A Peek at Our Week | Elementary | Week of October 22 - Absorbent Minds Montessori School

“Let the teacher not lose sight of the fact that the goal sought is not an immediate one, but rather to make the spiritual being which she is educating capable of finding his way by himself.” -Maria Montessori

This week was full of exciting lessons and events. We completed lessons with taste tests, challenging math works, and continued our exploration of the history of Earth. We were thrilled to perform “Caps for Sale” for our families and all the Primary Classrooms. We decorated for the Halloween party, prepared the food, and played games together. Putting on all student performances and planning student only parties, gives children the opportunity to learn how to work and collaborate with others. This also gives them real life experience about what happens when a team or group doesn’t work well together or communicate! Thank you to all the parents that helped us sew and that provided the materials we needed for our Halloween party!

This student is practicing forming and reading decimal numbers into the millionths. After mastery of forming and reading decimals, she will add, subtract, multiply, and divide them using our materials. The Montessori Decimal Material allows students to physically build and manipulate decimal numbers to understand their relationship to whole numbers.

This week we discussed the Clock of Eras. This material is another representation of the Timeline of Life. It shows students different eras of the Earth’s existence broken down into a 12 hour clock. We discussed different changes in each era and the etymology of the era names. Students are recreating the clock for their follow-up work.

These fourth year students are using our blank timeline to recreate the Timeline of Life. This blank timeline is used throughout the Upper Elementary curriculum and can be adapted to measure any length of time. These students calculated where to place labels for each era from 4.5 billion years ago until now!

The first year students had a lesson about nutrition. They discussed which foods are healthy and how often to eat all their favorite foods. While they discussed nutrition, they sampled different foods from each food group. Here, they are sampling grapefruit! This student was not impressed!

When we start a new short story in our “Rocket Rollers” Reading Group, I read the story first and we talk about unknown vocabulary or different spelling rules they will see in the story. This second year student heard we were beginning a new story and asked to lead reading group! He read “Jack and the Beanstalk” to these first graders and discussed the story with them!

We had such a blast preparing for and performing “Caps for Sale.” Each student had a chance to use the sewing machine to make their own cap! So many students had their very first sewing machine experience this week! They were so proud and had a lot of fun. Thank you to our parent volunteers that helped make this possible!

“A Peek at Next Week”

Next week our blog will be written by two students! You can look for a student written blog at the end of each month! Our first year students will be creating a noun family chart, will continue their study of the constructive triangles, and will complete their continent study of North America. Our second year students will discuss the four types of sentences (exclamatory, interrogative, imperative, and declarative), will review the Detective Triangle Game, and will finish their research of a country in North America. Our third year students will learn to measure in grams and milliliters, will discuss adjective suffixes, and will begin studying equivalence with our metal insets. Our fourth year students will change mixed fractions to improper fractions and improper fractions to mixed fractions, will review homonyms and indirect objects, and will discuss the creation of the universe. Fifth year students with begin plotting points on a graph, will review homonyms, and will study adverbials. Upper Elementary students will also take their first note taking quiz which will show them if they are taking notes effectively or not. This will give students an opportunity to learn which information is vital at lessons and prepares them for middle school and beyond! All students will begin typing lessons next week!

REMINDERS:

Book Fair next week!
Parent-Teacher Conferences – Friday, November 16 – No School Day for students. I will send out a sign-up genius for conferences in next week’s blog!

“Let the teacher not lose sight of the fact that the goal sought is not an immediate one, but rather to make the spiritual being which she is educating capable of finding his way by himself.” -Maria Montessori

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