This month in Mountain Laurel Cottage...

What’s next

March 10th - Field trip to Westcave Preserve
We are going on a hike as a class. If you would like to drive and/or Chaperone, please email me back. If we get more volunteers than we need, we will go on “First come, first serve mode”. We will email details on drivers and times once the date approaches. Please click on the link to sign the students permission to attend. 

March 13th - March 20th 2023 Spring Break - Have fun and we will see you on Tuesday March 21st. 

If you would like to look at the pictures from February please click here

Please come observe our classroom, it is always a rewarding experience! Click here to signup. 

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February went by fast, from freezing rain to flowers blowing around campus. The Student Led tours were a big highlight of this month! Having so many of you in the classroom was lovely. I enjoyed seeing the children’s expressions of excitement and ownership of their classroom.

In Math, we continue to advance to abstraction in every operation. Many students are working on long multiplication through different materials, so if you hear your child mention the Chequerboard, Large Bead Frame, or Geometric Multiplication, those are different ways to practice and learn long multiplication. Others are working on long division through Racks and Tubes or the Stamp Game. In the elementary classroom, children learn with repetition through variety. They practice using many different manipulatives, and we gradually start integrating the abstract aspect of the operations. So, when they are ready, and I introduce them to working the operations abstractly (just on paper), everything comes naturally to them. In addition to the regular math operations, new cycle students were introduced to fractions this month. Returning students were introduced to how to interpret and build graphs. As always, the children’s creativity never ceases to amaze me; they have come up with many interesting ideas for the type of data they like to graph. 
In Geometry, there has been a lot of progress with angles. New students have practiced learning all the different types of angles. Some made booklets. Others left post-it notes identifying angles all over the classroom ;-). Mid and full-cycles students are building and measuring angles and now adding and subtracting angles. Full-cycles are also working with polygons.

In Geography, we have had a variety of lessons, from understanding how the rays of the sun hit the earth stronger by the equator and lesser by the poles; to working with a model of the River and learning how rivers are formed, all the different parts of a river, and how sedimentary rocks are formed. We did experiments to show them how air takes up space, and that warm air moves up. Many understood why global warming is causing ice storms like the one we had at the beginning of the month.

In Biology, we have been learning about the work of the leaves, the stem, and the flower. All new students got to dissect a flower and even looked at the flower's eggs under the microscope. Our garden keeps blooming, and Ms. Lacey and the kids have a wonderful time planting and harvesting our little sprouts. 

In language, the older students have been writing amazing stories, poems, and reports. This month some students were introduced to sensory writing, and some of their pieces really transport you to delicious food or to feel the forces of nature. One of the full-cycle students wrote a baby book about the senses, and she calls it her first book. I don’t doubt she’ll be a writer someday. Younger students continue to work on the parts of the speech trough the grammar boxes. We are also advancing in the word study curriculum, they have been having fun learning homonyms, synonyms and antonyms, as well as finding compound words. We continue to do our phonemic awareness exercises. During read-aloud we finished and enjoyed Alice in Wonderland, so we will start a new book in March. 
In Arts, many students finished their amazing knitting projects, and others are following up on geometry lessons by embroidering different polygons. I also taught some students how to draw a sphere and I was impressed with their follow-up work (look at the pictures).
There are many going outs weekly, to HEB, the public library, the pet store… Yes!, some students are researching to get the classroom a pet fish. Please let us know if you can volunteer  to be a driver, we love our volunteers and we feel we are demanding so much of them because we only have a few. 

Ways to help our classroom

• Please sign up here to bring Flowers at LEAST once during the school year
• Donations from the Classroom Amazon Wish list

Thanks for sharing your children with us. Happy March!

Maya and Claire

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