This Month in Mountain Laurel Cottage...

​Mountain Laurel October Newsletter 
Fall is finally here! After many weeks of temperatures in the 90s, a sudden drop to the 30s was  quite a change! As on previous occasions, the children adapted to the change beautifully. We  spent most of our day working outdoors: lessons, follow up work, lunch, community meetings,  read aloud, etc., all happened outside. This past week was the exception, due to the rain and  low temperatures we had to work indoors for a couple of days. Everyone worked at their  individual desks/tables (unless they were siblings); we were cold and wore our many layers  inside the classroom, but it worked! we successfully embraced the cold front. You can see  pictures below.  
This month we welcomed 2 new students to our classroom: Clara and Lizzie McCay, they come  from Fox Tail and Rabbit Run (respectively), and have been a great addition to our beginning  cycle group. 
The children heard the Third Great Story: The coming of Human Beings, this opens up the  curriculum to have many exciting History Lessons. Children have been enjoying many lessons  on different areas. In Biology we have been studying the parts and needs of plants; some  students got to dissect a Lily flower, others dissected seeds and planted seeds to study the  roots, a group collected a wide variety of seeds, classified them and displayed them in what  they called “The seed observatory”. Some students are interested in learning about animals  and is always exciting to see their excitement when they learn interesting facts, like realizing  that we are mammals or finding our that mule comes from a female horse and a donkey.  
There is a variety of math work around the classroom, some students are working on addition  and subtraction, multiplication through a variety of works, fractions, multiples, squares of the  numbers, negative numbers, finding common multiples, division…etc. we are busy busy!  
In language, some students are progressing on their parts of the speech, through grammar  boxes, suffixes, prefixes, compound words, writing stories and of course reading and practicing cursive happens daily in Mountain Laurel.  
Learning about the states of the matter through different experiments, making a model volcano  erupt and learning the about the process to obtain certain goods in the story have been some of  the works in the geography area. 
In geometry some students have been enjoying doing geometric designs with metal insets and  compasses. Others are working on calculating the area of rectangles and triangles, while others  are learning about angles. 
Art has been involved in our daily activities, knitting, embroidering, crocheting, and painting  fascinate our children. We are guiding these works to make them purposefully, like showing  them drawing and painting techniques, knitting a hat or pillow, binding a book, etc.  
We closed our month with a fun Halloween party! the children decorated their trick or treat bags,  had fun discovering clues on a scavenger hunt, enjoyed telling jokes and “would you rathers”  under the shade of a tree and enjoyed dancing with friends and their stuffed animals.  
I look forward to seeing you for our Parent Teacher conferences this coming Thursday and  Friday. 
Have a safe Halloween weekend, 
Maya 



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