Mrs. Hood’s Class: Joy and Life in the Sunshine!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

I remember a couple of years ago sitting by a small window and observing the gigantic icicles that covered my view. Suddenly I noticed how, so slowly, water started to drip from the icicles on a sunny morning! I remember so clearly how this sense of joy filled my life! This was the end of my first winter in America and since then I love the hope that spring brings when Earth seems to wake up and become alive again! Warmer and sunnier days, windows opened, greener views, and that crisp in the air are just some of the things that I love from spring! My favorite thing of all is to observe the animals and their incredible ways during this season. Animals that spend the winter in hibernation come out of their dens, while those that traveled to warmer regions return. Many animals give birth in the spring. Winter coats are shed by those that sported them, and some animals may change coloration to blend in with their new surroundings. It’s amazing!

This week, we introduced a very beloved animal to our environment: the caterpillar! For the next two weeks children will have the opportunity to very closely observe the life cycle of painted lady butterflies! By the way, my favorite animal!

Two popular works this week in practical life have been opening and closing a lunchbox and table setting. As full day students have demonstrated interest in setting their own place for lunch, we offered these fun activities for children to practice those necessary skills and learn to carefully treat breakable items. We also added some pretending food and children have been very imaginative! We encourage you to involve your child in setting the table at your home! You will be surprised how well they do it!

Another fun work children seem to like is spooning eggs in our sensorial bin! The prickly grass is something that attracts children and it seems that the tactile experience feels almost therapeutic for some students.

For food tasting we introduced grape tomatoes! Eight out of nine really enjoyed it! Another win!

We can’t wait for all the spring fun that’s coming to our environment during the next couple of weeks! Stay tuned for some fun pictures!

Reminder: Toddler Parent/Child will be on April 11th from 10:30-11:30am in our class.

Spring has Sprung!

Posted on by Stephanie Thomas

The children returned to their normal routines with excitement this week!

Thanks to the milder weather, the children have enjoyed an abundance of outdoor play in the beautiful spring air.

Along with time on the field and playground, the children have been exploring new works in our environment. Our “Loud/Quiet Eggs” have been a big hit as the children love to shake twelve different plastic eggs and sort the loud eggs (filled with rice) from the quiet eggs (empty).

Another popular item is the ice cream scooping work. Kinectic sand is scooped from a bowl into a plastic ice cream cone. Many children worked between 20 and 60 minutes long with this activity! Needless to say, we will be purchasing more kinetic sand for our environment. 🙂

Mrs. Hood’s class: New Season, New Hope!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

 

 

 

 “Spring’s greatest joy beyond a doubt is when it brings the children out.” ~ Edgar Guest
Welcome back Dear Families:
Please enjoy these thoughts from Wildflower Ramblings:
These cold winter days are hopefully coming to a swift close, and we look forward to the days when the flowers begin to bloom – the crocus and bulbs first, and then are beautiful perennials and annual flowers.  Children love the outdoors and should be encouraged to explore all that world has to offer. Flowers, bugs, gardening, butterflies, oh the joy!
“We cannot create observers by saying ‘observe,’ but by giving them the power and the means for this observation and these means are procured through education of the senses.”  ~Maria Montessori

Rainbows and delicious Kumquats!

Posted on by Andrea Hood

The main focus this week was based on colors. Recognizing the colors and identifying the color names is an important part of a child’s development. The ability to identify colors is considered a marker and milestone in a child’s cognitive process.

As introductory activities this week, we used a lot of verbal communication and sorting and classifying games and activities. Verbal communication is a great way to teach the children about colors as we give them some vocabulary for starting to describe the world around them. Practicing this exercise daily encourages the children to start sorting and classifying objects around them based on their color attributes. With our youngest we focused on the primary colors and with our oldest we also worked recognizing and identifying secondary colors. As we worked on putting our rainbow puzzle together we took time to search around the classroom for objects that represented the color assigned. Children had a lot of fun thinking, observing, and finding different colored objects in our environment!

Children were very curious about what food we were going to taste this week as they already recognize this activity as a part of our weekly routine. It’s so fun to see the children gathering with great excitement onto the main rug when they see the teacher walking with the food tasting tray. They sit so quietly and so patiently waiting to see the special towel to be removed and reveal the new food to be tasted. There were a couple of conversations between the oldest toddlers speculating that the new food this week was going to be watermelons! To their surprise we enjoyed some tiny but delicious kumquats. Kumquats look like oranges but are the most diminutive member of the citrus family. We had great fun exploring and tasting this fruit! Even Mrs. Wilson and I loved being part of it!

We wish you a great, colorful, and relaxing spring break with your family and a safe trip to all of you who will be traveling!

Keep warm and happy!

We Brought the Gym to Us!

Posted on by Stephanie Thomas

With the below-freezing temperatures this week, we would normally head to the gym for some exercise. But our awesome middle school buddies were preparing for their play in the gym, so we needed to get creative. Ms. Sara came up with the brilliant idea to bring a favorite gym activity to our environment. We are blessed with a large room and can easily move our furniture to make space for big movement materials. We brought two heavy foam blocks and a large crash pad for the children to enjoy a gymnastics jumping station…and enjoy they did!

We also added two boxes to the room for those who wanted to partake in imaginative play. The boxes were mainly used for peek-a-boo, but there were houses, kitchens, and beds as well. It was a pleasure to watch the children turn the boxes into whatever they wished.

Practical Life, sensorial, art, and snack were equally popular on the tiled side of the room. The children were fully engaged in shaving cream art, digging in snow in the sensory bin with spoons and waterproof mittens, slicing their own bananas for snack, and transferring St. Patrick’s Day themed work.

We wish you all a wonderful break, and look forward to seeing you when we return Monday, March 25. Enjoy!

Mrs. Thomas: All Things Green!

Posted on by Stephanie Thomas

With St. Patrick’s Day approaching, we have a lovely green theme in our environment. Most practical life works are shades of green and/or on green trays. The children are sifting through green sand and gold glitter to find foam shamrocks, posting golden coins into a green canister, using whisks to make green bubbles in the sensory bin, and “cutting” green and yellow fruits and vegetables. Their food tasting was even green…spinach!

Due to the icy conditions of our playground, we have spent our outdoor time in the gym. This week, the children used scooters to move about the space. The scooters are about two inches off the ground and have a square base for the children to sit or lay on. It was a lot of fun to watch the children wheel themselves about using their arms, hands, legs, and feet…we saw a lot of tongues hanging out during this workout! These were very popular and we are looking forward to bringing them out again the next time we are in the gym.

Mrs. Hood’s Class: Freedom Within Limits

Posted on by Andrea Hood

At the beginning of the week our toddlers entered the environment and were so excited to find a new object. This object is an all time favorite piece of equipment that offer great benefits to your children: The slide.

Slides are encouraging to kids and invigorating to play on. Children will climb almost anything if it means going down a slide. Since they use it over and over, it encourages balance, coordination, and spatial awareness. It also teaches the children social skills and organization. The children loved it!

With popular activities like this one, we set specific rules, the purpose of which are: Taking turns, purposeful delays, and teaching self-control. No matter how excited or how compulsive a toddler can be, learning to be patient is a necessary process that promotes good character. Children are never too young to start working on these character areas.

As children continue to work on body awareness we introduced a grace and courtesy activity called: Walking around a floor mat. As children have demonstrated interest in starting to use rugs to place their works on (as is typical in our Montessori classrooms), we practiced how to be aware of these mats and walk carefully around them. The purpose of the floor mats is to define the students’ workspace and to reinforce Montessori’s principle of freedom within limits.

For food tasting we enjoyed some broccoli this week! 9 of 10 children loved it!

As February ends, we welcome March with great enthusiasm and hope! We appreciate winter but spring and warm weather will arrive soon and we can’t wait until it’s here!

Practical Life is Still a Huge Hit!

Posted on by Stephanie Thomas

The children are thoroughly engaged in our environment and are especially intrigued by all of our practical life works. Activities that allow children to spoon, tong, pour, post, peel and stick, glue, squeeze, twist, open and close, scoop, and hammer are available throughout our room. The children love manipulating these works with their hands and get such satisfaction from completing them successfully. Because these activities are so exciting, the children often repeat them over and over again, extending their focus and concentration.

In the sensory bin this week, the children mixed blue and red colored water together to make purple. They then used a variety of cups, scoopers, and strainers to pour and transfer the water.

We have added more pictures of animals on the walls of our room for the children to enjoy. One activity that we do with these pictures is a matching work. Smaller versions of each picture is placed in a tray and the children walk around the room making matches to the larger pictures. The children love walking around our space looking for the matches and attaching the smaller pictures to the larger with Velcro…and then doing it all over again!