Dear Parents,

We are totally on schedule with the kids settling into the routine of the school year. It’s terribly helpful that we don’t have a single outsider this year, i.e., everyone has been at Indigo for at least a year! Some kids in our studio have been at Indigo since they were infants! Needless to say, it’s so very special as a teacher to be able to work with a child for so long and see them grow over the years. Someone recently asked me, “what’s your favorite thing about teaching Montessori?” I probably could have gone on and on with so many reasons, but I was naturally quick to answer, “it’s so rewarding to see children grow and progress through a variety of creative tasks, activities and challenges, and it’s fulfilling to catch them in a moment where they feel accomplished over their new abilities.” Every day your child is making a little accomplishment. When we gather for a circle time just before lunch and at the end of the day, and as I dismiss each child to go line up, I try to quickly mention one of those little moments where I observed your child making an accomplishment. For example, “(Child’s name), I noticed you finished that complex puzzle today!” or “you worked so well as a team with so and so,” or “thank you for taking such great care of the environment by organizing the practical life area,” etc. Focusing on the positive events of the day is a great way for the kids to reflect on their own accomplishments, and we hope that they feel a little more confident about their own abilities. We’re really proud of all of our students this year, and we are delighted to see them settling in and showing care and respect for their environment.

Today’s blog will be a little more detailed, especially to help our new parents to catch up on how the Primary class functions and to let you all know how the flow of the classroom is going thus far. If you’ve heard it before, just scroll on through and thanks for your patience!

Practical Life Basics

Work Cycle Snack Time

First off, I want to thank all of you for agreeing to purchase snacks as I realize it’s a big task. In an ideal world, we would hope that you are able to include your child to help out at the grocery store, so that they feel like they too are contributing to our classroom. We realize that’s not always easy or possible, and regardless, we always acknowledge and thank that child (and their family) during circle time at the beginning of the week for providing us with snacks for the week.

Self Serve Station

During work cycles, each child will have the opportunity to prepare their own snack place by self serving. They have been taught to follow several steps, including choosing and counting out the number of snacks offered per serving, pouring water into their own glass, and cleaning up after themselves. We have five seats available for children to have snack, and an assistant teacher is monitoring the area to make sure it stays clean, to guide kids who might need a little help, and to be sure that every child has had the opportunity to have snack.

FYI: Between you and me, an assistant teacher rewashes the dishes later that day, just to be sure they are extra clean 😉

Practical Life Works

The practical life area is the area where our youngest ones are most familiar with, and for the first week of school, we started out by offering the very basic material that they would recognize such as simple pouring, spooning (i.e., scooping with spoons ;-), and tonging activities. Now that they have had some practice in those areas, I have switched out these works to offer more challenging extensions such as sorting tiny objects by color with tongs, works to practice pouring water evenly into several tiny cups, using a tiny spoon to balance and sort different sized marbles into dishes, and so forth. Your child has had thorough lessons on utilizing this material. Every week and a half, this material is changed out and refreshed with a variety of activities to help work your child’s fine motor skills. We see great progress in our students’ coordination, patience, concentration, and ability to find order after repeatedly practicing this material.

Handling Sharp Objects

After thorough lessons on safety with sharp objects, we offer works such as “pin poking,” using tacks, nails, and sewing needles. Since most children are not “allowed” to handle sharp objects outside of school, they feel very privileged and take these lessons very seriously. Utilizing tiny sharp objects such as pins and needles is a great way to rapidly build fine motor skills in the fingers as a child will naturally handle this material in the pincer grip, which will ultimately help them to build coordination to hold a pencil for writing. Our older students who are already holding their pencil in this way continue to benefit with this material as they are now working to sharpen their writing and drawing skills.

As you can see, we do best to get creative with this material by collecting random objects such as little bowls, beads, and colorful pins, in hopes that the details in the material will catch the attention of your child. The practical life area is a fun and inventive area to prepare for any Montessori teacher.

Plant Care

We’ve had lessons on the parts of a plant by taking a plant out of it’s pot to show the roots and soil, and now they are caring for the plants in the classroom. To avoid overwatering, we offer spray bottles to mist the plants, also making for a challenging activity to press the misting spray top in the right direction! So far, so good!

