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: