From the Puffin's Nest:   Primary Classroom Blog

April 2012

It has been a long time and so much has been going on that I do not know where to begin. Well, in the last blog I mentioned we would be looking at some more holidays around the world. We had a great time looking at the way people in India celebrate Holi; the children there paint each other with special dyes and then spray water on each other. While that would have been fun, we decided to make a paper copy of ourselves and then paint each other’s paper body. We were pleasantly surprised by the respectful way this was done and the great job everyone did cleaning up afterwards. The result was beautifully painted bodies hanging on our walls. 

We also had a great time with our special visitors on Grandparents Day. We shared so much good work that day. One special friend was so inspired he slipped into deep concentration as he ever so carefully cut out the Easter bunny he colored with his niece.  It was nice listening to the stories they told about their schooldays so long ago. One shared how the one room schoolhouse they started in was similar to the Montessori school as far as the mixed age grouping allowing students to learn from older students.  We are starting to see more of that in our class these days; our second and third year students are frequently found working with our first years. Everyone agreed we have a nice place for learning.

We have begun to explore the classroom in new ways. It is intriguing to see the different ways students use materials that have been in the classroom all year long.  Our habitats are now becoming three dimensional; our animals now have elaborate tree houses. Some of our youngest friends are draping fabric to hide away in tents. They bring books into their tents and tell stories to each other. Our youngest friends are also returning to the sensorial area with new confidence and success. The work they have been doing in the practical life area all year has prepared them to tackle the binomial cube. It takes coordination, concentration and a sense of order to master the binomial cube…and two of them have done it!

Another exciting thing is in the process of happening this week. It is sort of a culmination of many skills that we have been working on all year. This year we have been training our hands through writing, painting, coloring, hammering, weaving and sewing. Well, it just so happens that we are using all these skills and more to put together a beautiful, but functional, item for the auction coming up in May.  We will be sawing, painting and hammering boards to build a garden bench to go across two cube shaped planters. We are also coloring butterflies, dragonflies and ladybugs to decorate it using a technique called decoupage. And, then, we will weave a cover for a pillow we will sew together and stuff to make a lovely, soft seat for the bench. Wow, we are going to be busy.

We want to extend a special thanks to Gavin’s mother for sending in the animal skeleton for us to look at up close. It was awesome!

Note to Parents: Thanks for sending boots and rain pants for your child. It really helps!

March 2012

Greetings from the Puffin’s Nest! I want to tell you about the wonderful cultural explosion in our classroom. It started with the introduction to habitats learning that these are places that plants and animals live together and call their home.  We introduced the generalized habitats of forests, deserts, grassland as well as water habitats.  We are using our puzzle maps to see that these habitats are found all around the world. We looked at mammals around the world and talked about the habitats they live in. We did an in depth look at our northern forest and the animals that we have close by and up into Canada.

We have now introduced our next vertebrate group, the reptiles, and the habitats the live in. We started with turtles and saw students creating books and a mobile out of the turtle coloring pages. We started seeing the older students adding plants and sand and sky to their animal colorings. We have started going to the library regularly which allowed one student to bring down a dinosaur book saying “dinosaurs are reptiles; can I bring this book down to our class?” We were going to do dinosaurs later, but, we follow the child in Montessori so we introduced dinosaurs. The students began gathering around the book, tracing the dinosaurs on the puzzle map paper and adding a habitat around them. One child drew his dinosaurs free hand. Another child found a book with lovely pictures of snakes and other reptiles in their habitats and the explosion continued with three students working together on a mural containing reptiles in a grassland, forest, wetland and desert. We also saw habitats entering our early language matching works. The students have begun creating habitats for our animals matching works by adding the blocks and felt to it to create land and water and trees for teir animals. I love the creativity.

Now, if that wasn’t enough, we had a visit from Sarah of the DRA and received a fabulous compliment. The program was titled “surprise” because we had to play a guessing game to figure out what she brought. The students had to ask questions to get the answer. It was very rewarding for me to listen to the quality of the questions they asked and for Sarah to comment on their questions as well.  She told me how impressed she was with the maturity of our class since the last time she visited.

We are having so much fun in the Puffins nest!

