This week our “Peek” was written by our students! These students read our previous blogs, took pictures around the room, and filled in a blog template. The students did some editing together, and with a teacher, so what you will read below is their final product. There are still some misspelled words in their final product, but in a Montessori classroom we focus on the process, instead of the end result. Dr. Montessori believed when we put all of the emphasis on the final product, we devalue everything leading up to that point. This can discourage repetition which will make mastery of a skill difficult. The purpose of the students writing the blog is to provide you with a glimpse into the room through their eyes, to provide them with practice of real world skills, and to give them a deeper understanding of the materials in the room. We hope you enjoy their work!
“A Peek at Our Week” written by Ainsley (fifth grade) and Kenadie (second grade)
This week the first years learned the “Personal Family Timeline.” The second years learned the “Months of the Year.” The third years learned “Taxonomy of Invertibrates.” The forth years learned the “Geometric Decanomial.” The fifth years learned how to “Create-a-City.” The sixth years found missing ciphers in different base systems.
Lower Elementary
These second years are practising Racks and Tubes. They are setting up their next equation.They are doing flash cards. One person show the other an equation and the other answers it.
Upper Elementary
He is doing Table A. It is a table of multiples.They are doing spelling. They are making words for “Squid Sweep.” It was invented by one of our students.
REMINDERS:
No Piano or Music Classes – Weeks of February 3 and 10
Parent Work Time – February 11 and 13 – sign up here!
Upper Elementary Valentine’s Party (student only) – February 14 – sign up here!
This week we learned a bit about the internal organs. We started with the brain which is like the computer of the body. It tells our body how fast to breathe and how fast our heart should beat. We discovered the lungs help us breathe and puts oxygen in our blood. Our stomach digests food, the small intestines take nutrients out of our food and large intestines gets the remaining water from indigestible food and creates waste (poop) or as I referred to a bowel movement. The kidneys process excess water and creates urine. The liver removes toxins from the body. The liver is my fave internal organ. What is yours?
Did you know? Q) What is the difference between a Cantaloupe and Muskmelon?
A) A Muskmelon is a member of the reticulatus group, characterized by a net like ribbed rind and sweet orange flesh. A Cantaloupe is a member of the cantalupensis group, named for Cantalupo, a former papal villa near Rome. This group is characterized by a rough, warty rind and sweet orange flesh.
The below picture the Muskmelon is to the left and Cantaloupe is to the right.
Cultural Subjects: Your children can now count to ten in 15 languages (English, Latin, Sign Language, Spanish, German, French, Greek, Japanese, Arabic with the Lebanese dialect, Italian, Russian, Romanian, Swedish, Tagalog, Hebrew, Korean, Hungarian, Irish, Kiswahili, Welsh).
Peek In The Classroom:
Working with the Internal Organ shirt. This is a work that shows where the internal organs are located.
The Cards and Counters bring the abstract to the concrete, allowing a child to feel the units as they count. Cards and Counters is a material that consists of 10 number cards, 1-10, and 55 round, red counters, each approximately the size of a nickel. Then the appropriate amount of counters are put under the appropriate number.
The Vowel Tree is a tactile, engaging way to teach and practice decoding words. This manipulative can be used with beginning readers to more advanced readers. Originally developed as a Montessori material, the vowel tree reinforces skills for all learners, tactile learners, auditory learners, and visual learners.
Meet our newest reader.
Peek Into Next Week: Line Time- Pollution and Recycling
Letter Of The Week- S s
Rhyming Word Of The Week- bup
Next Language is Dutch/Flemmish
Upcoming Events: Valentines Party: Friday, February 14, 2020
NO SCHOOL: Monday, February 17, 2020
Akron Art Museum Field Trip: Thursday March 12, 2020 (morning) … Save the date, it is a FREE field trip! Details to follow.
Friends, Frolic, and Fun:
Ode to Kobe Bryant.
You should have seen the other guy.
S squared
It is all about fashion. I present to you a paper hat.
This week we talked about the life of Martin Luther King Jr. We discussed how he wanted to make the world a better place through equality. The class learned that he talked about his beliefs through peacful walks and speeches. The students talked about how we can all learn and be together no matter what we look like.
A Peek Into Next Week: Zoo Animals
Kindergarten:
This week the kindergartners started working on division. They learned that dividing is the act of separating something into groups equally. Here are some vocabulary terms they learned: Dividend-The amount you want to divide, Divisor-The number by which another number is being divided by, Quotient-The answer of a division problem .
A Peek Into Next Week: Division
Reminders: Valentine’s party-2/14| Presidents Day-NO SCHOOL 2/17
Enrichement Highlight: Art
The students learned about contrast with Ms. Dayna. They made a collaborative piece that is hanging in the entry way!
Work Time
This preschooler is working on the flag stamps. He is learining about different countries flags while strengthening his fine motor skills to color in the stamps.
This child is woring on the Binomial Cube. This material helps develop critical thinking skills, problem solving, and spacial understanding. The Binomial Cube also prepares the student for the algebraic equation: (a+b)^3=a^3+3a^2b+3ab^2+b^3.
These two preschoolers are working together on Golden Bead addition. They are learning that combining two small numbers (two addends) make a larger number (a sum).
Line Time: This week we looked at the skeletal system and if we didn’t have a skeleton we would be one messy blob on the ground (insert a flagellant sound). We learned the skull protects our brain, the rib cage protects our lungs, and the spine keeps us sitting and standing straight. We learned technical terms for our arms, leg and our digits which is a funny name called phalanges. We brought our life sized foam puzzle into our room. His name is Elvis because we learned about the pelvis and it was a cool rhyming name.
Did You Know: Pteronophobia is a fear of being tickled by feathers. It’s also a fear of feathers themselves. The word “ptero” is the Greek word for feather, and “phobia” is also Greek, meaning fear.
January Birthdays: A Montessori classroom consists of students ranging in age from three years to six years. Here are our newest four and six year old students.
Pastor Kirk Reads The Useful Moose:
Cultural Subjects: Your children can now count to ten in 15 languages (English, Latin, Sign Language, Spanish, German, French, Greek, Japanese, Arabic with the Lebanese dialect, Italian, Russian, Romanian, Swedish, Tagalog, Hebrew, Korean, Hungarian, Irish, Kiswahili).
Peek In The Classroom:
This boy is working on the Pink Tower and Brown Stairs. He found an extension which further supports the relationship between the two materials.
This student is working on the Nine Tray and is composing numbers with the symbol and quantity. It is difficult to se here but she wanted to compose the “year” 2020.
This student is working on the Sandpaper Letters. The direct purpose of the sandpaper letters is to teach the child the sounds of the alphabet by means of muscular and visual memory. The indirect purposes of the sandpaper letters are preparation for reading and writing. The sandpaper letters are an exciting and important material for the children to discover the letters and letter sounds.
This Kindergarten Student is working on her kindergarten kinder which includes lessons in math, handwriting and language.
Peek Into Next Week: Line Time- Internal Organs
Letter Of The Week- R r
Rhyming Word Of The Week- but
Next Language is Welsh
Upcoming Events: Valentine Party: Friday, February 14, 2020. Details to follow.
Art Museum Field Trip: Thursday, March 12, 2020. Details to follow.
Friends, Frolic, and Fun:
This student, for the life of me I don’t know how, got yogurt on her face and almost in her eye.
Weekly Theme: We were introduced to division with manipulatives (golden beads/static, no borrowing).
Handwriting: We practiced writing in cursive writing sentences (sometimes silly sentences).
Cultural Subjects: We now can count to ten in 21 languages (English, Sign Language, Latin, Spanish, German, French, Greek, Japanese, Arabic with the Lebanese dialect, Italian, Russian, Romanian, Swedish, Tagolog, Hebrew, Korean, Hungarian, Irish, Kiswahili, Welsh, Dutch/Flemmish).
Next Week: Weekly Theme: Division w/ Golden Beads (dynamic / Borrowing)
Synonym Of The Week: Nice: kind, pleasant, delightful, good, helpful
I can’t believe that January is almost over. Time is just flying by!! This week all of our lessons were about celebrating Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. We read some incredible books that really explained who he was on their level. They learned about segregation, they listened to his I Have A Dream speech, learned who Rosa Parks was, and learned about freedom marches and sit-ins. Ms.Amanda had some awesome crafts that went along with each lesson of the day! It was a fantastic week!!!
