Hello Everyone!

Though it was a short school week, we still managed to teach new lessons and had some productive work cycles.  The kids especially seemed interested in some of our new math material.  We also welcomed a new student…

This week, we welcomed Ellie to the studio.  She visited last week and is already adjusting well to her new environment.  Needless to say, our students have enjoyed showing her around and teaching her about different materials.  Welcome, Ellie!

Lessons Introducing Fractions

A Montessori work called the Wooden Fraction Skittles is a great tool that helps kids to start understanding fractions before learning about the term or how fractions look on paper in an equation. This material includes four large wooden skittles representing divisors of 1 whole, 1/2, 1/3, and 1/4.  In the near future, we will be adding the fractions on paper to match up with each Skittle.  After presenting the material, many kids have enjoyed learning how these pieces come together and create a whole skittle.  If you are curious how this is presented at first, here is a short video of another Montessori teacher giving the lesson: Presentation on Wooden Fraction Skittles.

Another Montessori material that was also presented this week was the Fraction Circles.  This material is presented in a similar way and goes up to 1/5.

Work Cycles, Circle Times, and Individual Lessons

This week, we had several days where kids were absent as many have still been out sick and feeling under the weather.  Since there were so few students on some days, we found it easiest to give more individual based lessons this week during work cycles.  Today, everyone seemed to be feeling better as we finally had a full house– all 19 of them!  We celebrated with music class as the kids sung some scales and favorite songs.  They also had two work cycles today, since they were really getting involved with their works and we wanted to encourage the creativity and productivity!

Most kids were found in the math area this week, since they were really enjoying the new material and extensions to older material.  Here are some more photos of kids working away in the math area.

Sensorial Material of the Week: Blindfolds.

The kids love to challenge themselves by eliminating their sense of sight with the blindfolds.  While we’ve encouraged this only a few times in the past, we are happy to see that they are taking it upon themselves to make material more challenging by using the blindfolds to really focus on their sense of touch.

We will end on sharing some more photos of various material used this week.  Enjoy and have a great weekend!

~Angelique & Carrie