Upcoming in the Puffin's nest is another look at some holidays, namely, Holi from India, Easter from the USA and Passover from Isreal. As usual we will look at the celebration and the continent the country is in.

Note to Parents: Even if it is a lovely day, there may be lingering mud puddles that are very attractive to the children, so continue to send the rain pants.. 

Mid-February

Wow! Our little hands have been getting a quite a workout these days. We have been discovering the joy of mixed materials for collage. We are learning to cut paper into shapes to glue onto paper and make something beautiful. Some of us like tiny pieces and some of us go for the big stuff (that doesn’t require as much cutting). We are discovering that ribbon, string, fabric and buttons require much more glue than paper (that is a bit of a problem solving activity). We are also discovering that we can create abstract art or something resembling a real object. Some of us have decided that tape is fascinating and began taping things together instead of gluing. So, we ‘follow the child’, according to Dr. Montessori’s philosophy, and we have created a taping work.  And all this discovery helps to strengthen our hands for more advanced activities like writing numbers and letters.

One of those more advanced activities that we have recent begun is sewing. So many of Dr. Montessori’s works are presented in a sequence that begins with something very simple and progresses to something quite involved. Sewing is one of my favorites! It starts with bead stringing. We have had stringing large wooden beads in the classroom all year but have now introduced bead stringing necklaces and bracelets that we can take home and wear…or share with a friend! Next in the sequence, which has also been out all year, is lacing cards. The lacing card activity prepares us for creating beautiful book bindings. The next works we have in the sequence are a running stitch work using burlap on a hoop, button sewing and pillow making. These works take a lot of practice, not to mention order, concentration, coordination and independent, the major goals of the Montessori primary curriculum.  

We are also seeing a continued interest in patterning. More of us are working on our concentration and coordination by stacking and patterning the knobless cylinders. An extension of patterning that we have recently begun uses poems and rhythm sticks. We are learning to feel the beat of the poem (and songs). We are also working on the difference between the beat and the melody. We are seeing and ‘feeling’ the patterns in rhythm.  Our older students have also begun hunting for rhyming words in poems.

We are having so much fun in the Puffins nest!

Note to Parents: The staff has decided to require children to wear either snow or rain pants throughout our wet seasons. Even if it is a lovely day, there may be lingering mud puddles that are very attractive to the children.

Reminder: Lunch items need to be in resealable containers.  

End of January 2012

Greetings from the Puffin’s Nest! We have been having such an exciting time with our science studies. We are learning about mammals right now, but let’s look at how we got here. Way back in the Fall we classified all living things into plants or animals. Then we classified the animals into vertebrates and invertebrates. We had fun looking at skeletons and finding the vertebrae (backbones). We discovered that we are vertebrates! We learned about our own body parts and how important it is to eat healthy foods to keep all our body parts working properly. Then we classified vertebrates into five groups, birds, mammals, fish, amphibians and reptiles. We were briefly introduced to the major differences between the groups and then began the process of looking at each group individually. This whole process involves starting with the whole and then breaking it down into parts. We do a lot of that in the Montessori Primary class.

The first vertebrate group we looked at was the birds.  We learned they have feathers on the outside, they have wings and clawed feet for appendages, they build nests out of different types of materials and in different places, the shape of their beaks help us know what they eat, and the boys are prettier than the girls. Oh, also, the babies are hatched from eggs and are rather ugly when they first hatch!

Now we are learning about mammals. The cool thing is, since we have already studied one group of vertebrates, we can now start a process called compare and contrast.  So, we are learning that mammals have hair not feathers, four limbs for walking and/or climbing or swimming, many mammals build nests also, the shape of their teeth help determine what they eat, the boys are usually larger and stronger than the girls and the babies are born live and are really cute! We had a wonderful visitor from DRA talked to us about mammals in winter. We looked at some animal skins and skulls and went outside to look for signs of mammals. We found some nests in trees that probably belong to squirrels and we followed animal tracks in the snow some suspected of being squirrel tracks and being fox tracks. It was fun hunting in the snow for signs of mammals.

