This week in Mountain Laurel Cottage...

Mountain Laurel August - September 

Back to School We are off to a great start this year; the new students have adjusted and blended with the returning students beautifully! We played fun games to build community and learn each other’s names.       After orientation days, the children were so ready to learn and explore new lessons and materials. The returning students took pride in showing new friends how to finger knit, and beautiful necklaces, bracelets, and scarfs are being made weekly. It was great to see the children’s eagerness to get their hands into materials and work from day one; for example a group of students started a research about Egypt their very first day back to school.      Children were amazed by the First Great Story: The Coming of the Universe. They especially enjoyed the erupting volcano. Some returning students love this story so much that they joined the audience with their new friends. The First Great Story has been followed by many geography lessons about the states of the matter, the laws that the different particles follow, as well as lessons about the composition of the Earth. Some students were so inspired by these lessons that a great discussion arose during lunch one day about the force of gravity. We ended up having a lesson about the Force of Attraction in the middle of lunch. It was wonderful to see all the children involved fascinated by the idea of magnetism and gravity.  The Second Great Story: the story of The Coming of Life was enjoyed by new and returning students. Following this story, I presented the Timeline of Life where children learned the different forms of life; from single celled organisms to animals with shells, to plants and dinosaurs, among others, until the coming of human beings.  We have a great microscope in the classroom this year. Many students looked at fossils or organisms from the Timeline of Life under the microscope and were absolutely amazed. The microscope is definitely a big hit this year, children enjoy finding specimens on the playground to analyze, and this has inspired children to research different animals. A group of students received the lesson on the parts of the flower and were in awe to see the eggs in the female part of Lily Flower.      In the language curriculum, new students are progressing in their reading and cursive writing skills. Everybody is learning cursive smoothly and understanding the different parts of speech through grammar boxes; a few started working already in suffixes. Returning students have been working on Sentence Analysis, grammar boxes, spelling, synonyms, antonyms, homographs, and homonyms. A group of students working on Homonyms decided to follow up by drawing the different meanings of one word. After that, about a week later, I overheard them playing at recess, and one friend told another to go on the Monkey bars, and the friend stopped and said: “wait I just found another homonym: bar. Monkey Bar, Chocolate Bar, and the Bar adults go to” :-) I really enjoy it when they keep making connections. Math and Geometry are always happening somewhere in Mountain Laurel; children are working on addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, fractions, lines, angles, geometric design, multiples, factors… and the best part is they all love it! I found a geometric design made with a compass, and in different parts of the design, the child wrote math operations and a note: I love Math.  Art is also flowing in our classroom; we read Van Gogh’s history the first few days of school. Music is always playing in the classroom, children have received lessons with the Tone Bars, as well as rhythm lessons with the different musical instruments we have in the classroom. In History, we learned about the Constitution. New students were fascinated by the third Great Story: The Coming of the Human Beings; we will continue with the study of Early Human Beings and US History next month. New students are practicing reading an analog clock and loving it. If  you have an analog clock at home, now you have a helper to go tell you what time it is ;-)
What’s coming next…
On September 30th and October 1st, the full cycle students will have special activities in lieu of the traditional third year Fall Campout. 
October 8th Silent Journey - Book your babysitter or choose which parent will attend but you don’t want to miss this amazing opportunity to experience and understand the Montessori curriculum and sequence from Primary to Upper Elementary.  Please remember is early dismissal (noon) that day.
October 11th no school for the children
Save the date October 29th Classroom Play; the students decided to write and perform a play. Two full cycle students are writing the script, they have volunteer students to perform and everybody is passing their ideas to the script writers. Please know that this is 100% student run, I will guide them and support them as much as possible without interfering in their leadership and managing skills. Some students unsuccessfully tried this last year, hopefully we will have success this year. Stay tuned for more information as the date approaches.
If you haven’t signed up to bring flowers you can do so here
If you would like to donate any materials for the classroom from our Amazon Wish list you can here is the link.
Thanks for trusting your children to us, it is a true honor and joy to see them grow, learn and have fun while doing it!
Warmly,
Maya