While the students were very happy to spend time with their families over Spring Break, it was clear how much they loved being back in the classroom! Some students got right back to some of the projects they were working on before Spring Break and some of the students asked for refreshers for the work they aspired to do. Spelling quizzes, the Checkerboard, new Art projects were very popular. Students started checking out their money skills as well.
A small committee of students met this week, finalizing the Elementary performance for our next school event, the International Festival. A group of students have been reading about Clara Barton and the Red Cross this year. Students have been talking about these historical events among each other and have been amazed with her life. This amazement has trickled into our performance and the committee has designed a performance that will remind us all of the impact the Red Cross has in the world.
Friday at Dad with Donuts, everyone who attended had a blast! Each student felt special spending the morning with his or her guest. Also, each guest received a special gift the students made with joy and pride. No one left hungry but all left with a smile. What a way to start your day!
IF FOUND….. RETURN TO ABSORBENT MINDS MONTESSORI SCHOOL (redux)
I recently had a very rare opportunity to visit with past students. I mean I am going in the way back machine, old school where these children are in 8th and 10th grade. Not only did I get to revisit the past with the student, but their parents as well. The students and parents were telling me what they remembered most about me. All answers seems to come back to one subject…food! The children remembered how I would try to steal their food and the parents remembered their children telling them how Mr. John tried to steal their food. I guess some things never change. That evening of visiting old students/parents is one of those intangible things that make my career choice one of the best decisions I have ever made in my 29 years of life. Oh ya, back in the day I was 29 too. Anyway, I hope I run into families from Absorbent Minds Montessori School after you have left to reminisce. Hmmmm, Maybe inviting me to your child’s confirmation, bar mitzvah, you know, their wedding would be a nice gesture. As long, of course, there is food there.
Alumni Visitors We had the pleasure of having two Alumni Readers visit this month. We had first grader James W. who goes to Dunbar Elementary and Taylor K. who is in the second grade at Price Elementary. Also visiting us was Tyler F. who is in the first grade at Absorbent Minds Montessori School/ Tallmadge Campus. He help with the science experiment.
Line Time Lessons
The month started off by going back in time and studying the Ancient Romans. The Ancient Romans had similar Gods as the Ancient Greeks. The King of all Gods in Rome was Jupiter and his wife Juno who was the Goddess of Marriage and Childbirth. Pluto was the God of the Underworld, Neptune was the God of the Seas, and finally we came across the God of War, Mars. Did you notice that a lot of these Gods had planets named after them?
Plug your noses we are entering the pollution zone. Pollution is TOXIC! We all agree that pollution is a bad thing. All pollution including air , water, land, and noise pollution. We learned how we could help our environment by using the 3 R’s.. Reduce, reuse, and recycle. Hold your breath (not because it stinks) but we are jumping into the ocean. The salty, deep, vast oceans. We learned about the several amazing animals that live in the ocean. We do not want to mess with a shark or get too close to a jellyfish. But clown fish are cool and the grouper has two eyes on one side of its face. We got reacquainted with the mammals of the oceans, dolphins, whales, and the orca. We ended the month by learning about our own state of Ohio. The students were first taught how to spell Ohio. OH-IO ! We learned that the flag of Ohio is the only flag that is not the shape of a rectangle. The official nickname of Ohio is the Buckeye State and the Buckeye Tree is the official tree of Ohio. The white tailed deer and trilobite are the mammal and fossil of Ohio. We found a theme of the color “red/”scarlet for the rest of the official things of Ohio. The flower is the scarlet carnation, bird is the cardinal, insect is the lady bug and the official drink is tomato juice. The official rock and roll song is “Hang On Sloopy”
Cltural Subjects A cheeky little leprechaun visited our classroom on St. Patty’s Day. He tipped chairs, flipped, tables, and stacked foot stools and trash cans on the shelves. He also left green footprints in the classroom. Even though this leprechaun was an ornery one he did leave gold coins the students and teachers.
