A Peek Into Handwriting | Academic Enrichment | Week of October 9th

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In handwriting , the children are continuing to make progress in writing in cursive! We currently have worked on I through Q, practicing writing the letters by themselves, then writing a sentence containing the letter we are working on that day. The Kindergarten students have also been asking me to write more words once they are finished! Please keep encouraging your children to practice their handwriting at home as well! I’m so proud of their progress!

Take a Peek Into our Kindergarten Reading Group | Week of October 9th

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This week was our last week on the story Big Wolf and Little Wolf. One of the activities that the children had to share was why or why not they would have left the little wolf under the tree. We then led a group discussion about their thoughts on this question. I love when we have discussions like this! I then wrote all their answers on our white board so they could write out their answers. Our last activity the children were able to discuss how they felt about the story and then write about what they would like to do differently the following week.

A peek into our Academic Enrichment for kindergartners | Week of October 2nd & 9th

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Landforms: The children learned and explored the difference between a lake, island, bay, peninsula, gulf, harbor, cape, isthmus, strait, chain of lakes, and archipelago.

Landform Boards: This child is feeling the difference between a cape and a bay. The sand paper on the board represents land and the smooth blue portion represents water.

 

Parts of Animals: The children learned the characteristics and body parts of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds and fish by using and working with the animal puzzle the was made with a great puzzle maker and control charts in the classroom.

Bird Puzzle: This child is tracing and labeling the parts of a bird: beak, head, breast, wing, tail, legs and claws.

A Peek into Next Week: Parts of Plants!

 

A Peek into Our Week | Ms. Kate’s Class | Week of October 9th

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I truly love this time of year. The perfect smell of fall, the beautiful colors we see all around us, and all of the really fun things our class gets to talk and learn about! This week we focused on Autumn. We had a blast heading outdoors together and collecting the different kinds of leaves we saw. As a group, we discussed the different types of leaves and then sorted them into different colors and created a leaf color graph. We also learned about chlorophyll and what happens to the tree and leaves as the different seasons go by. The children were also very excited  to  explore their leaves they found with leaf rubbings. It was a fantastic week!

Here is our leaf color chart that the children made. Having the children sort and classify is helping the children organize their understanding of language, people and the objects in their environment. This process is the child’s first step into math and science!
Our two friends are working on copy writing the basket of sight words. When you copy write the children refine their fine motor skills, are able to form letters and understand the purpose from just seeing a word and now writing it on to paper. Children also feel proud and gain more confidence in themselves when they see what they can do while they are writing. It can also spark their creativity.
Having a special moment in the library with one of our field students from the University of Akron.
This week our children were able to explore the different types of leaves that they brought in. One of our lessons was leaf rubbing. This lesson provides knowledge of the different leaves, fine motor skills as they color back and forth. They also have to follow step by step directions.

 

A Peek Into Next Week

Next week is all about pumpkins! Another one of my favorites ☺ Together we will…

  • discuss the life cycle of a pumpkin
  • have fun investigating a pumpkin from the inside out
  • sink or float science experiment
  • use our five senses to explore a pumpkin

Parent Education Night Wednesday, October 25th at 6:30pm (Tallmadge Campus) click on the link to register: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090b48a8a92da6f94-montessori

A Peek at Our Week | Elementary | Week of October 9

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Leaves and towers and buses! Oh my! The Holden Arboretum trip was a blast! Many of our students enjoyed their very first bus ride, while older students had fun teaching bus games. We were able to learn about different leaves and trees, catch wildlife that lives in the arboretum, and walk through the canopy. During our work time this week, first, third, and fourth years worked with different extensions of the Constructive Triangles. First year students transformed the blue triangles into new shapes. Third year students explored equivalence of the shapes inside the Small Hexagonal Box. Fourth year students found equivalence between different parallelograms, squares, and rectangles with our Euclid’s Theorem Drawer. Second grade students had their first look at our Geographic Feature Cards to learn about caves, icebergs, fiords, and islands.

