The children have been very busy with their work! Some new activities out on the shelves this week:

Snowball Counters, which is a seasonal variation on our Numbers and Counters. To do this work the children put the mittens (which all have a numeral printed on them) on the mat in the correct order from 1-10. They then place the snowballs (cotton balls) under the corresponding mitten. For example the mitten with the "1" would have one snowball placed under it. The control of error is that there are 55 snowballs and if the child ends up with some left over or they do not have enough, then they know to go back and re-check their work.


Other seasonal variations on favorite activities include our winter lacing cards:


and our holiday tree at the cutting station. This has been a group effort over the last couple weeks with most everyone contributing to the decorating. This started as a basic, pencil outline of a tree and the children were provided with construction paper, scissors and glue and made a festive creation!



There has been a lot of interest in our math material lately. The Bank Game with the Golden Beads and the Golden Bead addition has been popular among our older students. For those who are not familiar (or need a refresher!) the 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.





We've also been busy working with Mystery Words, making letter books, building words, doing puzzles and working with Sandpaper Letters.

During group time we've been talking and reading about different animals and which class they belong in. On Tuesday we made booklets about the life cycle of a frog and discussed that it belonged to the amphibian class and on Thursday we brainstormed a list of animals that are considered mammals. We hope to do more with animal classes after break as there seems to be a lot of interest in the subject.

We've been busy practicing for our Winter Celebration event! It will be held on Thursday, December 17th at 4pm at the Lancaster Congregational Church. The children are very excited to share the songs they have been working on.

And a few more happenings in the classroom:
(Yes, I went a little picture crazy this week)

Finally...Snow!

What a great first week in December!

We started talking about the different animal classes this week. We learned that there are six important animal classes: mammals, reptiles, fish, birds, amphibians and arthropods and we considered the different animals that belong to each class. We also learned about the parts of a fish and parts of a frog. Very interesting! We are excited to continue this in the coming weeks.

We were also very busy with stories about everyone's favorite subject: snow! We read about Snowflake Bentley who photographed snowflakes and enjoyed the story "Snow Sounds: An Onomatopoeic Story". The children had great fun making the "clank, crash, bang" sound of the plow, the "hush" sound of the snow and the "beep, beep, beep" of the school bus. We also enjoyed listening to our CD of the Polar Express.

During music we've been practicing our seasonal songs for our Winter Celebration event. On Wednesday and Thursday we were able to practice our songs with some live music! We had two special guests come in to play guitar and piano.

The children were also very busy with their work. Many children did the bank game and addition with Golden Bead material, worked with the Sandpaper Letters and Numerals, worked on building and writing words, sewed holiday buttons, used the winter/holiday lacing cards and made beautiful snowflakes with white paint against black paper.

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.