We now can count to 10 in twenty six languages… English (that is our native language), Latin, Spanish, Sign Language, German, French, Japanese, Greek, Arabic w/Lebanese dialect, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Hebrew, Swedish, Korean, Polish, Hungarian, and Tagalog, Hebrew, Korean, Hungarian, Polish, Irish, Kiswahili, Welsh, Dutch/Flemish, Serbo-Croatian, Cebuano, Malay, Hindi
Kindergarten Lesson
We capped off our lessons in geometry by learning our geometric solids (Cube, sphere, cone, rectangular and triangular prisms, ovoid, ellipsoid, cylinder, square and triangular based pyramids.
The kindergarteners started their section in Language. We will be learning about the parts of speech until the end of the year. We went over vowels/consonants, and nouns and verbs. A noun is a person , place, or thing. A verb is an action word or something you do. We the leaerned there are three articles. They are A, An, The. We learned rules when we use those articles. A hooks up with consonants, an hooks up with vowels, and the hooks up with anything. Moving along we learned that a pronoun takes the place of a noun and pronouns sometimes make our lives easier. We went over six pronouns He(boy), she(girl), we( a group we are included), they( a group we are not included), it (we use for non-living things and when we don’t know what gender ) We never call a human an “it” because it is rude. You was the last pronoun we became familiar with.
The Kindergarteners now can count to 10 in twenty six languages…English (that is our native language), Spanish, Sign Language, German, French, Japanese, Greek, Arabic w/Lebanese dialect, Italian, Romanian, Russian, Hebrew, Swedish, Korean, Polish, Hungarian, and Tagalog, Hebrew, Korean, Hungarian, Polish, Irish, Kiswahili, Welsh, Dutch/Flemish, Serbo-Croatian, Cebuano, Malay, Hindi.
Enrichments by Ms. Kathleen
MUSIC:
This month students are still listening to Peter and the Wolf which is true favorite of theirs. Every character in this story has their own instrument they all love to guess what character is being played at the time. The children were also exposed to the keyboard they learned about high and low sounds and were allowed to come touch they keys to hear the difference. They also were called up another time to explore the black keys. These keys when pressed played sounds of the different instruments. Children also listened to Chopin and Beethoven while dancing with scarfs around the room.
ART:
Students celebrated Dr. Suess’s Birthday! Ms Michele read to them Fox and Socks by Dr. Sues then told the students that Dr. Seuss was a dreamer. Next, children drew about their dreams on colored using oil pastels and tried to sneak in a picture of a fox in socks! Also this month the students learned about an artist named Jim Bot. During this lesson, students drew their own robots. Next, they labeled their pictures, describing why their robot was invented and what it will do to help them.
SCIENCE:
There were many fun experiments in this class this month, First we focused on surface tension, Mr. John crumpled up pieces of construction paper placing one piece in plain water the other in soapy water. The soapy container made the paper sink and the regular water container made the paper float. Dish soap lowers surface tension making the paper sink. In another class, the students watched Mr.John put raisins in a glass of ginger ale. The raisins seemed to be dancing around the glass, also swimming to the bottom and then again going up to the top of the glass again.The bubbles in the glass of ginger ale push up the raisins and when the bubbles pop , it forces the raisins back down. Students loved the Dancing Raisins Experiment!
For the last experiment this month Mr. John filled 4 glasses of colored water (2 yellow and 2 red). One of the colors was cold water and the other hot. He put them on top of one another balanced them so they would not spill all over or into each other. With the cold on top and the warm cup on the bottom both cups turned green! When placing the opposite way warm on top and cold on the bottom the colors stayed the same! This is because the cold water is more dense and it sinks. This was my favorite one yet by far.
Yes! The weather is finally warming! We got to go outside finally – not that we don’t love the use of the gym. The last of the snow in piles of the edge of the parking lot were the key focus as we have been stuck inside due to the extreme weather. Ice hockey was the second interest even though the ice puck kept falling apart. One of my favorite things is watching the students use their imaginations to create games and “official” rules during recess.
One popular lesson received recently was the experiment observing fluidity and viscosity of liquids. Students enjoyed the etymology of the English words and seeing the flow of different liquids. All students have been working on a style of cursive handwriting called The Initial Stoke Method where one stroke leads the student to drawing several commonly made letters of the alphabet. During the Elementary years, many forms of writing will be explored to increase the beauty of your student’s handwriting skills. This also encourages the students to write more neatly, and focus on their spelling, because they want their handwriting to be ‘just so’.
The Elementary class has been delighted to have a new student join us, increasing our class to seventeen students for the school year. We continue to meet our younger guests as the graduating Kindergarten students continue to visit us [two by two], preparing for their next step after the 3 – 6 classrooms. Next year promises to be a booming increase in size for our growing Elementary program, making our program healthy and robust. We are excited!
Many students are starting to delve into Mathematic Laws, Area, Geometric Solids and Ratios. A couple of students are working on Time. Time is both looked at as Standard Time and Military Time, initially, as these two are most commonly used in our society. Talking about societies, students took a look at different cultures and examined some of the patterns of endings, beginnings and merging of cultures over the course of human history. They found that all history of man has not been clearly found through artifacts from the past and that over time, the numbers of cultures multiplied and became more “crowded” on the timeline as it neared current times.
Students thoroughly enjoyed exploring the World of Fossils at the Cleveland Museum of Natural History. They were completely enthralled to search through rocks and see if they could figure out the kind of fossil they were viewing. Each student visited all six stations and had to decide if the group of fossils at each station were from a continent or from the ocean. At the end of the class, students became true archeologists and dug into a chunk of dirt, digging out their own shark tooth fossil. Then they identified they type of shark their specific tooth may have belonged to using a chart.
Prepping for our next big event, the International Festival, the students have voted on writing and performing, both. We will become researchers, playwrights and performers in the next couple of weeks! Other exciting starts are the Science Experiments are finally being realized as science materials have been arriving at the school, thanks to our $400.00 grant written by one of our Elementary parents. Beware if you visit our classrooms, Venus Flytraps are on the loose!
Week 29 & 30
Our big focus during this next week and a half is Science Fair despite the flu virus challenging many of our staff and students. Students carried out their experiments, collecting data to analyze. Many surprises happened with our “best guesses” or hypothesis had predicted. Some students worked hard to research their surprises to see if they could figure out why their experiment did not turn out as they hoped. All students delved deeply into researching the Law that governed the outcomes of their experiments, whether their hypothesis was correct or not. Taking their knowledge of paragraph writing, each Science Fair project created their first scientific research paper, based loosely on MLA format. One of the favorite parts of the project of the students was making the presentation boards, created with love and style by our young scientists to share their findings in a more visual way. The students were given lessons on how to present their work at Science Fair night and how to dress up their tables to make them inviting and exciting. One group featured an interactive activity! Science Fair night was packed and vibrating with stimulating conversation and all had fun! As staff, we had great pleasure watching the students enjoy the fruits of their hard work and dedication to their projects.
As part of our Science Fair work, lessons revolved around research techniques, formal writing skills, editing skills, typing skills, reading comprehension, how to organize a research paper, how to follow an outline, communication and public speaking tips from the best Mastering Communication Online Training Program . Several students walked to the local library to do research about their project and discover why it worked or didn’t work the way they thought. We used the library computers and all the knowledge gained from our initial library field trip that taught us how to search and find the books we need, browse this site and discover the leading experts and business solutions.
When it came time to write their paper, all students had lessons on how to type their paper on the computer and then we worked through the editing process. First, we read the paper aloud to a friend. Then we marked the areas we felt didn’t sound quite right with a highlighter. We reviewed the highlighted areas to re-word them as necessary, then typed our changes. Again, we read the paper aloud. This time we also looked for spelling and grammar mistakes. We corrected spelling and added any misspelled words to our personal dictionaries for further practice. Grammar mistakes were corrected and we learned a few editing symbols to improve our writing in the future. This may have been a “science” project, but it was laced with history, reading, grammar and language lessons as well. The students were so proud of all their hard work and it certainly paid off! The Science Fair was fantastic!
March was a busy month for us. The children had fun talking about Dr. Seuss, learning about different artists, and exploring the Rainforest. We also had fun celebrating Saint Patrick’s Day.
