFTER a meal (very strong stuff, not for sensitive stomachs!), 3 times a day – same affect as a very strong antibiotic, but with no side effects. 100% juice (freshly squeezed is of course best, but commercial works as well) mixed with water, give to drink unlimited. Also lemon or ginger tea with honey – drink with no limits (a little extra of good honey might help to like it even more, ha!). A very good recipe for cough syrup (onions, cabbage & garlic – chop up & boil for a long time until all is mushy. Strain, to the liquid add  lemon juice & honey or apple cider vinegar & honey. It actually doesn’t taste too bad, ha! Give to the child every half hour or as often as possible, just a couple of tablespoons at a time. Expect more BMs, but even that is good for them) – I use it always for bad coughs, really helps. Before fever over 39C I do not take it down, after, I take it down with vinegar water by wiping  the body in the areas of glands. For runny noses – sea water or water with sea salt – another miracle of God’s creation, should be able to get very cheaply at a pharmacy– suck it in through the nose & spit through the mouth. At first a nasty feeling, but get used to it pretty fast. Helps to get over runny noses but also strengthens the whole ear-nose-throat department, a good thing to do regularly for strengthening. For sore throats – gargle with salt water. Even when kids are sick, if they feel like running around, it’s ok, as long as they stay warm, out of drafts & out of the direct sun. Also let them sleep unlimitedly when they’re unwell.
6.   Natural yoghurt is very good at all times – helps digestion & absorption of nutrients. Eat daily. Also, if she was sick & had to take antibiotics – yoghurt is a must, for at least a full week after antibiotics to restore the natural bacteria in her stomach that have been destroyed by the medication.
7.   If she is sick as much as you say, I would do a full physical examination & take complete blood tests, her weakness might be caused by some vitamin deficiency, or something else of sorts.
I hope this helps. If you do the 1,2,3,4,6, & salt water, you will see tremendous improvement! And again, I’m really hoping to get more tips from all of you

I'll start by saying i didn't read the book & maybe there is something major i am missing, but with a lot of these specialized items, you can use MUCH cheaper substitutes. Like MOntessori stuff - i made a ton of it myself. The "crawling track" sounds to me like a nice not super soft mat - a yoga mat sounds like a perfect substitute! The monkey bars - i's assume Doman has specific measurements for it, but i do not believe your baby will not get the benefit if the bars are slightly bigger or smaller - and there are plenty producers on the market that make good children play equipment or even just sports equipment, i'd check in the sports store
all the best to you, faithful wonderful parents!!! you are superb!

i downloaded the demo & i loved it! I actually did learn several notes in just a few minutes! I think it's terrific & if you compare the price of private lessons with a good teacher (or many other programs offered for young children now), i don't feel $200 is that much. I don't have a keyboard, but it's in plans & i'm definitely planning on getting Soft Mozart as soon as i get the keyboard. It's an ingenious (& easy!!!) way to teach our kids something very valuable!

YES! THIS IS WHAT I'VE BEEN LOOKING FOR! MIRRA - KARMA TO YOU! THANK YOU SO MUCH FOR TAKIGN YOU TIME TO SHARE, WHAT A GREAT HELP!
ALL THE BEST!!!