This month, students are focusing on Composition of the Earth experiments. This experiment is about the density of solid objects. This experiment has a pot filled with sand. In the pot are iron objects, ping pong balls, and other plastic objects. Students push all objects to the bottom of the sand, then shake the pot to see what happens. The iron objects sink and the plastic objects rise to the top. Students can conclude that denser objects settle under substances or objects that are less dense.
These first and second year students are completing their constellation viewing tubes. Students have poked holes through printed constellations and glued them to tubes to be able to view the constellations in the light. Other students have decided to paint constellations or poke holes in a sheet of paper to use to cover a light! There has been a lot of creativity with this project!
One of our favorite parts of the Holden Arboretum trip was the Canopy Walk. This Walk was 500′ long and 65′ above the ground. We were able to walk through the canopy of the forest to see a different perspective of the trees and animals.
Here, our students are on top of the Emergent Tower, 120′ above the ground! Our students were nervous as they climbed higher and higher, but everyone made it to the top! The view was amazing.
These students are searching for live and dead forest material!
One of our activities at the Arboretum was finding the age of trees. Partners were given ribbons of differing lengths and were sent to find the tree it fit around. Our guide told us there is a mathematical formula for finding the age of live trees based on diameter. This formula changes based on type of tree.
These students are holding the fruit of a Buttonbush. These fruits were used on clothing as actual buttons!

A Peek into Next Week

Lower Elementary students will be working on small and large bead frames, beginning dinosaur research, adding angles, and studying the layers of the Earth. Upper Elementary students will study homonyms and prepositions, will explore the rules of electron clouds, and work through angle word problems.

REMINDERS: Next week we have our first “Bring Your Parent to Work Time” Days. If you are signed up, you will receive an email reminding you of your time, with some information to review.

Parent Education Night Wednesday, October 25th at 6:30pm (Tallmadge Campus) click on the link to register: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090b48a8a92da6f94-montessori

 

A Peek at Our Week | Ms. Courtney’s Classroom | Week of October 9th

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Topic: This week we learned about apples. The children enjoyed tasting different types of apples: granny smith, red delicious, gala and honey crisp. They also discovered what the inside of an apple looks like and how apples grow.  Some of the students even had the chance to do apple stamping and make homemade applesauce.

Work Time

Snap Dressing Frame: This child is learning to manipulate snaps so that she can dress herself. She is also developing motor skills and learning to follow logical steps.
Introduction Tray: These children are being introduced to the decimal system and becoming familiar with the symbols and quantities associated with units, tens, hundreds and thousands. They are visually seeing the difference between 1 unit, 1 ten, 1 hundred and 1 thousand.
Teen Board: This child is showing that he knows the symbols 11 – 19 and can successfully match the corresponding quantities, for example to make the number 14 he places one ten and four units.
Crumbing: This child is helping clean up sand after he was done using our kinetic sand work.
This child is learning how to prepare snack for his friends with Ms. Faith.
Object to Picture: This child is matching objects to pictures, by doing this she is making the connection that what she holds in her hand is the same as what she sees on the picture. In another sense that the picture of an apple is an apple, and the apple she is holding is an apple. This is a pre-reading material which aids in abstract thinking. This is essential preparation for reading.
These children are tracing and identifying the letter ‘e’ and its sound by using the sandpaper letter ‘e’.
Color Box 4: This child is selecting the lightest of the colored tablets and placing them in order lightest to darkest until all of the tiles have been put in order.

Guest Readers

  

Reminders

  • Parent Education Night Wednesday, October 25th at 6:30pm
    You can register to attend and for childcare by clicking this link
  • Bring Your Parent to Work Time Monday, October 23, 2017
  • Halloween Party Friday, October 27, 2017

A Look Into Next Week: Pumpkins

  • The students will describe a pumpkin using all of their senses.
  • The students will discuss the different shapes pumpkins can be.
  • The students will explore the inside of a pumpkin.
  • The students will guess and count how many seeds are in a pumpkin.

Peek at our Week | Mr. John’s Class | Week of October 09, 2017

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Weekly Lesson:

This week we learned about reptiles and what makes a reptile a reptile.  Reptile are vertebrates, cold blooded (body temperature changes to the temperature around them), they are born from hard shelled eggs and their skin is dry and with scales.  The children loved touching Elise (my Corn Snake) and Oliver (Ms. Kristen’s turtle).

Cultural Subjects:

The students can count to ten in 9 languages (English, Latin, Sign Language, Spanish, German, French, Greek, Japanese, Arabic with the Lebanese dialect).