The first week was all about Dr. Seuss. Throughout the week the children came to school dressed in crazy & mismatched socks and hats and backwards clothes! The first few days we concentrated on rhyming activities; the first activity was a rhyming ball game. I placed different words onto a ball and the children had to throw the ball to one another. When a friend caught the ball they were able to pick out a word and identify another word that rhymes with it. The children loved this activity! During the second activity, I wrote out a number of sentences from The Cat In The Hat and placed notecards at the end of every other sentence. The children had to guess what word was under the notecard that
rhymed with the last word of the sentence. I was super impressed at how well they knew the rhyming word! Throughout that week we went down in the kitchen and cooked green eggs and ham and then had a taste test. We then graphed who liked what better. For the last activity we focused on four sight words, “I, and, the, & that.” Four students came up at a time. As I was reading The Cat In The Hat my four friends had to keep a tally on the sight words that we were looking for. At the end of the book we counted up the tally marks to see which sight words were used most in the story. At the end of the week the children made a Cat In The Hat hat to celebrate Dr. Seuss’s birthday. It was a very fun week!
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The theme for our second week was, Art Appreciation. This week we focused on different artists and their works. The children were able to create their own works from the artists they learned about. The first day we learned all about Claude Monet. We discussed landscapes and why he chose to only draw them. We also learned about oil pastels and how to blend them. The children then created their own landscape while using oil pastels. On the second day, we discussed Pablo Picasso and his different Periods. The children learned about his Blue period and how he was very sad. We also talked about his Rose period where he fell in love and became very happy and all of his paintings were a rosy hue. We then went over his angry period, where all of his paintings were a bit scary. I showed them how he would drew faces in a different way and how all of his drawing were different. The children then drew self-portraits of themselves, cut their pictures up and created their own Picasso. The next thing we learned about was Mosaic art. The children learned the history behind the art, why they did art this why, and the different materials people used to make a mosaic. The children then made a mosaic heart out of little colored paper squares. They turned out fantastic! The children also had a lot of fun learning, exploring, and doing different types of art with Ms. Ashley!
Then we had fun exploring the Rainforest. The children learned about the four layers of the rainforest which are the Forest Floor, the Understory Layer, the canopy Layer, and the Emergent Layer. The children learned about which animals and creatures lived in which layer. We also went over the insects and animals they would find and why they are becoming extinct. Throughout this lesson we also talked about things that we use that come from the rainforest such as wood for our furniture, fruits, coffee beans, and rubber to make rubber bands. For the preschool lesson, Ms. Ashley did awesome rainforest art projects! We also had a very special leprechaun visit our room. The children had so much fun going on a shamrock hunt and finding all of his gold coins he left for them!
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The last week of March we had fun learning about our five senses. The first day the children learned about hearing and how the ear works. We also listened to an awesome cd that played different environment sounds where the children had to guess what the sounds were. We then learned about touch and the children had to place their hand in the mystery bag and guess the item that they were touching. We also had fun learning about taste where the children got to taste something sweet, salty, sour, and bitter! We then played a take away game that explained all about sight, and lastly the children had to place a blindfold on while smelling different smells such as coffee grounds, pepper, a lemon slice, onions, cilantro, and cinnamon. I loved seeing all the children’s facial expressions!
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Ms. Ashley’s Corner
Science
This month of science was full of fun and discovery. We started the month off with Floating rasions.
Carbon dioxide gas dissolved in soft drinks gives them their fizz. You can use the carbon dioxide fizz from a soft drink to make raisins dance.For this experiment you will need is a Can of colorless soda (e.g., 7-Up or Sprite) a tall, clear glass or plastic cup and several raisins (fresh raisins work the best). Next, Pour the can of soda into the tall glass. Notice the bubbles coming up from the bottom of the glass. The bubbles are carbon dioxide gas released from the liquid.Drop 6 or 7 raisins into the glass. Watch the raisins for a few seconds. Describe what is happening to the raisins. Do they sink or float? Keep watching; what happens in the next several minutes? Raisins are denser than the liquid in the soda, so initially they sink to the bottom of the glass. The carbonated soft drink releases carbon dioxide bubbles. When these bubbles stick to the rough surface of a raisin, the raisin is lifted because of the increase in buoyancy. When the raisin reaches the surface, the bubbles pop, and the carbon dioxide gas escapes into the air. This causes the raisin to lose buoyancy and sink. This rising and sinking of the raisins continues until most of the carbon dioxide has escaped, and the soda goes flat. Furthermore, with time the raisin gets soggy and becomes too heavy to rise to the surface.
