Sunnybrook Montessori

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.