The children have been very busy with their work! Some new activities out on the shelves this week:

Snowball Counters, which is a seasonal variation on our Numbers and Counters. To do this work the children put the mittens (which all have a numeral printed on them) on the mat in the correct order from 1-10. They then place the snowballs (cotton balls) under the corresponding mitten. For example the mitten with the "1" would have one snowball placed under it. The control of error is that there are 55 snowballs and if the child ends up with some left over or they do not have enough, then they know to go back and re-check their work.


Other seasonal variations on favorite activities include our winter lacing cards:


and our holiday tree at the cutting station. This has been a group effort over the last couple weeks with most everyone contributing to the decorating. This started as a basic, pencil outline of a tree and the children were provided with construction paper, scissors and glue and made a festive creation!



There has been a lot of interest in our math material lately. The Bank Game with the Golden Beads and the Golden Bead addition has been popular among our older students. For those who are not familiar (or need a refresher!) the Golden Beads are a great tool to introduce the children to the decimal system and understand unit quantities of ten, hundreds and thousands. A single bead equals one unit, ten beads strung on a wire indicates ten, one hundred is indicated by 10 bars side by side (which makes a square) and one thousand is ten one hundreds stacked on top of one another to make a cube. In our bank game the children go back and forth to the "bank" to exchange their quantities. For example if a child counts that they have 10 units, they may go to the bank to exchange them for 1 ten. If they count that they have 10 hundreds they may go to the bank to exchange them for a thousands cube. The Golden Beads and the small and large number cards allow the children to perform simple addition with really BIG numbers.





We've also been busy working with Mystery Words, making letter books, building words, doing puzzles and working with Sandpaper Letters.

During group time we've been talking and reading about different animals and which class they belong in. On Tuesday we made booklets about the life cycle of a frog and discussed that it belonged to the amphibian class and on Thursday we brainstormed a list of animals that are considered mammals. We hope to do more with animal classes after break as there seems to be a lot of interest in the subject.

We've been busy practicing for our Winter Celebration event! It will be held on Thursday, December 17th at 4pm at the Lancaster Congregational Church. The children are very excited to share the songs they have been working on.

And a few more happenings in the classroom:
(Yes, I went a little picture crazy this week)

Finally...Snow!

What a great first week in December!

We started talking about the different animal classes this week. We learned that there are six important animal classes: mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, amphibians and arthropods and we considered the different animals that belong to each class. We also learned about the parts of a fish and parts of a frog. Very interesting! We are excited to continue this in the coming weeks.

We were also very busy with stories about everyone's favorite subject: snow! We read about Snowflake Bentley who photographed snowflakes and enjoyed the story "Snow Sounds: An Onomatopoeic Story". The children had great fun making the "clank, crash, bang" sound of the plow, the "hush" sound of the snow and the "beep, beep, beep" of the school bus. We also enjoyed listening to our CD of the Polar Express.

During music we've been practicing our seasonal songs for our Winter Celebration event. On Wednesday and Thursday we were able to practice our songs with some live music! We had two special guests come in to play guitar and piano.

The children were also very busy with their work. Many children did the bank game and addition with Golden Bead material, worked with the Sandpaper Letters and Numerals, worked on building and writing words, sewed holiday buttons, used the winter/holiday lacing cards and made beautiful snowflakes with white paint against black paper.

Stone Soup

We had a nice couple days filled with Thanksgiving music, stories, projects and of course, Stone Soup! The children enjoyed cutting and washing their vegetables on Tuesday and finishing up their Thanksgiving turkey project. The children were very excited about Stone Soup on Wednesday morning, when they smelled it cooking. It turned out to be very delicious, although some children preferred eating the cheese, breads and crackers. It has been a great process this month reading through the different versions of the story, talking about sharing and community, preparing our vegetables and finally sharing Stone Soup together. Thanks to the volunteers who brought yummy food and helped serve and clean up.