The next experiment was experiment was sink or float paper. First, Fill two glasses equally full with water.
In one of the cups, add about 1 oz (30 mL) of dish soap and gently stir the solution. Create two identical balls of paper that can fit into your glasses of water. Gently drop one paper ball into the plain water and drop the other paper ball into the glass with the soapy water solution.You will quickly observe that the paper balls react differently to the two fluids. In fact, one paper ball begins to sink while the other sits atop the water! HOW DOES IT WORK? It may appear that one paper ball is floating on the water while the other ball sinks, but it isn’t entirely about density. Instead, what you are observing is a difference in the surface tension of the water. Soap is a surfactant, or a compound that lowers the surface tension of a liquid. Soap, in particular, decreases the surface tension of water by weakening the hydrogen bonds that make water such a special substance.This lower surface tension has two direct effects when it comes to the paper ball. First, the lower surface tension means that the paper can’t sit atop the water’s surface, allowing more of the water to come in contact with more of the paper. Second, the weakened hydrogen bonds mean that the water is more likely to soak into the porous paper, making the paper much more dense and causing it to sink.
The last experiment was a density water experiment and we had the help of a fellow alumni Tyler Franks. He was trying to do a hot and cold density experiment with the children. With all science things don’t always work out and this experiment did not. Mr.John always tells the kids that scientists are not always right as they are wrong more then they are right, and this was proff. The kids still had a blast trying to figure it out.
Music
Mrs.Lisa lead the kids with fun music by playing the piano. She would play different sounds and have the children guess what sound the heard. Then they played a fun cat and mouse game. When the heard the high sounds the mice could come out of their house to get food and when the heard low music the cats would try to catch the mice. This is one of the kids favorite music games, and they laughed and laughed. It is a great way to mix music with movement! The children had a great time taking turns and discovering the keys on the key board and learning about it.
Art class
This month the children had a chance to use their creativity by using mosaic art. Mosaic is the art of creating images with an assemblage of small pieces of colored glass, stone, or other materials. It is a technique of decorative art or interior decoration. Most mosaics are made of small, flat, roughly
square, pieces of stone or glass of different colors, known as tesserae; but some, especially floor mosaics, may also be made of small rounded pieces of stone, and called “pebble mosaics”. The kids really enjoyed explaining their story of what they created. The children also discovered how to draw their own robot. They really had to use their imagination to come up with an idea and use their creativity to put it on paper. Our students made the coolest robots ever and really enjoyed giving them names. They really liked how they were able to explain what their robots were doing in their picture. The last thing the kids did this month was put on the most beautiful Art Extravaganza for their family and friends. They were able to showcase all the art work they have done over the past year of school. It was so great to see how proud the students were of their work. They worked so hard to be able to share their art with you all. Great job kiddos and we are so proud of our future artist’s!
We started off the month of March talking about Dr. Seuss and Eric Carle. The children (and teachers) loved coming to school dressed crazy with their hats, silly socks, and crazy hair! We enjoyed reading Green Eggs and Ham and watching the students cringe as they tried that first bite of their very own green eggs and ham.
The second week of March we learned all about insects. The children learned how to identify animals belonging in the insect category and those that do not. They learned the main parts of an insect with the help of our own version of Head Shoulders Knees and Toes (Head, Thorax, and Abdomen.) Together the preschoolers made a beautiful diagram of an insect to display in the classroom. For the third week of March we talked about plants and flowers. The children discovered the four elements needed to grow a plant soil, seeds, sun and water. They also learned the word photosynthesis! We planted flowers to watch grow in the classroom.
The last week of March we talked about butterflies and caterpillars. Students had a blast learning about how butterflies go through stages of growth and change called a life cycle. They even got to create a butterfly life cycles using different types of macaroni. We also designed butterflies using coffee filters and clothes pins.
I hope everyone enjoyed their spring break and is ready to get back into the swing of things!
