What a unique, challenging, but special year 2020 was. For me, one of this year’s highlights was having the blessing of being part of your child’s journey of life. Each and every one of them has not only grown physically, but emotionally and intellectually. I find such joy watching their individual personalities come to life! These children are such a gift and I can’t wait to watch them blossom even more in 2021!
Wishing you all peace and love during this holiday season. Here’s to a great 2021!
In the Montessori curriculum, care for living environments is one of the most important aspects. Children love animals and plants and can relate to them as individuals. Those relationships and that intimate, personal contact form the base for our biology curriculum. Children are drawn to living things and they want to know and learn more about them. We nuture and build on that interest by helping them to sharpen their skills in observation, and to learn and apply methods of appropriate caretaking.
Lower Elementary students have been loving their biology lessons! The third years are learning about the body functions and external parts of moss. They are enjoying searching for moss while outdoors and closely observing it under a magnifying glass. The first and second graders are learning about amphibians. The first year group is taking a close look at the external parts of a frog meanwhile the second years are studying the inside, the body functions of a frog.
It’s important to practice self reflection from a young age because it can help children recognize their emotions and regulate them. One way we did this was in our journal writing this week. The children wrote about something they liked about themselves, and something they thought they could work on. It was beautiful to watch each child express and reflect on themselves in different, unique ways. I feel so humbled I get to support and assist each child on this journey of life! Here is a list of what they came up with:
Favorite Qualities:
Qualities to Work On:
This year Lower Elementary is learning about the Composition of the Earth. This unit on physical geography follows the Sun and Earth study that we explored last year, and provides the children with a more intensive study of the planet. The goal is to provide an impressionistic understanding of the Earth’s composition and formation.
This week, the children were encouraged to think back to the Creation Story; how the world changed from a gaseous and liquid state to an increasingly solid one. We had a discussion about how the Earth cooled, and the heavy elements settled into the center, while the lighter ones rose to the surface. This was just like the experiment we did with oil, water and molasses, and how the molasses poured right through the lighter oil and water.
Students learned that the heavy inner part is called the barysphere. This includes the inner and outer core, plus the mantle, that we spoke of in the last lesson. The outer layer is called the lithosphere, which in the last lesson we called the crust. The thin layer of water surrounding the Earth is called the hydrosphere and the air around the Earth is called the atmosphere.
We are thrilled to be back at school! The students hopped right back into their work like we never left. It’s amazing how the children can adapt and overcome any circumstances that are thrown their way! A huge thank you to the middle school community for making us feel so welcomed by making us a card. Even though we can’t gather as a whole school this year, it’s heart warming to know the sense of community is still here.
We are diving right into our Writer’s Workshop lessons and the children are loving it! Our first unit focuses on writing true stories about our own lives; “small moment” stories. The children participate in a mini lesson and then spend some quiet time writing and practicing the new skills they are learning. This week the children have learned about how to stretch out their memories by magnifying a small moment and adding details. To help solidify this objective, we have been dissecting the book Owl Moon by Jane Yolen. We did this by finding a powerful part in the story, deciding what made the part powerful, and finding details and examples in the passage that proved it. After our mini lessons, Ms. Mary and I move around the room and conference with individual students, giving help and instruction where needed.
We periodically get together as a whole group and share our writing with each other; this is a favorite part of Writers Workshop for many. This year, our author’s circle looks a bit different in order to facilitate the social distancing guidelines, but that is okay! Some children shared from their work spots, and others wanted to come up to the front of the classroom to read. How incredibly wonderful is it that the children feel safe and respected, and as a result, want to share their writing with their peers!
This week the children were immersed in geometry. The first years had a lesson on the first constructive triangle box. This lesson consists of a review of geometric language learned thus far and introduces an exploration of the relationship between triangles and quadrilaterals. It demonstrates in a sensorial way that triangles construct many other shapes such as: parallelograms, squares, rectangles, rhombuses, and trapezoids.
The second graders love using the box of sticks to further explore the study of angles. They have been using this material to construct right, acute, and obtuse angles; we even enjoyed making these angles with our bodies! This week, the group received a new lesson on convex and reflex angles. This was a complex lesson but I was impressed with the way the second years absorbed this new information.
The third years have been working so hard discovering new ways to use the Montessori protractor. So far this year we have reviewed how to multiply angles using the protractor and we learned to divide angles as well! This week, the children enjoyed exploring the common protractor. The purpose of this is to acquaint the children with the method of constructing and measuring angles.
This week the third year students told the first of Maria Montessori’s Five Great Lessons, the Creation of the Universe. The third years have been working so hard for the past few weeks, preparing and practicing, to give this lesson to the younger students. Even though the third years told me they were nervous about being the “teachers” and presenting this lesson to the class, they leaned into the discomfort and did an outstanding job. What an amazing thing to witness! They should all be so proud of themselves.
The children also enjoyed their first classification lesson, learning about living vs. non living. This was a group discussion which introduced the concept of life by contrasting living organisms with non-living matter. We used our class pet, Rocky, and a rock from outdoors to facilitate the discussion. The children were thrilled to observe and touch our leopard gecko! The objective of this lesson was to distinguish living organisms by these functions: metabolism, growth, reproduction, response to stimuli and adaption to the environment.