This month in Mountain Laurel Cottage...

Mountain Laurel  October Newsletter

This Month in the classroom…
    October was a fun and busy month in our classroom. So many new lessons, so many new accomplishments for our kiddos, our first going outs and the first cooking experience in many years! Add to that Silent Journey and ending with Parent - Teacher Conferences.
   It was really good meeting with you all to look at your kiddos work and to discuss the next steps for them.
    In language, many beginning cycle students are enjoying learning new parts of speech through the grammar boxes. They started the word study as well, with Suffixes. Mid and full cycle students are writing amazing persuasive letters, interesting reports on different US States and animals. Others are writing very creative stories and descriptive paragraphs. 
    In math, some students continue their journey into abstraction, and are able to do different operations without materials. Everytime they master a level they feel so proud and want to continue to the next level. This is true for beginning cycles learning addition and subtraction, for mid cycles getting new lessons that involve both materials and pencil and paper, and for full cycles working on long division and long multiplication just on paper. 
    In geometry, a group of students are so excited to calculate the area of different surfaces. When I introduced them to the area of the parallelogram, some students asked to go to the Primary playground because they remember seeing parallelograms there when they were tiny. It was very impressive to see them go directly to the spot they had in their memory. 
    We have had some very cool science, biology and history lessons. I’m sure you heard about the lesson about how liquids flow sideways and downward because they all loved it! Or about them applying force to break solids.
    They all have had fun working on an art piece that we will auction at the Fall Fandango! It’s going to be beautiful!
    The school t-shirts were a great hit, but Mountain Laurel students are hoodie lovers, so a group of students wrote a persuasive letter to our school director, Roxy Young-Grein, asking her to please order hoodies. We took a picture of almost all of us wearing a hoodie, and sent it to her with the letter :-) 

What’s coming?
​
Fall Fandango Nov. 17th  
Get your tickets here for one of the funnest events of the year!!! Children love Fall Fandango; the students that have been at Cedars since before the pandemic still remember going there and having so much fun! This year it is so close to us, at everyone’s beloved Graceland (Metcalf BBQ) and we will have the entire place just for us. 

Thanksgiving Break No School Nov 21st-25th


Ways to help our classroom

• We need volunteer drivers for our Going Outs, please let us know your availability here
• Please sign up here to bring Flowers at LEAST once during the school year
• Donations from the Classroom Amazon Wish list

Thank you for sharing your children with us, 
Warmly
Maya and Claire