Dear Parents,

As the kids stayed busy during this week’s work cycles, Carrie and Angelique started taking turns documenting each child by sitting down one-to-one and testing them on what letter sounds and names they know, what numbers they recognize and what colors they are familiar with.  This especially concerns our older students to help in the preparation of kindergarten, but we also document our younger students as they are all exposed to the same material and often show interest early on.  If your child continues to stay in Montessori, it is most important that they start becoming familiar with letter sounds before knowing the names of the letters, since word building with phonics is presented early on.  We will follow up with all of you on areas that we are working on with your child during our parent teacher conferences that happen near the end of this month (beginning on Wednesday, October 23rd).  We will be posting time slots for you to sign up for parent teacher conferences sometime within the next two weeks.  All in all, each student this year is showing progress in letter sounds and number recognition, and we look forward to sharing more positive information with each of you during our meetings.

Carrie working one to one with Waylen

New Material

Last Friday on our teacher work day, we added material in areas where children have been showing interest, especially in math, language and our botany areas.  We tried to stick with a seasonal theme in these areas.  Many children were found exploring our Fall basket, using the 3 part cards that teach about the life cycle of a pumpkin, and sequencing cards that show the process of cutting open a pumpkin, taking out the seeds, and then cutting a face to make a jack-o-lantern.  They also enjoyed a basket of colorful gourds at the nature table and several kids had fun counting with festive objects in our math area.

Art & Language

In general, all of our students are interested in some form of art this year, particularly with chalk, dry erase boards and markers, metal insets, creating story books, and cutting snippets of paper.  These interests will truly benefit our students when it comes to writing.  As each child gets lost in their drawing and doodling, they build coordination to properly hold their markers, crayons, pencils, etc., and begin gaining better control as to where they make their marks.  Many of the younger students are often found using chalk boards during the work cycles, and several of our older students started writing in journals.

This week, we offered some homemade story booklets with 3 letter words to trace along with imagery to go with the words (such as dog, bus, and sun) for our students to color.  We left some blank pages in between each word and image for those children interested in story telling, so that they could draw their own pictures to link the imagery together.  Needless to say, several of them came up with some pretty interesting and funny stories.  For example, one short story that a child came up with included a pig that took a bus to go visit her other “pig friends.”  We must admit, we have a very creative group of kids and we have a lot of fun listening to everyone’s ideas, thoughts, and input.

Just For Fun

A finger painting station was offered this week.  The first step was to finger paint a plastic cutting board followed by taking a white sheet of paper and pressing it on the painted board.  The last step was to peal the paper away to reveal a work of art.

Step one with Beckett:  Finger painting a cutting board

Colin dips his fingers in water to clean them off before pressing his paper.

Transition Periods

Each day this week, we offered children something different during transitions, particularly after lunch.  While everyone eats and cleans up their lunches at a different pace, we like to offer things to do while waiting for everyone to finish up.  One day, we had an art project laid out and encouraged kids to draw a place that they would travel to if they were to take a jet plane to get there (inspired by one of their favorite songs to sing– Leaving on a Jet Plane).  Another day, they watched part of an episode of Sid the Science Kid which really had their attention.  One day, we offered magazines and encouraged the kids to circle things they liked in the magazine, and books were offered on other days.  Changing things up has helped keep transitions smooth and enjoyable.

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So that pretty much covers everything we’ve been up to this week.  We hope that that our information is helpful and that our posts also help you with communicating to your child about the week.  We will leave you with some recent photos during work cycles.

Have a good one!

Carrie & Angelique