I hope you all enjoyed a wonderful Thanksgiving!

Our big accomplishment this week was reading every Stone Soup story we have. While we saw the differences in them, the same lesson of sharing and community was apparent in all of the stories. We read, 'Growing Vegetable Soup' and that sparked discussion about what vegetables would go into our soup and how they would prepare them by washing and cutting.

We discussed the Thanksgiving story and read some more books about the pilgrims and the Native Americans. We've continued singing our 'Over the River and Through the Woods' song during music and we were able to read the original version of the book as well.

We've begun a new project! The Gatelys have given us a map so that we can track Tommy's dad on his ship. We made a tiny ship that we placed on our map and when we get updates from the Gatelys we read them to the children and move our ship to the new position. We were surprised to learn that the ship travels at 13.8-18.9 MPH...as one of our Kindergartners said, "That's not so fast." The children were also excited to learn that there were 300 pick-up trucks on board and helicopters land on the flight deck.

On Thursday morning the children were treated to a science experiment by Iza and began making a Thanksgiving craft with Tammy. Along with everything else, the children have been busy doing their important work!

We started talking about Thanksgiving this week by sharing some stories about the pilgrims and the native people of North America. We also read a sillier Thanksgiving story called "Over the River: A Turkey's Tale". That sparked an interest in singing, you guessed it..."Over the river and through the woods to grandmothers house we go..."

We've also been reading our Stone Soup stories. The children very much enjoy singing along to, "Some Friends to Feed" a version of Stone Soup done by Pete Seeger.

In continuing with our study of the Rainforest we made colorful rain sticks (which the children quickly re-named Rainforest sticks) which we used to make the sound of rain while we sang our Rainforest song. They turned out to work better as music shakers anyway.

On Thursday we made Rainforest friendship butterflies. The children traced their hands and then cut them out to make butterfly wings. Then they traded one of their wings with a friend and kept one for themselves. They glued them together and decorated them. Beautiful butterflies were made and the older children were so thoughtful about helping the younger ones with the tracing and cutting.

Thanks to Iza we now have a copy of, "This Land is your Land" on CD and they have enjoyed singing along with great enthusiasm during music. We also finished listening to 'Peter and the Wolf' and continued our discussion about instruments in the orchestra.

We've also been busy working with our materials. It was a great Sunnybrook week!

It is Stone Soup season! We read our first two Stone Soup stories this week and the older children explained the tradition of Stone Soup at Sunnybrook to our younger and new students (I learned a bit as well). What a great story of community and sharing. I think we will enjoy reading all our different Stone Soup versions throughout the month.

We continued our study of the Rainforest with a great new book (thank you Randalls!) called "The Rainforest Grew All Around". The book offered us some interesting Rainforest facts and allowed us to sing a new Rainforest song (sung to the tune of 'The Green Grass Grows All Around').

As a group, during circle, we have begun to explore our different phonetic sounds...starting with 'A'. We review how to write the letter (upper and lower case) , the sound it makes, we use sign language to sign it and we brainstorm different words that start with that particular letter. It has been a nice supplement to our Montessori language materials.

We have been listening to "Peter and the Wolf" during Music & Movement time. In "Peter and the Wolf" each character is represented by a different instrument of the orchestra. The children each hold an instrument card and when they hear their character they hold the card up high so we all know what instrument we are hearing. Of course it does get a bit scary when the wolf comes around.

During work time, we had a lot of math materials out. Number rods, The Tens Board, addition and subtraction activities were all popular this week. The children also worked with watercolors, letter painting/stamping and performed some puppet shows.

Sunnybrook Montessori is looking for a BIG cardboard box we can make a puppet theater out of. When the children choose to do a puppet show we pull out the couch, but another school shared a great way to make a theater from a box, fabric and paint. Let me know if you think you have something that might work.

