A Peak at Our Week | Elementary | Week of September 3 - Absorbent Minds Montessori School

“Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and strength, use it to create.” -Maria Montessori

My favorite thing about the Montessori Elementary Curriculum is the amount of opportunities students are given to use their imagination to learn, create, and grow. This week we have seen students take an interest in something and run with it. We had two first year students, inspired by the nest in our room, complete a research report about wasps. Other students that were inspired by their research spent time observing the nest. Our second and third year students were responsible for reading the laws of the universe and coming up with their own science experiment to demonstrate to the class how the law works and they experiment the education technology by hand. Our fourth and fifth grade students started their first “Word of the Week” project where they chose any word that they thought others wouldn’t know and needed to come up with a creative way to show what it meant. When students have the opportunity to follow their interests and use their imagination, they often create something that exceeds our expectations and combines skills from many areas of the classroom into just one work!

Our introduction to the solar system is always an exciting lesson. One student is the sun and other students get to be the planets. To show students how far our planets are from the sun, we use the scale of one step = 36 million miles! Our friend holding Neptune had to take 78 steps away from the sun to show that it is 2.8 billion miles away! You can barely see her in this photo! The students that did not hold a star or planet had a race around the solar system towards the end of our lesson. Before we went inside, our second year students shared something they learned about each planet from their research as first graders.

A second and third grade student work together on their Laws of the Universe lesson. Today, they will present their poster and experiment to the rest of the class. These students are going to teach their friends about inertia!

These first, fourth, and second grade girls are working together on our volcano experiment. In the elementary classroom, students are able to complete experiments on their own using experiment cards about anatomy, water, air, matter, and many other topics. If students are interested in discovering something we don’t have written out, they are able to research an experiment or idea and write a material request if we do not have what they need. This is another opportunity for students to be creative while practicing the Scientific Method and learning to cooperate with others.

These first grade girls have worked for two weeks on their wasp research! They used book and internet resources to write over a page of research. They also are making progress on a paper mache nest. To complete their report, they drew a picture of a wasp nest and added some laminated wasp specimens. They finally laminated their work and hung it near the nest so others could learn, too!

Inspired by the ongoing research, this first year student is getting a closer look into the nest!

A Peek into Next Week

Next week, we will begin our Spelling Assessments. The following week, we will begin our first Spelling lesson and homework! First year students will learn about the history of clocks, the noun, fractions, and the first plants. Second year students will practice greater than and less than, feminine and masculine nouns, the intersection of two straight lines, and work with our Animal Kingdom Chart. Our third year students will solve equations with the squares and cubes of numbers, will learn about suffixes, will begin their study with congruent figures, and will study the taxonomy of vertebrates. Fourth year students will review the commutative and distributive laws of multiplication, will begin advanced grammar studies, will continue their study of Pythagorean Theorem from last year, and will study basic life processes. Fifth year students will complete the Table of Pythagoras, will continue studying Native Americans, will study energy on earth, and will begin studying advanced botany.

REMINDERS:

Our Ramseyer Farm Field Trip is Friday, September 21. Please make sure to turn in your permission slip!
Picture Day – September 26
Sign ups are ready for “Bring Your Parent to ‘Work Time’.” You can sign up here.

“Imagination does not become great until human beings, given the courage and strength, use it to create.” -Maria Montessori

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