Hi Everyone,

This week, the kids enjoyed staying warm  and cozy as we stayed indoors on most days due to the cold and rainy weather.  We made sure to do some yoga exercises and sometimes we’d even offer a kids hip hop tutorial video for anyone interested during work cycle to keep active.

Hip Hop Dancin

LANGUAGE

Singing Exercises with Beginning Sounds and Phonograms

The kids especially enjoyed singing scales this week as we have everyone learning double letter sounds at this point, and many of them (even the younger ones) are beginning to remember what sounds like “sh” and “ee” make.  Everyone has been asking to do more of this lately, so we continue to let kids take turns and pick two sandpaper letters off of the shelf to see what happens when we read those letters side by side.

Small Group Lessons for Beginner Readers

Some of our older kids, especially the kindergarteners are working on reading and writing the words from a beginning readers book called “Sam and the Rods,” which comes from a Montessori series called “The Peacekeepers Series.”

SENSORIAL LESSONS

Thermic Tablets

The kids have been having a blast with the Montessori Thermic Tablets, a work that helps build awareness of temperature.  This work typically contains six pairs of tablets, each of different substances such as wool, cork, quartz, steel, wood, and glass.  The children learn to “feel the temperature” of each tablet, and match each tablet to its pair.  Many children prefer to do this blindfolded.  Some kids are even beginning to place the tablets from the “warmest” to the “coldest.”  While we haven’t introduced terms like heat conductors (such as metals) and insulators (such as wood or cork), we plan to start discussing some fun science facts once they’ve all had a chance to work with the tablets.

HEALTH

We focused a lot on eating healthy this week, especially emphasizing the benefits to fruits and vegetables.  We read some books showing the digestive system when eating healthy food and too much not-so-healthy food.  We also discussed a couple video clips including one on high fructose corn syrup that everyone especially responded to as they all had questions afterward.  Here is the video, for anyone who wants a lesson: Video on Bad Sugars

VISITORS THIS WEEK

This week, Owen came to visit again when his school was out on Friday.  We also had another friend join us named Iris.  Most of the kids already know Iris as she attends the after school program over at Wonderland.  She fit right into the Montessori swing of things on Friday as well.

CELEBRATIONS OF LIFE

Linnea’s mom recently joined us for Linnea’s celebration of life, which was a very special day for her.

Just for everyone’s information, we have made it past the months of overlapping birthdays, so we are are pretty open to having more celebrations of life on whatever day works for you.  If your child has not had a celebration of life, please let us know if there is a day within the next couple months that would work for you.  Ideally, we would like to have celebrations on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays at 9:45a.m.  The celebration lasts about 15 minutes, and afterwards you are free to go or stick around for another 15 minutes during the work cycle.

And last but not least, below are some images of kids staying productive during work cycles.  I hope you all had a wonderful weekend!