Our brand new friend is working on the knobbed cylinders. This material is designed to assist children in making distinctions in their immediate environment. This material primarily engages the senses of touch and sight. When working on the Nine Tray the child will have a better understanding of the decimal system. They will also become familiar with the names and relative sizes of the categories. Ms. Amanda is working with one of our friends on one of our continent maps. I love these maps because it teaches the child the different countries in each continent. It also is a great work for them to gain fine motor skills, focus, and concentration. This cutie is working on the binomial cube. The purpose of the material is less focused on the complex mathematics behind the material, and rather is to provide a challenge for a child’s ability to find patterns and relationships between the blocks.
REMINDERS :
Please check out the sign up I sent out yesterday about the valentines day party!!
We love to go outside, so please remember to have your kiddo always come prepared for outside!!
“Art has the role in education of helping children become like themselves instead of more like everyone else.” -Sydney Gurewitz Clemens
Each week, I learn more and more about the students through art. For follow-up work, students are often asked to draw their research, build models, or create displays. No two pieces of these assignments are ever the same between students or throughout the years. We are able to understand a lot of the thought process of a child when they have an open-ended art project for follow-up work in the new rooms with wall cladding installers Melbourne. When I take pictures or walk around art and music classes, I can see which students have learned to push through frustration, which students enjoy wide parameters and which prefer step-by-step guides, and which students open up when they are able to express themselves through art and music. We are so lucky to have Ms. Dayna and Ms. Lisa to give our students these opportunities.
Lower Elementary
Here one of our second year students is leading two first year students through our key pockets. They are working on the sound /th/. Our second year student invited them and had them take turns reading the cards. While working together, our older students gain confidence in their abilities and our younger students learn from their example.Our first kindergarten student has come to visit! Here one of our first graders is leading her through some cultural work. We love to see our first year students get to be leaders to the kindergarten friends that they had in their old classrooms! We are excited for many more weeks of getting to know visitors!
Upper Elementary
We often talk in the classroom about how pushing through a normal amount of frustration with work, helps our brains grow and helps make work easier the next time. Here, a third and a fourth year student are working with our Negative Snake Game. They observed the fifth years during their lesson and wanted to try it on their own. They created an equation of adding positive and negative integers using ALL of the bead bars in the box. They were a bit frustrated at times, but pushed through and finished out the morning focused on it.This student has started his virus research. He has chosen to research the togavirus which causes German measles and equine encephalitis. He is learning about the history of the diseases, the symptoms, and what scientists are doing to stop the spread. He will then build a model and present his research to the class!
Enrichments
Our first recorder class has come! Some students tested on “Hot Cross Buns,” “Gently Sleep,” and “Merrily We Roll Along.” If they pass their performance of the song, they receive a belt, like in karate. Some students received all three belts for their songs!
REMINDERS:
“Bring Your Parents to Work Time” – February 11 and 13 – sign up here!
This week in science class, Mr. John taught us about air pressure and creating a vacuum. He lit a piece of paper on fire, placed it in a glass, turned it upside down, and placed it on a plate. This created a vacuum! Thank you for a fun science class!
This week the students learned about ocean animals. We learned about different types of sharks, types of crustaceans, and even how an elephant seal can hold its breath under water for two hours!
A Peek Into Next Week: Martin Luther King Jr.
Kindergarten:
This week the students continued learning that subtraction is taking smaller number from a larger number, and added in exchanging. We call this Dynamic Subtraction when exchanging is envolved.
A Peek Into Next Week: Division
Reminders: NO SCHOOL- Monday, January, 20th| Kindergaten walking trip-Tuesday, January 21st|Kindergarten trip to Natural History Museum-Thursday, January 23rd
Enrichment Highlight: Music
Ms. Lisa started her unit on Peter and the Wolf. The students will learn about the different instruments in the play, and will learn which instrument represents the characters.
Work Time:
This student is coloring the land and water forms work. He is learning about the different forms such as, cape/bay, straight/isthmas, and system of lakes/archepelego.
This student is refining his sense of touch by identefying the geometric solids using a blind fold. He has to use his memory of the shape to destinguish it by touch only.
This young lady is working on addition with the Dot Board. This work moves the child from concrete addition with manipulatives to abstract addition.