Our science topic does not stay in the cultural area of our class but spread to other areas as well. In art we used our cutting skills to put hair on the bear and put together the parts of a horse. We read a brand new Eric Carle book about an artist who painted a blue horse and that started us painting and coloring mammals of all different colors.  In geography we are looking at mammals of North America and Europe. In our language area we are reading and writing stories about mammals. And, very exciting, we have just begun a research project with our older students. They will be looking up the diet, habitat and predator of various mammals and then reporting back to the class at our meetings.

Oh, I almost forgot, we also learned that we are mammals as well. And we are omnivores that need an assortment of good food to keep us healthy and, since we do not have hair (or fur) all over our bodies, we need warm, protective clothing in the winter.

Reminder: Please think about health and nutrition when you pack your child’s lunch and when helping them get dressed for school.

January 15, 2012

Welcome back to the Puffin’s nest. We have all returned from the holiday break and are back in the swing of things again. We have welcomed two new students to our classroom, Nurai and Ryan. It has been a rather smooth transition period helping our new friends become acclimated to the classroom. We attribute this to the wonderful independence we have all been developing since we began our Montessori journey. Let’s take look at that development for a bit.

The first thing I think of is lessons in Care of Self. We have all been working hard learning to put on our own shoes when we arrive in the morning as well as hang our coats and bags in the correct place by ourselves. Getting ready to go outside was easy in the nice weather at the beginning of the year but it was a challenge for some of us once the cold, wet weather came along. Those snow pants, boots and mittens (forget the gloves!!!) were tough at first, but we have it down now.  Why did we manage to accomplish these difficult tasks? Because we were given guidance and  the time to do it for ourselves.  It might be faster and easier if the teacher did it for us but what do we learn from that?

Another area of Independence is practiced with lessons in Care of the Environment. We have learned how to scrub the tables and floor, dust the shelves, water the plants, even use the carpet sweeper. And, we are free to do these works whenever we feel the need.

A big task we do that combines care of self and care of environment is snack and lunch. We have learned how to set up our own snack and lunch and then clean it all up afterwards. If we spill, it is okay because we know how to clean it up. We have learned to wash and dry our trays, sweep the crumbs, pack away the things that go back home and sort the trash from the compost. Lunch is mostly a peaceful time because we have learned (mostly) how to converse with each other at our tables and express our opinions about what is okay and what is not. This is learned through Grace and Courtesy lessons.

Many of our Grace and Courtesy lessons happen at class meeting where we have talked a lot about respect. It seems learning respect helps us to become independent. Think about it, if we respect our self, we will want to take care of our self and if we respect our environment, we will want to take care of it also. And so, if we know how to do something and we have the desire to do something, we will likely do that thing on our own as long as we have been encouraged to do things for ourselves by being allowed to do those things by ourselves.

So, the good news is, with many of us being so delightfully independent, our teachers have been able to help our new classmates on their journey toward independence.

Note to parents: Please think about independence when you pack your child’s lunch and when helping them get dressed for school.

Reminder: It is cold out there and we do go outside so please send hats, snow pants, winter boots and mittens.

December 2011

In this busy season, we are continuing our study of holidays around the world. We just finished having fun with Santa Lucia Day. This holiday took us to two places in Europe. It is an interesting holiday celebrated way up in northern Europe but it is about a young lady from Italy.  We discovered that this holiday not only leads up to our celebrations of light but also relates to our food drive. Food drive? How is that, you might ask. Well, the legend speaks of a young lady who brought food to poor persecuted Christians hiding in the hills of Rome. She wore candles on her head to light her way into the dark hills to deliver the food.  Because she was a Christian she was betrayed and burned at the stake for her kindness to the poor. The legend goes on to suggest that when a famine hit an area of Sweden one winter long ago, a glowing ship arrived with food for the starving people. A young lady wearing a gleaming white gown and glowing beams of light around her head was at the helm of the ship and carried the food to the people.  This young lady named Lucia is honored each year for her dedication to others in need.  You see the connection now?  And, just so you know, our food drive is continuing throughout next week….be an angel and share some joy.

There is not much time till our holiday break and we still have Duwali, Saint Nicholas Day, Chanukah and Christmas to learn about. We better get cracking! An important thing we need to remember about these holidays is that they are stories that some people around the world believe and celebrate.  We are not celebrating the holidays but are enjoying learning about them and the areas of the world where they are celebrated.  

