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.

It's hard to believe that we've already been in school for three weeks! The children are settling in nicely, and it's been sweet to see new friendships and interests develop. One of the favorite activities is in the Practical Life area: rock painting! This is done with water, two medium-sized rocks and various sized paint brushes. The purpose is to develop concentration and fine motor skills. The children get joy out of making the rock "beautiful" when it is shiny with water and can experiment with different sized brushes to see the brush strokes.


Other activities this week included: finishing nature collages, making "apples"
with cinnamon scented play dough, collecting leaves for our leaf books, reading Autumn stories and singing new and favorite songs from our "Rise Up Singing" book.

Working with the Color Tablets
The purpose of the Color Tablets is to assist the child in identifying color and to visually discriminate different shades of color. There are three different color boxes and the third box (below) is also a language lesson in understanding the concepts of "dark", "lighter", and "lightest".


Short Chains
The Short Chains are practice for linear and skip counting to 100. The Short Chains represent the squares of the number 1-10.


Drumming!



Matching lower and upper case letters


Working with the Sandpaper Letters


Pouring exercise

"Rain, Rain, Go Away" was our motto last week. It seemed that every time we tried to go out to play we got rained on! Although, the children were quite eager to get out the rainy day activities. Hopefully everyone got a chance to enjoy the sunny weekend!

Despite the gloomy weather, the classroom was a busy, happy place all week. Along with lots of exciting math, language and practical life work, we had fun apple stamping with fall colors, moving like fish and birds with our Carnival of Animals CD (and movement scarves, of course), doing nature collages and performing puppet shows.

Working on numbers 11-19 with the Teen Board.

Apple Stamping and other art projects

Fun during Music/Movement time



Puppet Theater



Window Washing (Practical Life activity)



Investigating Shells



Working with Movable Alphabet to build words

First Week of School!

Hello Sunnybrook families and friends,

I hope our new and returning families enjoy this blog. It will be updated weekly and will give you a peek into the happenings of the classroom.

We had a great first week of school. The returning children were excited to get to work and our new students have done a great job of exploring the classroom, meeting new friends and beginning to work with the materials.

We started the week by reading, "The Kissing Hand," which is a great story for the first day of school, and introduced our calender. We practice the months, days of the week and record the weather during morning circle. During music we did rhythm games, played our rhythm sticks, maracas and triangles along to "Play your Instruments" by Ella Jenkins, enjoyed "The Bear Hunt" CD/story and the movement activity to "We all Go Traveling By".

On Thursday we read "Mouse Paint" and did a color mixing activity at circle. Our Friday students enjoyed mixing paint and painting their own white mouses. Our Friday students also worked on leaf collection and identification for the Leaf Books they will be working on over the next few weeks. We also collected extra leaves and pressed them to use for a project with the whole class in the coming weeks.

All the children enjoyed the new rakes outside and building with the wood pieces donated by Garland Mill (thank you)! All in all, it was a great first week back!

Three more days of school! Can you believe it?

The students have been very creative the past few weeks drawing, painting and making their own little booklets. This week we made props to go along with our spring pantomime that they hope to perform for families at the picnic on Thursday. The pantomime is a great movement excercise that also ties in with all the exciting things we observe in the spring: seeds sprouting, breezes, warm sunshine, gentle rain and of course butterflies.

Speaking of butterflies... we really enjoyed watching our fat caterpillars form a chrysalis and then hatch to become Painted Lady butterflies. There was much excitement when they finally hatched from their chrysalis and we were able to release them.

We are perfecting our folk dances and have finished making some beautiful posters to go along with them:






With the weather being so nice we've been trying to do some lessons outside. On Friday the students learned about the parts of the tree and made tree puppets out of brown bags. We then used our puppets to sing "The Green Grass Grows All Around." We also determined how many friends we needed to complete a circle around the tree.





Other pictures from the week:



School picnic is Thursday, June 10th at noon. See you then!