This week we started preparing for our creation story with some science demonstrations. The purpose of these demonstrations is to illustrate concepts explored through the story of the creation of the universe. The creation story provides an impressionistic demonstration of the origins of life. The story is designed to impart a sense of wonder and awe, to instill respect for all that has happened, and to ignite interest in scientific investigation.

We have been lucky to have such beautiful weather this week! It’s beginning to feel like fall, and we are loving it. Each morning, when the weather permits, we start with recess on the field. Some activities the children enjoy partaking in during the morning movement are soccer, jumping rope, walking laps, and playing make believe. This is a vital part of the day, to get the body moving before a busy day of work ahead.

Please remind your child to wear something BLUE on Monday, September 21 to recognize and celebrate the International Day of Peace.  Blue is the universal color of peace.

This week’s art project was inspired by Vincent Van Gogh’s Sunflower paintings. After looking at images of Van Gogh’s work, each child took time to closely examine real sunflowers with their eyes and sense of touch. Students noticed the range of textures, vibrant colors, and shapes of the sunflowers. Then, they carefully drew their own using pencil and oil pastels. Each sunflower was then cut out and arranged to create one collaborative art piece that visually represents the bright, beautiful Lower Elementary community. Thank you so much Mrs. Reid for organizing such a thoughtful project.

Another exciting part of our week was creating the class “Who Am I” material together. “Who Am I” is a collection of Montessori biology materials used to learn about the different kingdoms of life; specifically, animals, plants, fungi, protists, and prokaryotes. As a fun beginning of the year activity, we made this material with a focus on the children in the classroom. This process started with the children answering questions about themselves. Next, it was typed up, and turned into a material the students can use during work cycle. Not only is the “Who Am I” material a fabulous and popular classification work, it also provides work in comprehension and fluency while helping the children get to know each other!

If you would like to access your child’s weekly schedule, including enrichment classes, you can do so on myfwm.org. Go to the Parents module and select Student Schedules. If you have more than one child at FWM, you can access all from this one location using the drop down menu.

Another week of pure joy! Our third year group has been such an asset to our class by mentoring and guiding the younger and new students through this transition period. I am so grateful to have such a helpful group of students. It’s heartwarming to see the connections being made across age groups. If this is any indication for the year to come, we are all in for a spectacular school year!

It is important to intentionally build community at the beginning of the school year. One of our community building activities this week was reading a book about peace, discussing as a class what makes each of us feel peaceful, and then the children represented those ideas on doves. It was so beautiful watching them come up with unique items that brought happiness and tranquility to one another. They will hang in our classroom for the rest of the year to help set a peaceful tone in our classroom. 

The children have been loving our science lessons! Continuing our light lessons from last week, the children explored the concepts that light travels in waves and straight lines. We also had some fun delving into shadow experiments. They learned that shadows are formed when light cannot pass through an opaque body in its path. This was demonstrated by holding an object close to a beam of light from a flashlight. We then held the object further away and turned to its side. The children came to the conclusion that if the object is closer to the light, the shadow is bigger, and if it’s farther away from the light, the shadow gets smaller.

Adding on to our science demonstrations, the children enjoyed learning about the movement of Earth around the Sun. In this demonstration, the gravitational attraction is represented by a bucket, the Earth is represented by the water in the bucket, and Mrs. Sankey represented the Sun. She then swung the bucket in a wide circle around and over her head. The purpose of this was to express that the same force that pushes out on the water and holds it against the bottom of the bucket, is what keeps our world from falling into the Sun. The Earth gets this force as it propels itself through space. What keeps our planet on a steady path around the Sun is the balance between the gravitational attraction of the Earth and Sun and the forward motion of the Earth.

We had a very productive week!

The first years have been loving their lessons. They heard the “love story of lines” during geometry this week, where they learned about convergent, divergent, and parallel lines. They used the box of sticks to explore these concepts. In grammar, first years learned about adjectives and had a fun time coming up with silly adjectives to describe nouns. As an extension, they were introduced to a work called the grammar box, where the children practice the parts of speech they have learned so far this year.

The second year group enjoyed learning how to subtract fraction insets using the Montessori protractor; a concept that can be challenging for some, they grasped so quickly! I was impressed. They also had a blast learning about pronouns. The students and I put our heads together to create a short story using no pronouns. The children realized that this was challenging because it sounded ridiculous and very repetitive. However, afterwards we came to the conclusion that pronouns are necessary for every day language!

Last but not least, the third years have been enjoying their hands-on geometry follow-up. They have been using the box of sticks to make equilateral, isosceles and scalene triangles. One student told me that, “This is the most fun geometry I’ve done in lower elementary!” How incredible is that? As for language, the third year group received another sentence analysis lesson. They learned that there can be more than one subject in a sentence and they started using the term predicate in place of action when describing a sentence.

We have an upcoming field trip to the Discovery Museum on Thursday, April 23rd. The bus will leave FWM at 9:30 and will return around 2:00. Children need to pack a bagged lunch that day and should not bring anything that needs to be heated up. We can take three parent volunteers. Please contact us if you are interested!

We are all getting very excited for our upcoming production of Moana Jr. in May. The children will be learning their parts next week and we have already begun singing the songs together in class. If you would like to access the songs for your child to practice, please click on this link.