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: