Dear Parents,

We hope that you all had a lovely Thanksgiving holiday with your beautiful families! Every year, as soon as conference week is over, it’s time for us teachers to prepare new lessons and follow through with offering our students new opportunities based upon our observations. It was a pleasure to meet with many of you, and we strive to keep our word on offering a variety of lessons that will help your child to grow as they are challenged in new directions.

Lesson after Lesson

At this point, each child has been exposed to countless Montessori lessons and they have been practicing new material along with extensions that require multiple steps. It’s hard to sum up every lesson in a nutshell as each day we are learning something new, but hopefully some of the photos below will put things into perspective. While we are not typically thinking about trying to capture every single lesson when we are in the moment, we hope that the following images give you an idea of the variety of topics that we’ve been covering. Share these photos with your child and let them know how proud we teachers are of them! You can see that we truly have a group of respectable listeners and participants.

Small Group & Individual Lessons 

Below are some examples of individual and small group lessons. Small group and individual lessons are happening all of the time on a daily basis during each work cycle.

All children are are joining in on small group lessons on a regular basis, and we look forward to sharing with you in the near future about what your child has personally been working on.

What This Time of the Year Looks Like in Our Studio…

Everyone is very familiar with the flow of our environment, and we are proud to say that the work cycles are long lasting and constructive periods where each child stays engaged for long periods of time, with little or no redirection. Year round, we have a number of tours scheduled for potential future parents, and these parents are always so amazed with how calm the environment feels as all of our students are working diligently on various materials. Longterm parents, you all know that at least every other year we may have up to 30 children in the studio, depending on the readiness of our preprimary students who will move up periodically throughout the school year. While that number sounds like a lot to an outsider, it feels more like 15 – 20 students in comparison to your typical preschool environment. When we tell the parents that there are currently 22 or so children in that moment during the tour, they make comments like “wow, I can’t even tell! They’re so good!” Maria Montessori taught us how to build classrooms of responsible students by combining various age groups, and without the numbers and variety of ages, this system wouldn’t work as smoothly. Our “senior students” who have been with us for years set the tone for our younger ones, providing them with opportunities as they practice teaching and working on social skills while setting a positive example. It’s a beautiful balance that happens with longterm students who know the ground rules of the classroom. And of course, with the proper guidance from teachers who practice Montessori discipline, we offer helpful lessons along the way. We cover important topics to build independence such as lessons on practical life skills, social skills, respect for self and others, and many more topics on the universe. Once this productive and safe environment is achieved, the teachers can be observers as we learn what each child is working on. During work cycles, we can also flow in and out of small groups and individual groups while many children practice working on material independently.

Practicing Responsibilities & Independence

Your children are all on a regular routine of practicing to care for themselves and their environment. We encourage you to continue self-care routines at home to keep them in practice. I always say this, but do not let them fool you – they know how to clean up after themselves! For example, each day they are consistently putting their material away neatly as everything has a special place, and they are also following many steps to clean up their lunch as they pack up their things after they have eaten.

 

Above, Anjali, Rachel, and Rowena closing up their containers after lunch

More Activities in the Studio

We realize that children are not always in the mood to share about what they did at school after a long day, but we hope that you have seen growth in general as they consume new knowledge and information on a daily basis. They are growing up so fast!

To wrap things up, we have more photos to share with you about what your child has been doing, so please share these images with your child during some quality time to get them talking about what has been going on at school. Thank you all for your support and for your hard work at home with your little ones. Comments are appreciated! It’s good to hear from you and that tells us that the blog is actively in use. Please remember that if you are looking for any advice for in the home, there are some good topics under our Extra Extra section on the blog. We hope that you are all doing well and we look forward to sharing more in detail about upcoming lessons.