Kindergarten
The kindergarteners started their grammar unit by learning their five vowels and what isn’t a vowel is a consonant. We learned a fun song to the tune of BINGO there are five letters that I know and vowel are their name O’s A,E,I,O,U A,E,I,O,U A,E,I,O,U and vowels are their name O’s. Then we looked at noun and verbs. Nouns are people, places, and things. Verbs are action words or something you can do. We also learned that there are three articles, a, an, the. We learned that “a” hooks up with consonants, “an” is very picky and only hooks up with vowels. And “the” is not picky at all and hooks up with anything!
Science
For the first week of March we defied gravity using water cardboard and a cup! With no air inside the glass, the air pressure from outside the glass is greater than the pressure of the water inside the glass. The extra air pressure manages to hold the cardboard in place, keeping you dry and your water where it should be, inside the glass even when you hold the glass upside down.
The second week we made a tornado in a bottle by spinning a bottle in a circular motion which create a water vortex that looks like a mini tornado. The water is rapidly spinning around the center of the vortex due to centripetal force. Some vortexes found in nature include tornadoes, hurricanes and waterspouts.
The third week of March we filled baggies up with water and poked pencils through them. No water spilled out the holes because ziploc bags are made of a polymer. Polymers have long chains of molecules that are flexible. When we poked the sharp pencils through the baggie, the pencils slide in between the chain of molecules that made up the polymer. The molecule chains made a seal around the pencils and didn’t let any water out.
Art
By: Ms. Faith
The first week of March was a celebration for Dr. Seuss’ birthday. So, in honor of his birthday, Ms. Michele brought in a piece of artwork that Dr. Seuss painted himself. The title of the pieces was called Dream and then the students got to draw their own dream. They were allowed to use markers, crayons, and colored pencils. The next week, Ms. Michele showed the students different pictures of structures from around the world. These structures included, the Great Wall of China, pyramids, and the Pentagon. Students were given sugar cubes, glue, and pieces of foam to create their own structure. Another project we completed was to go along with the classroom them of plants and flowers. We read a book about and garden and discussed what a garden needs to grow. The young artists got to paint their own gardens using paint, paintbrushes, and forks. The students dipped the forks into the paint and drug them on the paper to create the petals of a flower. We saw a lot of creativity just from using simple objects. Some children painted a sun or insects since those are things a garden needs to grow. At the end of the month, Ms. Michele brought in some art works from an artist who paints robots. The class got to draw their own robot using oil pastels and had to come up with a purpose for their creation. Some students designed robots to help them clean, do homework, and even plant gardens. The students love to be creative and can not wait until the next art class!
Music
By: Ms. Faith
In the last month, Ms. Lisa reviewed many of the terms we have been learning throughout the year. The students reviewed the terms Adagio and Allegro. Adagio is Italian for slow and Allegro is Italian for fast. She uses these terms for describing tempos of songs. To reinforce these concepts, Ms. Lisa played a song from Beethoven, which had a slow tempo, and a song from Chopin, which had a fast tempo. The students used scarves to dance along with the different tempos. The students also got to practice singing in their high and low voices as well as quite and loud voices. Since the students enjoyed the game called “Cat and Mouse” that Ms. Lisa introduced to them last month, she brought it back again this month. The students have a lot of fun trying not to get caught by the cat. To wrap up music class before spring break, Ms. Lisa brought back her keyboard and taught the students the difference between the black and the white keys. She had two students come up and play a duet on the white keys, then the black keys. The students had to learn how to be an audience and listen respectfully while their peers were playing their duet. Once their duet was finished, the students took a bow and their audience clapped for them. We hope Ms. Lisa has a great spring break and I know the students will look forward to the first music class in April.
Themes of the Week (in addition to Montessori Work time)
4/06: All About North America
Introduction to the seven continents
North America: countries, culture, climate
United States, the flag and it’s history, Christopher Columbus
South America: countries, climate, culture, landmarks, The Equator, The Andes Mountains
The Amazon/What is found in the Rainforest (animals, products we use that come from the rainforest)
Afternoon Group Lesson: All about sports and fitness
4/13: Africa and Asia
Africa: countries, culture, climate and animals! We will also learn about some African cuisine and languages
Three regions of Africa (Savannah, Desert, Rainforest)
Nile River, Sahara Desert
Asia: countries, culture, climate, languages and cuisine. We will cover historical landmarks like the Great Wall of China, and locating natural landmarks like the Himalayan Mountains on a map.