 

Respect, Fun, and Friendship. Here are some of my Breakfast Club Students jockeying for position on MY chair. Respect, Fun and Friendship is all part of the grace and courtesy taught in the Montessori classroom.

 

The metal insets are located in the Language area. This material has several different shapes for the child to trace. The aim is to acquire mastery of the hand in using a writing instrument with direct preparation for writing.

 

The Knobless Cylinders are found in the Sensorial area and the purpose is to observe and compare the different sizes and colors. Another material focusing on visual discrimination.

 

The Plant and Animal puzzles are materials from the Cultural Subject area. These materials help the child identify the parts of plants and animals.

 

These students are working with the Science Bins(trees) which is a Cultural Subject work. They are comparing the book to a real piece of a tree. In this bin are buckeyes, walnuts, and a variety of sticks.

 

BIOLOGY… Gibby had babies. Last week we just talked about Mammals being born alive and drinking mother’s milk. Roz (in this picture) who gave birth in April helped clean the babies.

Sneak peek to next Week:
We will be learning about Amphibians and the characteristics of.

Letter Of The Week:
H h

Rhyming Word Of The Week:
bit

In the near future:

Parent Education Night Wednesday, October 25th at 6:30pm (Tallmadge Campus) click on the link to register: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090b48a8a92da6f94-montessori

Halloween Party Friday, October 27, 2017 click on the link for details: http://www.signupgenius.com/go/4090b48a8a92da6f94-mrjohns1

 

A Peek into Art Class September 2017

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Art Class

By: Ms. Faith

For the first month of art class, the students learned about primary colors, the color wheel, how we are all unique and using our senses. They also learned about two artists, Piet Mondrian and Henri Matisse. Henri Matisse was a French artist who was known for his use of color and for his paintings. Piet Mondrian was a Dutch abstract artist who had a huge impact on 20th century art.

These students are working on renditions of Mondran’s Composition ll in Red, Blue, and Yellow. They learned about primary colors, lines, and how to use glue sticks with this project.
 

  

The students learned what a self portrait is. We talked about how everyone is different and special. They looked in the mirror at themselves and looked at their features.

 

To celebrate fall, the young artists made fall trees using cut up vegetable to stamp in paint for the leaves. Since the theme that week was the five senses, we talked about how the vegetables looked, smelled, and felt.

A Peak into Music Class | September 2017

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In September, the students met Ms. Lisa our music teacher, learned the rules for music, and how to use certain instruments.  The instruments we learned how to play were rhythm sticks, castanets, and maracas. The students also learned musical terms such as staccato, legato, allegro, andante, and adagio.

Singing hello to Allie the Allegator. Ms. Lisa has the students watch Allie’s mouth while they sing hello to her, so they know whe to start and end singing. This teaches them how to follow directions and how to sing together like a choir.
 
Using egg shakers to match the beat of the song.
 
Using maracas to make the sound of a train. The students marched in a circle like a train and had to listen when Ms. Lisa rang the bell and played the train whistle to know when to start and stop. The song played in defferent tempos as well, so the students practiced walking slowly, at a medium pace, and at a fast pace.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

A Peek into Science | Tallmadge Campus

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In Science this month, students learned the term oxidation and discovered that when you add bleach to something it becomes oxidized, therefore its properties change.

 

 

The students experimented with air pressure using a hair dryer and ping pong ball. They discovered that the air from the hair dryer flows around the outside of the ball, so if they positioned the ball carefully, the air flowed evenly around each side making the ball float midair. We also talked about how gravity pulls the ball downward while the pressure below the ball from the moving air forces it upward, meaning that all the forces acting on the ball are balanced and the ball hovers in midair.

 

The students experienced seeing sound waves using a metal spoon and pan. They also learned that sound waves are what allows us to hear different noises.

 

For science this week we filled a Ziploc bag up with water and gently using pencils pierced through the bag until it pierced both sides, surprisingly NO water leaked out! The students discovered that the plastic the Ziploc bag we used was made of naturally formed a seal around the object as long as it stayed in place.

 

Our next experiment, we created an environment where we could see the oxygen/carbon dioxide process of plants by submerging a leaf in water and placing it in the sunlight. The process of photosynthesis allowed us to see bubbles on the leaves and as the leaves released its’ extra oxygen from being submerged, the oxygen was seen as bubbles in the water.

It has been a fun month exploring in Science!