Updated with pictures!

We had lots of fun Tuesday making little apple pies. These came out so cute and the children had a great time making them. The children started off by mixing the dough and rolling it out with the rolling pin. Then they cut a circle in the dough using a drinking glass and placed it in their muffin tin as the bottom crust.



Then they washed an apple and had help cutting it into slices and with some (not so sharp) knives, they were able to chop their slices into little pieces. They put them on top of their bottom crust and sprinkled them with sugar and cinnamon and added the top crust.

In case you want to try this at home, we baked them for about 15-20 minutes at 425 degrees. They looked great when they came out, but due to an unfortunate incident of salt being mixed with our flour we used for rolling the dough out, they didn't taste as good as we had hoped. It's the process not product, right?
Final product picture...


Since we were in cooking mode, we made some orange, cinnamon spiced play dough on Tuesday afternoon. The children that helped had fun helping measure and add ingredients to the bowl. Of course, they all had to have a turn adding food coloring and stirring. The whole classroom has enjoyed using it.

Other happenings in the classroom included: working on our shape names and making triangles, pentagons, hexagons, heptagons (and so on...) with Popsicle sticks, learning "5 Little Pumpkins" poem and finger play at circle, and moving along with our "Carnival of Animals" CD and movement scarves. We've seen some great work in the classroom this week. Lots of exciting math, language and sensorial activities have been out, and beautiful paintings, drawings and clay creations were made.

On Thursday afternoon, the children enjoyed a visit from Iza who gave them a presentation on Poland. They located Poland on the globe, and talked a bit about the people and culture of Poland. Thank you Iza!

Our Friday friends were busy drawing equilateral, isosceles and scalene triangles, reading about Beethoven and making their own Beethoven Books, and recording facts about African animals in our Geography Journals.

Montessori Moment:
Montessori believes that all children are capable, and by allowing them to do things for themselves they will experience joy and develop confidence and self-esteem. In the morning, have your child show you how they take off their shoes, put on their slippers and hang up their belongings.

“Any child who is self-sufficient, who can tie his shoes, dress or undress himself, reflects in his joy and sense of achievement the image of human dignity, which is derived from a sense of independence.” -Maria Montessori

Harvest fest is Thursday from 12pm-1pm for both morning and afternoon children. Morning children will be dismissed @ 1pm. The children will enjoy some snacks and autumn activities. Thank you to those who signed up to help or bring goodies.

Lots of exciting work was out this week including: learning names of shapes with the shapes from the Geometry Cabinet, matching sounds with the Sound Cylinders, learning about quantity with the Number Rods, and building the maze with the Red Rods. The maze is a fun sensory extension that a child can do with the Red Rods. I didn't manage to take many pictures this week so, I used a picture below from last year so that you can see how one would construct it. After they build it, they enjoy carefully walking through it.


We enjoyed our second yoga lesson and learned some new poses. The children were very engaged and eager to participate. Hopefully, they were able to demonstrate for you at home.

We started listening to "Peter and the Wolf" during music. The children are doing a great job recognizing which instrument represents each animal. We also helped narrate the book, "The Empty Pot" with our instruments. This is a great listening excercise where each child is assigned a part to help narrate with an instrument. For example, every time the word "children" is read the children with the bells shake their bells or every time the word "seeds" is read the children with the sand blocks play the sand blocks and so on... It's a lot of fun, and helps work on listening skills and concentration.

We also spent plenty of time outside in the beautiful sunshine!

This week we embarked on our first library trip of the year. We practiced our library manners, enjoyed a fall story hour and made leaf rubbing pictures. It was a great way to spend a rainy morning.

Popular activities this week included: using pumpkin spiced play dough and pumpkin cookie cutters, practicing letter sounds, counting, sorting, stringing beads, building words, doing geography puzzles and making numbers 11-19 with the Teen Board.


At circle we enjoyed stories about apple picking, made a "spiderweb" with some yarn and took turns being the spider crawling through the web. We also read "Our Peaceful Classroom" which is a book about attending a Montessori school. The illustrations are done by Montessori children from around the world. It's a beautiful book and we had fun seeing the similarities between our classroom and the classrooms in the illustrations.

The Friday students have been busy, busy! They have started making their own geography maps and we've been reading about South America together. So far, they've been interested in learning about the animals in South America so we've read about spectacled bears, anacondas, piranhas, jaguars, poison dart frogs and capybaras. We're practicing our handwriting and writing down important facts we find in "Geography Journals." They've also been enjoying the Bank Game.


The Bank Game:

"The Bank" (Bead Material)

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. Due to missing small number cards we used the large number cards in the pictures below.





Outdoor balance beam fun!
Forgot to post these a couple weeks ago.

We had a great week thinking about Autumn, investigating seeds, learning yoga poses, doing exciting math exercises and making music!

We started the week by reading, "How Groundhogs Garden Grew" and "Growing Vegetable Soup." Then we looked at some seeds in the vegetables that Tammy had brought in from her garden and discussed the seed life cycle. We had some experienced gardeners who knew just what it takes to make great vegetable soup. This should come in handy during Stone Soup time.


On Wednesday one of our parents came in during Music/Movement time and did some yoga with the students! They learned a great song about practicing yoga and used their bodies and imaginations to become different animals.



We have two exciting art projects the children can choose to work on. Our first one is leaf art. We first went on a leaf hunt around the school grounds to collect leaves. Children studied the leaves and drew or traced their favorite with a fine point ink pen. Once everyone has completed this we are going to scan and print several copies for each child and then have them decorate the leaf copies with different materials: watercolor paints, tempera paints, markers, colored pencils, etc. We hope it will be a fun process and be useful in exposing them to different art mediums.

On Thursday, our afternoon children read, "To Be An Artist" and looked at a poster of "Castle and Sun" by Paul Klee.

We then discussed the different colors and shapes we saw and everyone agreed that "Castle and Sun" was a good name for the painting. They were then able to make their own version of "Castle and Sun" and they created some beautiful work! This activity will stay out over the next couple weeks and will be introduced to the morning students.


During music we talked about different ways we can make music. We thought of using our body: clapping, snapping, stomping feet and singing. We also thought of the different instruments we can use to make music. We had a great time experimenting with this by doing our clapping rhythm activities, singing songs, playing the really BIG drum and using our maracas, triangles and rhythm sticks.