Halloween is next week, and every Montessori student is looking forward to celebrating in school! We will, on Friday, October 29, have a full morning of special Halloween activities and treats in the Montessori classroom. While other students of St. Mary are going to put on their costumes after lunch, we want to encourage our 3 and 4 year-old students to wear their costumes to school. We have a few guidelines for costumes that we ask you to keep in mind:
* Please bear in mind that the costume should be comfortable enough for a full range of motion (sitting, standing, and for full-day students, laying down). * Please refrain from makeup, as our full day students will be eating and resting that day. *Please do not include any accessories that are "weapon-like," or extremely small, or valuable. If you care about it getting lost or broken, please don't send it in to school. *Please be mindful of our age group and do not dress your child in overly scary or gruesome costumes. *Please, if your child is a Montessori Kindergartener, send them to school in their regular clothes, and send the costume along in a bag. After they attend the regular Friday school Mass, our Kindergarten kiddos can dress up with their friends! On another note, the weather is changing. We continue to go outside, so please keep that in mind when deciding if your child needs a jacket for the day. Also, many of the extra clothes in cubbies are summer-weather outfits. We will send home these clothes to be replaced with fall or winter-weather clothing. Look for the Remind message to indicate when the extra clothes are coming home to be replaced. We are collecting so different kinds of leaves! On the playground, so many students are aware of the parts of leaves and comparing the ones they find to their friends'! If you haven't already, please bring in one special leaf tomorrow, so we can see what we've gathered! Happy Thursday, all!
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Hello again from the Montessori Children's House! October is just about half over, and we are learning about deciduous trees and their changing leaves. Our students are more comfortable than ever, choosing work on their own and getting invited to lessons by their teachers. They can find their own cubbies, "sign in" to class with their name sticks, draw and write in their journals, raise their hand to participate at circle time, serve themselves snack, and ask their teachers or each other for help when they need it. We've seen so much growth!
This week, due to a generous donation of apples to the school, each Montessori student used a hand-cranked apple peeler/corer to prepare apples for applesauce. This was a great time to talk about the importance of handwashing when handling food. It was very interesting to see how the machine worked as students turned the handle. Miss Teresa's crockpot then did the rest of the work, and the next day, we had homemade applesauce for everyone to taste. We even had two special helpers go to the office, cafeteria, and maintenance office to offer applesauce to others - a great lesson in grace and courtesy! Keep your eye out for interesting leaves over the next week! We are going to do a class-wide leaf hunt, and see how many different kinds we can collect (limit 1 special leaf per student, please!). Please bring leaves by Friday, October 22, when we will gather to sort through them and also learn about the parts of leaves. Thank you for reading! Have a great weekend! We are into our second month of school, and our students are settling in beautifully! They have had most, sometimes all, of the preliminary lessons, and are now on track to do what we call "extensions." This is a step in our lessons that encourages our students to get creative, ask questions, try a different way. Extensions encourage repetition of a lesson without having to do the exact same process over again. And repetition can help build mastery of skills. This week, the four- and five-year-olds are beginning to journal every morning. It will be the first classroom work they do. The journal topic is drawn and written on the board, and our students copy it as much as they can. If they can write their name, we ask them to write it on the page with their drawing. If they can copy the word(s), we ask them to do that. If they can write the date, we ask that they copy the date. If a student can do all that, we might ask them to compose a sentence of their choosing about the journal topic. This is important writing practice, from pencil control, to letter formation, to organization of thoughts. The teachers use this time to assess where each student is when it comes to penmanship and fine motor control. The photo below is our journal topic for tomorrow, which Miss Teresa drew at morning circle. Watching a teacher (try to) draw is also a good lesson in doing your best, even if it's not as perfect as you'd like it to be! Last week, we culminated our apple unit by having an apple tasting. Split into two groups, our students tasted a piece of Macintosh, Red Delicious, and Ginger Gold apples, then voted on their favorites. Both groups decided that Red Delicious was the overall favorite! This exercise helped us learn about eating manners, waiting to take a turn, and of course, counting and comparison of numbers! On a final note, we are aware that it is runny nose season, and we are stocked up on tissues to accommodate our students. Please, if your child has a runny nose, and no other symptoms to impede them from coming to school, send in extra masks. Once they are wet, masks are uncomfortable and ineffective. Thank you for your help!
This coming month, we will be learning about deciduous trees and how they change in the Fall, parts of leaves, and our animal focus is on mammals. |
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Ms. Teresa is just one of the three fantastic teachers in St. Mary's Montessori Children's House! |