Dear Parents,

The week flew by as the kids stayed busy with lessons and had many more work cycles.  During work cycles, we continue to encourage our students to go work on any material that they have been introduced to.  So far, the kids have expressed that they really enjoy this time of exploration and seem to be benefiting from a variety of “works.”

Some of you might be wondering, what exactly goes on during a work cycle?  To give you a better visual of what a work cycle looks like, we began putting together video clips of your children at work this week.  We will be presenting the clips in a short film that should last about 10 minutes or so at our open house on Tuesday, September 17th at 4:45p.m.  We think this will especially help you to understand and appreciate how constructive and enlightening the work cycles are for each child.  If you would still like to learn more in the meantime, Angelique has written an article about our work cycle, explaining what the children are often up to as well as what our intentions are as directresses.

Some of the work taught this week included placing objects on a scale to understand terms like heavier, lighter and equal, as well as a lesson on our geometry cabinet, consisting of a variety of geometric shapes.  Also presented was a thorough demonstration of hand washing and how to cut fresh flowers for flower arranging.  During our work cycles this week, our students especially enjoyed working independently with the red rods, the triangular box, our story book box, building land forms with clay, the geometry cabinet, and the spindle boxes.  A few of our older students particularly enjoyed working with the 100 Board and all ages seemed to enjoy flower arranging as our room was decorated daily with colorful arrangements of flowers on nearly every table.

We ended the week with music class, a lesson on the binomial cube, and taking turns role playing during circle time.  Some role playing topics included skits on helping others, caring for the classroom, and listening to their peers and teachers.

We will leave you with some recent photos and hope to see you soon!

~Carrie & Angelique