We are using this holiday season to practice our patterning skills. We are making red, green and white paper chains and many colors of candy canes. We are also combining some of our sensorial materials to make patterns.  It is so fun to watch the red and green knobless cylinders get carefully stacked up tall. So, what are patterning skills and why are they important? Good questions!  They can be defined as “the ability to copy, extend, and create a model or design.” And it is an important skill because it helps to build higher-level thinking skills. To extend a pattern, we must first discover the already existing pattern and then figure out what will come next. This level of thinking is analysis. This requires a great deal of thought! Creating an original pattern requires even higher level thinking, namely synthesis; this is much more difficult than just remembering something. Patterning is a great way for us to develop strong thinking and problem-solving skills. It also helps us to develop a strong foundation for mathematics.  And, well, patterns can be very aesthetically pleasing, don’t you think?

Happy Holidays!

November 30th

Greetings from the Puffin’s Nest.  We hope everyone had a happy, healthy holiday! We sure had fun with the inspiration the Thanksgiving holiday gave us. We used Thanksgiving to introduce our study of nutrition and our community service project. Ms. Murray brought in examples of her favorite Thanksgiving feast foods which we classified into the food groups according to the food pyramid.  We saw that there are many fruits and vegetables that are part of her feast and decided that is a good thing. We read about the first Thanksgiving and realized that they had a hard life and how they were grateful to be alive and grateful for the help they received from the Native Americans. We then talked about what we are thankful for and decided we are all thankful that we have family, friends, pets and healthy food to eat.  We learned that there are many people in the world, far away and very close to us, that do not have enough food to eat and talked about the Puffin community service project.  We will be collecting nonperishable food items from each of the groups as we study that food group. The food will be given to a local food pantry. This is how it works; we have a food pyramid in our entry way which we will use to display our food items and as an item is brought in, we will write the name of the item on paper and hang it in the correct place on our food pyramid. All the while we will be talking about how good those foods are for our bodies! We are hoping each of us will bring at least one item from each food group. It would be fun to bring one item each week to keep the fun and learning going all the way till our next holiday break! 

We have also been progressing rapidly in our math area. Several of us have begun the process of Addition for Memorization. The first step in this process has us revisit the number rods looking for all the combinations of rods that add up to ten. We do this with just the rods (the quantity) first then add the numeral cards (the symbols) and introduce writing the equation using the plus and equal signs.  This material has us matching the combination of rods to the ten rod and counting it to make sure. This is very hands on and concrete. Next, we move on to the same process with the bead stair. Here we use two sets of bead stairs, one set up from 1 to 9 and one from 9 to 1. In an orderly manner, we put together one from the first stair and one from the second stair and count them using our finger in 1:1 correspondence. If we do it correctly, each pair adds up to ten. How fun! We can then explore other combinations and see what they add up too…even more fun! After working with this material we move on to the Addition Strip Board. This is getting a bit more abstract because it is more visual and less tactile. Pretty soon we will be able to start playing the Snake Game!!! Maybe we should introduce reptiles in our cultural are soon?

Oh, almost forgot, we learned about Trung Thu this week. It is a holiday celebrated in Viet Nam. This is the beginning of our Festival of Lights holiday study. This holiday is celebrating the harvest moon. We had such fun making moon masks and pretending to be at the festival. We hope you all enjoy the upcoming holiday season.

Important Reminders:  Please see your teacher before you leave school so they know you have been picked up.  And please be sure to have hats, mittens (better than gloves!) boots and warm jackets as we love to play outside.  

Peace!

November 15, 2011

Well, as promised we have begun combining our cultural area with our language arts area. We have started using story writing paper to write stories about birds. At first the stories were all just telling facts that we know about birds. So, we had a lesson about the difference between fact and fiction. We read a science book about Humming Birds that talked about its nest and eggs and feeding the babies. We learned that this is a factual book full of good information that was true but not really a story. Then we read a book about a lonesome Loon. This was a story that had a sequence and could have happened but was not told as truth. A few of us have begun writing fiction stories about birds. We will soon look at a bird book that is just plain silly, not truth at all but fun to read. We will look forward to the stories that are written in class after we read that.

