This year’s FWM sweatshirt, designed by the 8th grade class, is available! Order by Monday to receive yours before the end of the year! 2021 FWM Sweatshirt- Order Here!

There is such a great sense of community in our school. Within the class, the children love just spending time with one another. Every Thursday we have community building time in the outdoor classroom at the end of the day. The children play games, build with sticks, and get creative with friends. Most children play with different classmates each week and, as a result, many friendships are being cultivated! I think that is part of the beauty of a Montessori classroom; the chance to collaborate with children from different age groups. Children of various ages, working together, will learn from each other, both as students and as teachers. Just as siblings learn and grow together, so do children in a mixed-age classroom environment! Our Lower Elementary classroom is very much a family!

Our focus in Reader’s Workshop has been on the study of story elements. The children have been learning that characters are the most important ingredient in any story, and when readers go on reading adventures, they pay attention to details to learn all they can about the characters on the way. Also, they are learning to think about the problem the character is facing and the way the problem was solved to consider the ending and what the character may have realized. Afterwards, they think about the lesson as a universal message we can all learn from the story, not just the character.

In Writer’s Workshop the focus has been on realistic fiction. This unit involves something they already do everyday- pretending! The children call on their imaginative skills to invent characters and small moment adventures, and then name them and put them into imagined scenarios. They are learning to get their characters in and out of trouble to give their readers a satisfying ending. In addition, they are learning to bring their stories to life by making their characters think, feel, talk, and move.

This week in magnetism, the children are learning about the north and south poles of a magnet. Each end point is referred to as a pole. After some investigation, they discovered that two unlike poles will attract and two like poles will repel one another. In addition to locating the poles and exploring the attraction between them, we also learned about the Earth’s magnetic pole. The south pole of a magnet it attracted to the south pole of the planet and the north pole of the magnet is attracted to the north pole of the planet. We explored this concept with a bar magnet, a piece of thread, and a ruler.

In physical science, we enjoyed learning more about the composition of the earth. The children are learning about our protective blanket, how each part of the atmosphere plays an important part. Each child participated in a discussion about what the atmosphere is and what makes up the atmosphere. Afterwards, they learned specific nomenclature for the five parts of the atmosphere: troposphere, stratosphere, mesosphere, thermosphere and exosphere.

To celebrate our beloved planet Earth, we started a discussion by reading the book, Dear Children of the Earth, by Schim Schimmel. The narrator of the story is Mother Earth and she asks for help from children everywhere. She explains that she loves and wants to protect each child on Earth but in order to do so, she needs their love and appreciation in return. This book leaves goose bumps on my body (and almost tears) every time I read it because the message of protecting our planet is so powerful. I recommend this read!

Afterwards, I facilitated a conversation on how we can take part in protecting and preserving our planet. We had a beautiful discussion that ranged in ideas, including: planting trees, not wasting paper, turning off lights, recycling, picking up trash, and much more! From there each child reflected in their journal about their own journey in helping Earth. Later in the day, we also incorporated a fun arts and crafts activity that corresponded with our duty to help protect our planet.

We were fully immersed this week in magnetism. The children enjoyed being scientists and exploring how iron filings are attracted to magnets. They also had a blast “fishing” for metal and steel objects in a bowl filled with sand. They learned that magnets are used in every day life- to separate metal accidentally mixed in with food and for recycling. Also, they are used by doctors to remove metal splinters from eyes without even touching the eye!

In addition to our science unit, the children are getting back into the swing of things in their geometry work. The third years are loving using the box of sticks to make and identify parts of a polygon. The second years are continuing their complex work with the Montessori protractor, measuring the angles of different types of triangles. The first years are enjoying learning the difference between lines, rays, and line segments. We’re keeping busy and motivated!