A Peek at Our Week | Elementary | Week of September 10

“Education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment.” -Maria Montessori

This week we had many exciting lessons and spent time learning from each other. Our first graders worked with fractions, learned the history of clocks, continued their Geometric Cabinet work, and learned about the first plants on Earth! Our second year students practiced labeling Golden Beads as greater than, less than, or equal to, distinguished between feminine and masculine nouns, looked at the intersection of two straight lines, and classified animals on our Animal Kingdom Chart. Our third year students began adding and subtracting squares and cubes, learned about suffixes, were introduced to congruence, similarity, and equivalence, and studied the taxonomy of vertebrates! Our fourth year students further studied the Pythagorean Theorem, discussed basic life processes, and learned about acronyms. Our fifth year students continued their Native American research, continued studying acronyms, and found the formula for a decanomial using the Table of Pythagoras.

Our fourth grade students discovered that the Pythagorean Theorem doesn’t just work with squares of numbers, but works with rhombi, trapezoids, and hexagons! We combined all of our Constructive Triangle boxes and even borrowed some from Ms. Courtney. Our students each took one side of the right-angled scalene triangle to build the shapes listed above.

These second and third year girls are working together on Handwriting. Our returning second year students are working on capital cursive letters. Our third, fourth, and fifth year students are writing paragraphs in cursive. This week, the older students wrote about black holes!

One of our first grade students has spent time this week working on snake research. In this photo, he is researching the Emerald Tree Boa. Research in the Elementary classroom can incorporate many areas of the classroom into a single project!

This first grade student is practicing the Fraction Skittles lesson she received on Monday. This is our first fraction lesson of the year and reminds students of their work with fractions in kindergarten. We discussed fracturing a whole into equal parts and different ways to write fractions.

A Peek at Next Week

Next week our Lower Elementary students will work on telling time, alphabetizing, different types of nouns, and parts of flowers and fish. Our Upper Elementary students will practice estimating and learn rules of divisibility. They will learn about coined words and the history of the English language. The fourth years will learn the chemical composition of life. Fifth year students will continue studying plants. Next week all students will begin Spelling lessons and will have their first homework assignment sent home following their Spelling lesson on Monday. We have our first field trip Friday, September 21, to Ramseyer Farms! Please remember to dress your child for the weather and a day on the farm!

REMINDERS:

Friday, September 21 – Ramseyer Farms Field Trip
Wednesday, September 26 – Picture Day
It’s almost here – “Bring Your Parents to ‘Work Time’!” Sign up here.

“Education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment.” -Maria Montessori

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