We are also going to use our study of birds to introduce the topic of nutrition. And, of course, to do that, we have put up a bird feeder. We thought it would be fun to put the feeder outside Skittles’ window so he could have some bird company to talk to.  We will talk about the different kinds of food the birds eat and the beaks that are needed to eat that kind of food. When we first introduced the topic of living things, we talked about what all living things need and one of those was food. We will revisit this idea and compare what birds eat to what humans eat. With Thanksgiving fast approaching, we will introduce the food pyramid and look at how the Thanksgiving Feast fulfills the human nutritional needs according to the pyramid. And, as a community service project, we will be bringing in nonperishable examples of each food group and then donate it all to a local food bank.

As mentioned before, in science, we have been looking at our decomposing pumpkin. We have seen a distinct difference between the half with holes in the bag that allow air in and the one that has no air. We used our powers of observation and talked about describing words. We used words like “fluffy”, “slimy”, “squishy” as well as color words. We saw that the pumpkin with air has turned all black and looks slimy while the one without air is white and fluffy. We then noticed that our jack-o-lantern was doing the same thing only both in different places. Hmmm…I wonder why? After sharing our describing words about the jack-o-lantern, we drew pictures of our “orange, black and white, slimy, squishy, sinking” jock-o-lantern and then wrote about what was happening. We all agreed that the pumpkin would become soil in the end. And since it was starting to stink a bit, we put it in our compost pile to let it do just that.

One beautiful day last week, we thought it would be fun to go outside in the woods and listen to the sounds of birds and practice our listening skills.  Well, we got out there and the birds were just not talking that day! So, we decided not to waste our trip in the woods and explored the woods with all of our senses one at a time. We looked closely for the holes in the bark that allow the trunks of trees to breathe and we felt the different kinds of bark and moss. We smelled the forest and talked about why autumn smells the way it does (decomposing leaves) and then moved the leaves to see the soil beneath and, sure enough, there was a white fungus under there working on decomposing the leaves. We realized that we had used our sense of hearing, sight, touch and smell and that there was one left. So, we decided that since it was such a lovely day, we should have snack outside so we could use our sense of taste out there as well.

Wow! We have been doing some serious work in science!

October 31, 2011

We had some unusual visitors in our classroom this past week….a Golden Eagle, a Red-tailed Hawk, a Great Horned Owl and the smallest owl in Maine.  All these birds have been rescued and cared for by the good people at Wind Over Wings. One of the things we learned is that if you find a wild baby bird on the ground, you should put it in a safe place in a tree rather than take it home to care for it. One of the coolest things was when the Eagle sang to us…he does not have a very good singing voice but it was funny to watch. 

 As a result of these visitors, our class has been inspired to write about, draw and color different kinds of birds. We have a bird matching work that some of our friends labeled and then recorded the names in their writing journals.  Some of us drew pictures of our favorite bird, the Great Horned Owl while others put together crazy looking owls to hang on our tree…what fun we are having with birds!

 We also finally did our Stone Soup! We started with a lesson on Plants We Eat and which part of the plant we eat. This is a big classification work. We made it more fun by classifying the vegetables that were going into the soup. Did you know that some of the things we eat as vegetables are actually called fruits by scientists?  

Earlier, when we were just starting to classify fruits and vegetables we cut open a pumpkin to look inside. We saw all the seeds and even looked inside the seed to see if we could see the baby plant inside it. The pumpkin halves then sat on our science observation shelf so we could look at it more closely with the magnifying glass. One day one of our friends noticed something fuzzy and white all over the pumpkin halves and wanted to know what was happening. So, as with the ‘follow the child’ philosophy of Dr. Montessori, we talked about the process of decomposition that was taking place right before our eyes. Then we set up an experiment to see what would happen if one half was in a closed bag and the other was in a bag with holes to allow air in. Hmm, I wonder what will happen.

We are still happily plugging along with our math sequences. Each of us is working at our own pace through the sequence of math works that prepare us for the operations (addition, subtraction etc.). It is fun to see friends move from counting the big number rods to the little bead stair and finally begin the bead chains. It takes a great deal of fine motor coordination and concentration to do that one to one correspondence required to count and label those lovely bead chains.  

