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This Month in the classroom… I feel like this month went by in a blink! The children act like the school year started months ago; everyone feels just at home. We have had lessons in every area of our curriculum by now, so on any given day, we see materials from all the different shelves in our room being used. In the Montessori lexicon, we say our classroom is very Cosmic. In Language, there is all sorts of follow-up work going on; children are working on the parts of speech through grammar boxes, which always start with a game, and the children look at me like, what is Miss Maya doing now? Older friends giggle, as they know what’s coming ;-). For example, I wore a crown a few days ago because I was the Queen of Grammar. We started a daily exercise to build phonemic awareness, and the children (and I) are loving it. We work on rhyming, segmenting, blending, on-set sound, etc. This is a great foundation for emerging and beginner readers. Writing is a trend in our classroom these days. There are poems, reports, and stories written daily. Through the different forms of writing, children are learning techniques on how to write a paragraph, punctuation, capitalization, and spelling. A group of full-cycle students was introduced to persuasive writing techniques, and boy are they convincing! A beautiful form of written expression is the writing of the classroom play. Two full-cycle students, Natalia and Lily, are the co-authors of the story called “Escape the Serpent.” After they wrote and edited the script, they typed it. They were so excited to type on a computer. All the students have worked so nicely on getting ready for the play. Everyone has played an essential part in the preparation. Their creativity and capacity to work collaboratively have blown me away, and I hope you all get to come and see it for yourselves. Math is a colorful and fun part of our daily life. In many Montessori materials, the category of the units is represented by the color green; the tens are represented by the color blue and the hundreds by red. The bead bars also have the same color format, from the primary to elementary. This color-coded system allows the student to understand place value, as well as the difference between families and categories in a very concrete manner. This consistency solidifies understanding and prepares the way for a smooth transition from materials to abstraction. In that order of ideas, I’m excited to share that some mid and full-cycle students are making significant progress to abstraction in long multiplication and long division. Addition and subtraction are part of the daily routine for first-year students. Many can solve long dynamic equations abstractly (without materials), and we are just in week nine. Some beginning cycle students were introduced to long multiplication through the Montessori chequerboard, and they love it. If your child tells you: “ I worked on the pegboard today,” they were finding factors and common factors of numbers. Mid and Full cycles are rocking on operations with simple fractions (same denominator). Most of them can do so abstractly or just use the materials to check their answers. In Biology, the beginning-cycle students ran an experiment to learn about the needs of plants; if you were there for Silent Journey, you probably saw it. Followed by the needs of plants, our class has been learning about the function of the stem, the roots, and the leaves. Different animals, both prehistoric and contemporary, are being studied. The students have been working with the Timeline of Life and learning about the different Eras of prehistoric life; younger friends are doing so in a very sensorial way, others are listing the different species that were present in different periods. After the Third Great Story, “The Coming of The Human Beings,” we keep advancing our history curriculum by learning about the early human beings and how they survived and adapted using their intelligence, hands, and imagination to fulfill their basic human needs. We followed by learning about our own fundamental needs. There is always a great sense of appreciation for our ancestors when we compare how our fundamental needs are so easily fulfilled compared to the early human beings. For Indigenous Day, we discussed how our continent was discovered and what that entailed for the Native Americans. Children have been learning the different types of angles, measuring angles, and understanding units of measurement, as part of our geometry curriculum. In Geography, we have been studying the Earth and its relationship to the Sun, the states of matter, and how liquids, solids, and gas particles behave. Older students have been working on Economic Geography, learning about what’s produced in different parts of the United States. Younger friends are learning the chain of production of the goods we consume. Got yarn work? Of course!!! We are knitting, finger knitting, making pom-poms, and crocheting DAILY. I go home with beautiful necklaces, bracelets, and EVEN a crown one day… It was meant to be a necklace, but it didn’t fit me, so the child asked me to wear it like a crown! So if you saw me wearing a purple piece of yarn on my forehead for dismissal, now you know it was actually a crown ;-). The children have been using their art skills to create amazing backgrounds for the classroom play. Some students have been practicing perspective drawing, using the technique of drawing a vanishing point, and their drawings are so creative and full of details. Last but not least, we welcomed a new student, Georgia Kirk, into our community this week. Georgia joined us as a beginning-cycle student. She is new to us but not to the school; she has been in Cedars since she was in Primary. We are very fortunate to have Georgia and her family join our community. What’s coming? Come see the Play: Escape the Serpent this Friday, October 29th at 2:45, followed by the Classroom Playdate
Scroll down and enjoy the photos. I’ll see you at the Play this coming Friday. Warmly Maya
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