I hope everyone had a happy Halloween! What a fun and festive week we had at Sunnybrook! We read some Halloween stories such as, "Los Gatos Black on Halloween" and visited the library for a special pumpkin-themed story hour. On Thursday the children enjoyed a special fall celebration. They painted pumpkins, did some apple stamping, played some games and enjoyed yummy snacks. Many, many thanks to the parents who were able to help set up, facilitate activites, clean up and send in goodies.

We wrapped up our George Washington studies and reviewed all of our facts we learned throughout the month. Our Friday group said goodbye to George Washington by doing some cherry tree math. Three cherries on one tree and two cherries on the other...how many if we put the cherries together? We also changed the "Noble Duke of York" song to "Brave George Washington" and sang about how he marched his men up and down and up again!

New to the shelves this week: Mystery Words! This was quite a hit with our beginning readers. The Mystery Word bowl contains tiny envelopes that correspond with our beginning reader books (also known as the blue, green, purple and red books)
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A child places the bowl and the books on a mat and then chooses an envelope. Inside the envelopes are "mystery words", words from the book a child may not have been introduced to yet. Once the child has mastered all the mystery words they are ready to read the book. Learning the words from the book before actually reading the book ensures success, builds confidence and a love of language within the child.


Fall celebration photos:

We continued our study of the rainforest this week by reading some great books. We've read about toucans, sloths and jaguars and discovered that the "roof" of the rainforest is called the canopy. We've talked mostly about tropical rainforests , but our Friday group read about a temperate rainforest in, "A North American Rainforest Scrapbook". There were lots of different and interesting species in the North American rainforest book. The picture of the banana slug was a big hit.

We also continued our study on George Washington. We know so many facts about George Washington now, we had to get out another piece of big paper so we could keep listing more. The children also enjoyed coloring the picture of George Washington crossing the Delaware River.

The cutting station has been added near the painting area. Cutting is great work for improving fine motor skills. It has been enjoyed by our younger and older students alike. The younger ones work on their cutting and pasting skills and our older ones have been busy desiging and cutting out their own creations such as hearts, apples, cats and dinosaurs.

Some of our students worked on a pin-punching activity this week. They traced around our geography maps and then pin-punched the countries/continents out. It required a lot of attention to detail and fine motor skills, not to mention patience! What a great hands-on way for children to learn geography.

Many made color and letter books this week. The letter books consist of a child choosing a letter and practicing writing different words that start with that letter and drawing a picture of the item. For example, an "A" book might picture an apple, astronaut and ant. A color book has pictures of blank color tablets and to do this work, the child takes a blank book and the colored pencils and uses one color per page to color the blank color tablet.

We enjoyed some quality outdoor time in the warmer air this week. We played with the parachute and sang the "Under my Umbrella" song, played bean bag toss and bubbles. We also collected the leaves and pine needles on the ground to make great fall collages with contact paper.

We learned a lot about fire safety this week. We had our first fire drill and a visit from the local firefighters! The firefighters had a fire safety discussion, showed the children how a firefighter looks dressed in his equipment ("you look like an alien...or a bumblebee") and invited us to tour the fire truck. Of course everyone was given a fire chief hat as well. The fire visit was a great way to conclude our family/community unit and we were able to move onto our next unit: The Rainforest! We started the unit by splitting into groups and drawing everything we knew about the rainforests. We have some very colorful wall hangings that include many rainforest flowers, trees, and animals. We enjoyed reading "Take a Step Inside the Rainforest" and "The Parrot Tico Tango".

We also continued in our Spanish lessons. The children are learning a great Spanish song about El Cuerpo (the body). They have also been working on the days of the week in Spanish. Zeanny does a wonderful job engaging them in the Spanish songs and finger plays and we are so grateful she is willing to volunteer her time.

Our Friday group read, "Zin, Zin, Zin a Violin!" and learned about the different instruments that make up an orchestra. We took some time looking at pictures of the instruments and listening to a music selection of each instrument.