Afternoon Group Lesson: Variety of activities and crafts about the different countries.
4/20: Australia, Antarctica and Oceans
Antarctica: The Arctic region, animals, landforms and plant life
Pacific, Atlantic, Indian, Arctic and the Southern Ocean, ocean life
Australia: Desert, Outback, Rainforest, Great Barrier Reef, culture and climate
Australian cuisine and language
Afternoon Group Lesson: Having fun learning about the different states of the USA.
4/27: All About Europe
Different European countries and their culture
Different climates, landmarks and landforms
Gondolas, Olympics, Running of the Bulls, Windmills, Eiffel Tower etc.
Highlight a few languages spoken in these countries. We will learn the days of the week in Italian and common sayings in French (Good Day, Thank You, Good Evening, etc.)
Afternoon Group Lesson: Flags of the world.
For the month of April, we will be concentrating on preparing your child for the international festival and will resume letters and words of the week in May.
Things to do at Home this Month to reinforce our themes:
While reading a book have your child point to all of the letter of the week she/he can find. Have them do this with the sight words as well. Play I‐Spy using things that only start with the letter of the week/ sight words.
As a family, come up with a food or dessert that authentic from a different country and make it together.
Pretend to go on a trip. Place chairs in the middle of the room (as your plane), bring a map! Point to a country and fly there! Talk about the animals you would see, the weather, people and anything else you would see or experience!
We will be practicing individual lines and songs in class in preparation for the Festival, please practice your line at home too!
Our Academic Enrichment time is daily from 12:00-1:00pm. This time is specifically designed for our Kindergarten students to join together as a group to work and progress through the advanced materials and lessons in the Montessori primary curriculum. Throughout the school day in their classroom they are still working individually with their classroom teacher on these and other materials at their level.
Our Academic Enrichment time is daily from 12:00-1:00pm. This time is specifically designed for our Kindergarten students to join together as a group to work and progress through the advanced materials and lessons in the Montessori primary curriculum. Throughout the school day in their classroom they are still working individually with their classroom teacher on these and other materials at their level.
Themes of the Week (in addition to Montessori Work time)
3/30: Countries from North & South America
North America: countries, culture, climate, & landmarks and cuisine
South America: countries, culture, climate, & landmarks and cuisine
Languages, flags and location on the map
4/06: Countries from Europe
MONDAY 4/06– NO SCHOOL (Easter Monday)
Europe: countries, culture, climate
Famous landmarks and cuisine
Languages, flags and location on the map
4/13: Countries from Europe (Week Two) and Africa
Europe: countries, culture, climate, famous landmarks and cuisine
Africa: countries, culture, climate, famous landmarks and cuisine
Languages, flags and location on the map
4/20: Australia, Asia and Antarctica
Antarctica, The Arctic region, map, flag, climate and animals
Windiest Place on Earth; covered in ice
Australia: countries, culture, climate, famous landmark and cuisine
Asia: countries, culture, climate, and famous landmarks and cuisine
Languages, flags and location on the map
4/27: Lie Cycles
Life cycle of the plant/bean
Life cycle of toads/frogs
Life cycle of butterflies
**There will be no words or letters of the week for April 06-April 20. We will use this time to practice individual lines with students**
Letters of the Week: Try to find objects that begin with each letter wherever you go with your child.
4/27: Zz
Rhyming Words of the Week: Try to find each word in books as you read to your child.
4/27: BAM, cam, dam, ham, jam, lamb, ram
Things to do at home this month to reinforce our themes:
As a family, come up with a food or dessert that authentic from a different country and make it together.
Pretend to go on a trip. Place chairs in the middle of the room (as your plane), bring a map! Point to a country and fly there! Talk about the animals you would see, the weather, people and anything else you would see or experience!
We will be practicing individual lines and songs in class in preparation for the Festival, lines will be sent home next week; please practice your child’s lines at home too!