Another work that continues to be popular are the puzzle maps. And talk about needing concentration and coordination! These things take a great deal of that. They also require a sense of order since it is easy to loose some of those tiny puzzle pieces and sometimes hard to figure out where they go if you do not do it in an orderly manner. So, again, it is good for us to spend time in the practical life area where it looks like we are just playing but are actually working on concentration, coordination, order and independence.

One last activity that is growing in popularity is yoga. While this looks like fun exercise (and it is!) it also takes and builds concentration.  It is not easy to hold your body still in those animal postures. Scientists have suggested that yoga and meditation help people do better with their academic studies. And guess what, Ms. Murray is starting Yoga Zoo for children next week. It would be great to have many friends there improving their concentration and coordination.

Finally, thanks to everyone for your donations to Wind Over Wings….they were delighted by your generosity!

Peace!

October 15, 2011

Wow, have we been busy these past two weeks! We had a fabulous time at the apple orchard. We saw the fruit of a tree and how they grow on the branches. We also got to experience how they taste fresh from the tree and how they taste turned into fresh apple cider. It was fun to go into the barn to watch how they choose which apples are sold as beautiful apples and which get sent to become cider. Did I mention we got to taste freshly made cider? YUM! Some of us went into the kitchen when we got back and made apple crisp and then shared it with the whole class. That was a wonderful way to end our day at the apple orchard. Now, in our science area we are learning the names of the parts of plants and which parts of plans we can eat. Next week we are going to make stone soup….I wonder what that has to do with plants?

Two other really exciting things are happening in our class. First, we are seeing that ‘explosion in to writing’ that Dr. Montessori has described seeing in young children. She observed that when a child is ready to write they just cannot get enough of it. In the Montessori classroom there are so many works that prepare the child’s hand for that explosion. These works are found throughout the areas of our classroom wherever the ‘pincer grip’ is used to pick something up. We have a new (beautiful) writing desk and we are enjoying composing notes to friends and family as well as making books. We are making books about leaves, and living/nonliving things, butterflies and even about our puzzle maps. Some of us even have journals to write in because we write a lot and need more paper than others. With this writing, we are seeing some wonderful concentration happening and this leads to a very peaceful classroom…how nice is that!

The other really exciting thing that is happening in our class involves our peace area. We have decided to call our peace area “Peace Through Understanding” Dr. Montessori wrote about peace education and felt that if we want to have a peaceful world we have to teach the youngest members of society to be peaceful. Our plan is to learn about people around the world by studying there customs. The thought is that if we understand other people and their ways we will not fear them and the result will be peace. We have a wonderful book about celebrations around the world that we will be using to learn about and compare holidays children celebrate in other countries. We will first look at Trung Thu and Diwali that are celebrated in Asia, then we will come to North America to look at The Day of the Dead in Mexico and Halloween in Canada and the US. Oh, we are going to have fun!

Some of us had a lovely time walking in the rain and singing “If all the rain drops were lemon drops and gum drops, oh, what a rain it would be.” We would like to do this again with all our friends so we encourage you to bring rain boots and rain coats with hoods so we can all stay dry.

Finally, two quick reminders: parents are able to sign up for conferences and we are looking forward to the harvest fest at the end of the month. Our class will be making cup cakes and running a cake walk at the fair…hope you can all come!

Peace!

September 30, 2011

Greetings from the Puffin’s Nest! We have been having fun celebrating birthdays here in the Puffins Nest. Many of our youngest students have now turned three as well as one young man turning six. As preparation for their walk around the sun we have been practicing walking an imaginary line around the outside of our circle of friends. This walking develops both coordination and concentration as we do not just walk…we carry a short stack of something very carefully so it does not fall! One rainy day we decided to liven things up a bit and skip around our circle…it was a hair raising experience!

Many of us have been exploring the math and sensorial materials and there is something very helpful about these works…it is called control of error. We are learning that we do not always have to ask our teacher for help because, when our brains are ready, we can see that something is not right and are learning it is okay to explore to the materials to fix what doesn’t look right. And, boy, does it feel good when we fix it ourselves! This process is early problem solving and we find it in many areas of our classroom.