Beyond that, work time has been busy. Number Rod addition was especially popular this week. As was the art area, the Practical Life pouring and stringing activities and the Color Tablet extensions.

A word about worksheets: you may notice some language and math worksheets coming home with your child this school year. As with all our materials, the children are invited, not forced, to complete worksheets. Sometimes the worksheets will be done with one of our Montessori materials (such as the Number Rod addition) and others are completed with a teacher or as a group. While worksheets are not the main focus of our curriculum, they still play an important part. My main goal with worksheets is to encourage fine motor skills. A child may understand a math concept or know how to spell a word with the movable alphabet, but they still need to be practicing writing the letters and numbers. We also want to familiarize the children with worksheets as they will probably be a part of their future education. Most importantly, the children really enjoy doing them. So, hang them on the refrigerator with pride!

Some pictures from previous weeks that haven't been shared yet:

Wish list

Sunnybrook Montessori now has a wish list you can view at amazon.com

10/09/09

We started our week off with some new books and new facts about George Washington. We are beginning to learn quite a bit. Why did George Washington wear a wig? Ask one of the students from the Friday group! We had quite the discussion about it on Friday.
Our Sunnybrook friends have been enjoying some new activities we have added to the Practical Life area. One is a clothes line where they practice hanging towels and take them down to fold them again. I've never seen such delight in folding laundry. You may want to keep that in mind next time you have a big laundry basket of clothes to put away. You could probably enlist a very willing helper.

We have also been busy stringing beads and sewing buttons onto fabric...not an easy task, but some children have been quite successful at it. In other areas, we've been working with the Number Rods, the Short Chains, tracing the geography puzzles and doing some Sight Word Bingo. The Friday group enjoyed exploring some "less than" and "greater than" concepts by trying to decide which number would fill up the alligator the most. We used some really big numbers because he was quite hungry.

Our highlight of the week was a very special visitor from Believe in Books...Corduroy! The children enjoyed a Corduroy Halloween story and received a special book. What a great program!

9/2/09

Happy October!

Thank you for contributing your photos to our family tree projects. Construction is well underway and they should be ready to go home next week. The children were very proud to show off their photos and tell us about the special people in their lives.

Wednesday morning was muy especial because we started our Spanish lessons. It was great to see the big smiles on the children's faces as they learned new Spanish phrases and songs.

We've been very busy working on extensions with our sensory materials. We've been looking at pictures of suggested extensions and have been able to create our own by following the pictures. Favorites include: the maze with the Red Rods, the sunburst with the Color Tablets, and the fun structures with the Pink Tower and Brown Stairs. The Movable Alphabet, the Number Rods and the puzzles have also been quite popular this week.

We've started studying our first "historical person of the month". October's historical person will be George Washington. We made a list at circle about all the facts we know about George Washington. Turns out we know quite a bit already! We were able to add some new ones to our list thanks to a story about George Washington and the Revolutionary War and a helpful classmate who brought in a Quarter to share with us. The children were excited to see that George Washington was on the Dollar Bill and the Quarter! I expect our "what we know" list to get much longer as the month goes on.

The Kindergartners and the Friday group had a lesson about nouns and adjectives. We found nouns around the room: blocks, clock, table, glue stick. Then we added in a discussion about adjectives. Our noun was dog and we tried to think of different ways to describe our dog. Some ideas were: fuzzy dog, purple dog, little dog, overweight dog, hot dog :)

During Music/Movement we listened to "August's Rhapsody" and drew pictures about how the music made us feel. It was really amazing to see how the children interpreted this. Some made squiggle shapes (fast and slow depending on what the music was doing), others drew the instruments they heard, others drew music notes, trees, animals, happy and sad faces. It was a great exercise.