Sensorial Area

The sensorial area offers a variety of material with countless lessons and extensions that keep your child busy as they practice isolating their senses. During lessons, we teach vocabulary terms to help your child begin to notice detail and order.

Blindfolds

Blindfolds are a great way to isolate the senses to help focus on matching various textures, weights, sizes, and temperatures of material. Children are welcome to use blindfolds on nearly all of the sensorial material, and they just love working with a peer to take turns helping each other to place the material in each other’s hands.

Language

Story Booklets

It’s possible that you’ve seen your child bring home a little stapled “book” that has random imagery with letters to trace for beginning sounds. In Montessori, we are discouraged from “cookie cutter art,” however tracing and coloring activities are very important. I have found some useful ways to use imagery that children can add to or begin to tell their own story by thinking “out of the box.” I’ve been drawing up random images for years (in fact, I have thick binders of activity sheets and booklets that I should probably consider sharing with other teachers one day), and I try to mix them up every time I put these booklets together. I try to make sure that the books are put together different orders, even if an image is repeated (which is done on purpose for practice on recognizing site words and beginning sounds), and a child has the opportunity to link the images together by adding their own personal elements. These booklets are especially beneficial for older students who have had plenty of practice sequencing and writing. If your child is 4-5 years old, be sure to ask them what their story is about. We teachers usually encourage them to check in with us when they are finished to tell their story from the beginning to the end, a great opportunity for them to share their creative ideas. Younger students also benefit as they practice tracing and/or coloring within the lines. Coloring within the lines for new students usually starts with with scribbles that begin to take shape and grow more dense. It’s neat to see the gradual progress in each child’s coloring, drawing, tracing and writing skills over the months that they are at Indigo.

There is a long list of activities that we present in these subject areas, but I want to make sure that I cover some other important topics. Stay tuned for the next blog as I will try to cover more subject areas!

Celebrations of Life

We offer a “Celebration of Life” in our Montessori Studio, a special day at school where we focus on one child during a circle time to celebrate their journey from their birth to present day. If you have never heard of this before, feel free to read this link: Celebration of Life  or read it later, located the Extra Extra section on the home page.

Devereux’s Celebration of Life

Devereux was our first child to start the celebrations off this year, and also happens to be one of our oldest students. We have added some extra photos below to share his special day and to give our new parents an idea of how a celebration typically looks like.

On celebration days, we have a group time family style snack directly following the celebration. It’s a nice way to end the celebration, since parents get the opportunity to chat with their child before goodbyes.

If you are a new parent, I like to clarify each year that you need not be concerned if your child isn’t featured in a post. If you notice that a child seems to be featured more than another child, it’s for explanation and educational purposes only. I have a lot of photos to sort through and I tend to pick an image that will best explain a lesson, idea, etc.  Devereux happened to have the first Celebration of Life of the school year, and I wanted to give you an idea of how your child’s celebration will look. I promise, I have many more photos of your child than what is shared on the blog and I like to save extras for discussion when we meet for conferences. I have 29 kids to keep track of and I literally go through a check list to make sure that I have shared photos of your child at least 3 times somewhere throughout the post.

Older Kids Teaching Younger Kids

As you’ve probably figured out by now that one of the benefits in having multi-ages in a Montessori environment is that the senior kids get the opportunity to be leaders and teach lessons that they are very familiar with, since they have seen the way I teach lessons over and over again. This feels like a great privilege to our older students to be “little teachers” and they are very careful to be respectful and helpful as they teach our younger students. Plus, it helps the younger ones to feel more comfortable and welcome in their environment.

Music Time!

We’ve got a lot of great little singers in the studio. I love to teach them some basic scales to warm up their voices followed by songs that tell a story… if you are a new parent you can learn more about my approach by reading this link or read it later under Music Education with Angelique located in the Extra Extra section.

More Photos from Work Cycles

Thanks for reading along. Here are some more photos of your sweet children. I hope you enjoy!