This week in Aspen it was all about pumpkins!! After our amazing trip to Ramseyer’s we decided to focus our attention on pumpkins this week! The Ramseyer’s staff taught us many interesting facts about pumpkins last Friday! Therefore, we started our group lessons with a review of what we learned at Ramseyer’s. We then took a closer look at the Life Cyle Of A Pumpkin. In order to get a closer look, the Aspen children utilized our Pumpkin Life Cycle tray. On this tray the Aspen children were able to experience various stages of pumpkin growth by observing, touching, and exploring vines, flowers, pumpkins, and leaves. Through exploration and lessons the Aspen students learned that pumpkins grow on vines and start out as seeds. We also discovered that pumpkins have lots of seeds! Some pumpkins have more than 500 seeds!! Aspen even compared the pumpkin seeds to those of the apple seeds we explored last week! We discovered that pumpkins have more seeds than apples and pumpkin seeds are larger than apple seeds. After learning all of this we then engaged in work with pumpkin themed Practical Life activities, classified the parts of a pumpkin, explored the pumpkin life cycle with our three part pumpkin life cycle cards, watched the How They Grow: Pumpkins video, labeled the parts of a pumpkin, and discussed our new season Fall.
The Aspen Kindergarten students continued segmenting three letter phonetic words, practiced writing on lined paper, and began their introductory cursive lessons. The kindergarten students explored phonics with the Phonetic Object Boxes, played the “Rhyme Time” game, I Spy, and made personalized readers to practice their Sound Detective skills! At this point in time, confidence is the key! By focusing on the isolation of “sounds” (letters) they are able to segment phonetic words without apprehension!
Next week our thematic topic is Color! Color is all around us, is subjective, and our area in Northeast Ohio is about to be rich and vibrant with Fall colors! Thus, there is no better time than next week to learn how to verbalize our interpretation of the colorful world around us ! See you Monday!!
Scrubbing Pumpkins!
Decorating a pumpkin with Expo markers!
Exploring the linear sequence of numbers to twenty with the Pumpkin Numbers!
Using tweezers to remove Sunflower Seeds from our giant Sunflower!
Fun learning numbers with the Green Sandpaper Numbers!
One of the most beautiful things to witness in a Montessori classroom is a Child to Child presentation of a work! Both of these children had received an independent formal presentation with a teacher prior to this moment. However, they chose to work together while figuring out the presentation process and concepts of The Cards And Counters .
One of our classroom chores! Learning how to care for the environment around us is a big part of the Montessori curriculum. Watering our plants is one of our most favorite chores!