Some of our Sunnybrook friends with their work:

September 26th

Another busy week at Sunnybrook! We continued our discussion on family and community. The children considered the types of places they see in their community. Some thoughts were: schools, stores, the library, the post office, the fire station and churches. On Thursday we embarked on our first outing to the library! The children enjoyed story time and got a lesson on the proper treatment of books. Then they participated in a special project and got to check out some of the fun activities in the children's library section.

We continued our science experiments this week by testing objects to see if they were magnetic or not. Our Friday group did a measuring activity where we learned how to measure in inches and that 12 inches=a foot.

Some of the more exciting news of the week-the art easel is back! It must have been greatly missed because the children have been busy creating beautiful art work. I hope the paint stains are washing out of the clothes. The art smocks only do so much...

We checked out some nature sounds at music/movement time and did a little yoga and stretching.

It's "Take a Child Outside" week! Read more about it here: www.takeachildoutside.org

9/18/09

I guess it really is time to say goodbye to summer weather. The children (bundled in fleece jackets and sweaters) enjoyed playing out in the September sunshine and autumn air this week. Inside the classroom we were quite the scientists. With help from a science project book we talked about tightrope walkers at the circus and the center of gravity. Our experiment consisted of having our Sunnybrook friends stand with their backs against a wall and then lean over to pick up an object. They discovered that it was impossible to do so without falling over. We then tried it in open space and it was much easier. We concluded that your center of gravity really is necessary to pick an object up off the floor...or to be a circus performer.

The beautiful food coloring paintings you may have seen were the results of a science discussion/experiment about air turned art project. They really did come out nicely.

Our Friday students did an experiment in which we tested different objects to see if they sank or floated in water. We hypothesized which objects would float and which would sink. Most of the time we were right but there were a few surprises (the plastic glove floated but the plastic cheetah did not). We also got out the microscope and viewed a few slides. Very interesting and hopefully an activity we will repeat with different slides in the near future.

We enjoyed the "Dinothesaurus" book which has some great poems and facts about Dinosaurs. We heard about some of our favorites (Tyrannosaurus Rex and Triceratops) and learned about some new ones. We also tried hard to pronounce Micropachycephalosaurus.

Our community and family theme lead us to talk about different jobs and people in a community such as, the librarian, the postal worker, the fireman, the doctor, etc. We even have a great song about the people in the community (sung to the 'Wheels on the Bus' tune).

We've had some colorful music activities this week with the movement scarves and Hap Palmer's color song. The children have also enjoyed singing and moving to 'London Bridge' (and eagerly wait to get '"locked up" by the bridge) and the kangaroo song.

First week of school!

It has been a busy first week at Sunnybrook. The returning children eased back into their routine and the new students had a great time exploring their new classroom and materials. This week we started our first theme of "Families and Community". We listened to a Spanish song about 'la familia' and talked about our own family members.

Some of the older children have been enjoying an activity called "popcorn words". They pick a "kernel" (scrunched up paper with word written on it) out of the basket and practice reading and writing the word with a small group. It's been fun reading and writing but I think the real enjoyment comes from making the popcorn popping noises.

One of our students shared a great book about the moon, planets and stars. We learned some interesting facts and enjoyed dramatizing the solar system. We had the Earth, the Sun and the moon and the other children took turns being far away and nearby planets.

We had a great discussion at circle about how the Earth is made up of dirt, water and air. We had a surprise visitor when we were investigating the dirt cup- a worm! After the children said hello we returned him to his outside home.

We've also been busy making many art projects. Come on in and peek at our apple tree! The play yard has been a busy place with our new jump ropes, sand, balls and an imaginary game of "picnic with T-Rex". Great first week!

Back to school

Welcome to the new blog for Sunnybrook Montessori. The blog will be updated weekly to give families and friends a glimpse into the classroom and keep you updated on the activities, themes, stories, songs etc. the children explore throughout the year.

So glad to see so many of you at the Welcome Back picnic and cleaning night. Your support is really appreciated.

Enjoy your Labor Day weekend and we will see you Tuesday morning!