 Some of us are really getting into the moveable alphabet. This work provides a sensory experience with spelling. As we sound out a word we are able to pick up and feel the shape of the symbols for each sound we hear. We were prepared for this work through previous sensory exploration as we ran our fingers over the sand paper letters while listening to their sounds. We also had experience listening carefully picking out beginning, ending and middle sounds of a word while playing a game called “I Spy”.  We have students at several different levels of moveable alphabet; some are at the dictation level where they frequently only hear beginning and ending sounds in a word while others have progressed to choosing a topic to write about. A major explosion into topic writing happened the day of our Peace Celebration when four children all decided to write words that made them feel peaceful. Since then the topic of fall or otum has been popular as well as writing phrases. Some of the writings have been accompanied by drawings.

One of our friends that is particularly interested in the moveable alphabet has been talking to her family about what she is doing and came in to school with a new word she was proud to write.  Her topic was “words I know” and she shared that she learned the correct way to spell that meaning of the sound no from her Grandmother. It is wonderful when families share the learning experience with us children. This friend had been balking at recording her own moveable alphabet words on paper but today she eagerly wrote them and was delighted to show her words to her Grandmother when she picked her up that day. This experience affirms Dr. Montessori’s belief that children do not need rewards for their accomplishment but that the accomplishment itself can be the reward.

A really fun thing we have started is cooking!!! We have been reading Eric Carle books and one of them was about a boy and his mother making pancakes…so we decides to make pancakes too. It was such fun we have decided we will try to cook more often. As you may know, our first field trip is on Tuesday…we are going to the apple farm. So we thought we would make applesauce.  Also, we have just started learning about plants and since vegetables are plants, we are going to make vegetable soup. We may be asking some of you to send in some vegetables to help us…so pay attention to any notes that come home, please. 

And, finally, we all want to thank Drew’s Mother for helping us in the kitchen…we hope you enjoyed it and hope you will come again. 

Ms. Linda Murry and Ms. Chrissy Bellows

September 15, 2011

Greetings from the Puffin’s Nest! We have had a delightful beginning to this school year. The transition to a new teacher has gone smoothly and our new students have acclimated as if they had been here all along. We all very quickly learned the beginning practical life lessons, like pouring, sponging and scooping, so we could serve and clean up our own snack and lunch; two very important activities.  We also became independent in the art area with lessons in tearing and cutting paper, gluing and, of course, coloring. Everyone loves to color so we had coloring activities in our cultural area and writing center as well as the art area. Some of us color quietly with deep concentration while others see coloring as a social activity. Either way, we are using our hands to do the ‘good work’ of strengthening and building coordination in our hands. 

The same is true in the writing center. This area is mostly for writing letters with colored pencils but sometimes we get carried away and color with them also. We have fancy scissors that cut pretty edges on colored paper so we can make lovely notes to give to our friends and favorite people. We can also practice writing our names using tracing paper over our name cards. We are learning to write in a beautiful flowing letter style called D’nealian…it is half way between printing and cursive. We were very excited when the D’nealian moveable alphabet arrived; the pretty letters draw us to the work.

Many of us were also very interested in the math area. There are so many works with those pretty beads and so many boxes with intriguing things in them. Our younger friends have been counting spindles and rods and beans and whole herds of animals! Many of us are starting to work on our teens and early place value work while a few of our older friends have begun exploring the early works with the metric system.

And, finally, thanks to the curiosity of one of our friends and Dr. Montessori’s philosophy advising the directress to “follow the child”, we have begun our cultural studies.  We had a beautiful lesson called “Interdependence of the Universe” which was presented as a story using colored cutouts representing the three states of matter that make up our world. We saw that the sun, air and clouds are made of gases, the land is solid and the oceans, lakes and rivers (all the waters of the earth) are liquid. Isn’t it amazing that everything in our world can be classified into one of three groups!  The lesson continued with the placement of plants and animals on the land and in the air and water. We have been told there are many ways to classify the many things in our world. We are going to read and write and color and tell stories about the many things in our world this year. It sounds like it is going to be an exciting adventure this year; I cannot wait and look forward to telling you more.