My apologizes for the late posting.

Happenings in the classroom last week:

*We finished reading all of our Stone Soup stories and also enjoyed, "Growing Vegetable Soup" and consider what type of vegetables we might bring for the soup. We are getting quite good at our Stone Soup poem!

*We painted Thankgiving sun catchers and thought about the people and things we were thankful for. Many children also enjoyed some Native American mazes/coloring sheets.

*On Thursday we had a visitor play piano for us and we had a great time singing and began practicing songs for our winter celebration event.

*We also enjoyed a great yoga lesson where we listened to "The Little Mouse, the Red Ripe Strawberry and the Big Hungry Bear" and made yoga poses to go along with the story.

Along with all the other activities the children were busy with their important work.


Square of Pythagoras
The child builds Pythagoras' square using careful discrimination of size, shape and colors. This helps eye-hand coordination, concentration, develop cognitive skills such as thinking, judging, associating and comparing. It is also preparation for advance math concepts such as multiplication and algebra.


Building words with vowel sound "e"


Working on a puzzle which allows the children to build different words



A grocery list according to Kindergartners: Apples, goldfish, grapes and bananas:)


Working with the Spindle Boxes and Teen Board



This week at circle we read "The Peace Rose" story. The Peace Rose is a symbol of working and talking together to solve a conflict. The Peace Rose story shares conflict situations which are very familiar to children (children wanting to paint at the same time, someone knocking over another ones work) and encourages them to communicate with one another using the peace rose to solve the problem peacefully. We did some role playing at circle with our Peace Rose, so the children became aware of situations in which it may be useful.

This week we listened to, "Some Friends to Feed" which is a version of Stone Soup told and sung by Pete Seeger. The children love singing along, "Stone Soup is what you need, when you have some friends to feed. Step right up with what you got and add it all to the big soup pot!" We are comparing and contrasting all of our Stone Soup stories. We've had some good discussions about what is the same throughout all the stories and what is unique to each story.

We've been working on our Grace and Courtesy lessons at circle and in small groups. We are practicing how to greet one another, how to say "excuse me" when you need to move around someone and how to sit down and stand up quietly. We are also practicing walking around others work, pushing in chairs and rolling our work mats correctly.

"Grace and Courtesy lessons" is the term given to learning social skills in the Montessori environment. Maria Montessori believed that between the ages 2 1/2 -6, the child is in a sensitive period (when it is easy for a child to acquire a certain ability) for the learning of good manners. We present the lessons as role playing excercises in small groups or at circle. We may model how to carefully walk around another's work and then any child who would like to, is invited to try it themselves.

We also enjoyed making some art projects this week. On Tuesday we made food color paintings by blowing through straws to move the food coloring around and on Wednesday they made collages with dried rice, beans, corn and peas.

Stone Soup day is Novemeber 24th. Please remember to send in a vegetable that your child can help wash and prepare for the soup by Tuesday, November 23rd.

This week we read two of our Stone Soup stories and began to memorize a rhyme from one of our Stone Soup books. We practice at circle and we hope to have it memorized by Stone Soup day:

"Heat some water in a pot, Add a stone you've scrubbed a lot.
Sprinkle pepper, salt and herbs,
Let it boil undisturbed.
Stir in milk to make it sweet.
Add potatoes for a treat.
Toss in carrots, onions too,
Let it bubble, let it brew.
Taste the soup and when it's done,
Share Stone Soup with everyone!"

To help us remember the story of Stone Soup we made story bracelets. The children were given a pipe cleaner and four green beads, two red beads, one yellow bead and three clear beads. The first three green beads represent the three soldiers, the first red bead represents the village/community that they arrived in, the yellow bead represents the idea to make Stone Soup and the pot, the three clear beads are the three Stones they put in, the other green bead represented the other ingredients of the soup and the last bead represented the change in the villagers and the idea of sharing and community. The hope was that the children could use their bracelets to retell the story to a friends or family member.



On Thursday the firemen visited the library and we were able to attend. The children enjoyed watching a demonstration of how a firemen dresses for a fire and were able to see (and climb in!) the fire truck. They also listened to a story about fire safety.


Thanks to the help of our students the Sunnybrook Giving Tree is up!


It has a list of volunteer opportunities for the month of November. I invite you to check it out at the beginning of each month to see if there is anything you would be available to help with. I will also list these needs in the newsletter.

This week we perfected our "5 Little Pumpkins" rhyme/finger play and made some pumpkin props to perform with. We practiced each day at circle with our props and took turns being the first, second, third, fourth and fifth pumpkin. See if your child can share the rhyme with you!

We also worked on finishing our leaf project. I wrote about it in a previous post, but to recap: The children drew or traced their favorite leaf we found on a leaf hunt with a fine point ink pen. We photocopied their drawing until everyone had four copies of their leaf. They were then able to decorate their leaf with watercolor paints, colored pencils, oil pastels, markers or crayons. Some chose to do all one medium, and some chose to try different ones. Either way, they came out beautiful and it was a great way to experiment with the art materials. The completed project should be ready to go home sometime this week. Here are a couple done by the Friday students:



On Thursday we enjoyed painting pumpkins, apple stamping, making masks, making orange paint creations and sharing some goodies at the harvest fest. We were lucky to have beautiful weather.





The past few weeks we have been thinking and talking about leaves, pumpkins, and Autumn. Now that we move into November we will switch our focus to....Stone Soup! We started our first Stone Soup stories last week and read a Stone Soup rhyme. Stone Soup is wonderful for many reasons, but mostly because it gets us thinking/ learning about sharing and being a community and what that means.

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.