As you can see from the pictures, the children have been busy working very hard! They must know that vacation is only a few short days away as they all are making the most of their time in school.

Practical Life and the art area have been the most popular spots in which to work. Safety loop scissors were introduced to the environment and have been a big hit. Painting with watercolors and drawing with egg-shaped chalk has also been fun. And pouring, scooping, and posting works continue to consistently engage the children.

We wish you all a wonderful vacation spending time with your loved ones. See you in April!

“To have learned something for the child is only a point of departure. When he has learned the meaning of an exercise, then he begins to enjoy repeating it, and he does repeat it an infinite number of times, with the most evident satisfaction”- Maria Montessori – The Montessori Method

Children had a great time this week exploring and repeating some of the new materials in the environment. In a Montessori environment, repetition does not necessarily mean that the child has to engage in the same exact work over and over again. Anything that provides the child with practice of a previously learned skill, including extensions and games, is repetition. Dr. Montessori said,  “Repetition is the secret of perfection.”

Through repetitive exploration your children are able to look at a material from different angles and explore it, letting it become part of their understanding of the world. At the same time, it allows them to self-critique: they look at how they are doing something and make slight changes in order to perfect the action, making it more efficient. The Montessori environment is designed to support exactly this kind of learning. Children choose their own work, allowing their interest to guide them to a choice. They are drawn by desire and that allows them to return to an activity with frequency, working with it until they have perfected it. It is, in fact, a developmental need. Dr. Montessori wrote, “when a child has attained this stage, of repeating an exercise, he is on the way to self-development, and the external sign of this condition is his self-discipline.”

Enjoy the pictures and this beautiful video taken by Mrs. Wilson, where Micah and Mya work together with one of our most popular works, introduced early last week: Air, Water, and Land.

We started this short week with an introductory geography lesson focused on air, land, and water. Children had a fun time sorting different animals while gaining some rich vocabulary. Some of the names of the animals they have been learning this week are: octopus, starfish, tiger shark, sea turtle, eagle ray, lion, rhinoceros, giraffe, elephant, tiger, cockatoo, blue macaw, snowy owl, toucan, and everybody’s favorite, our precious little hummingbird. It’s so great to see our students properly naming their animals!

We also had a delicious food tasting activity. This week children touched, smelled, observed the inside, and tested some yellow peppers. At the beginning, some of the children were hesitant to taste, but as they saw their friends enjoy it they got brave and they loved it! They kept asking throughout the day for more. One more vegetable you can add to the list of things your child will eat.

Children had a great time enjoying the outdoors this week as well.

Please read the following message about ticks.

With last week’s warm temperatures, ticks that were dormant have become active. Therefore, it is essential that parents begin checking their children for ticks at the end of the day. Please read the following important information from the Center for Disease Control and Prevention.

Check your clothing for ticks. Ticks may be carried into the house on clothing. Any ticks that are found should be removed. Tumble dry clothes in a dryer on high heat for 10 minutes to kill ticks on dry clothing after you come indoors. If the clothes are damp, additional time may be needed. If the clothes require washing first, hot water is recommended. Cold and medium temperature water will not kill ticks effectively.

Shower soon after being outdoors. Showering within two hours of coming indoors has been shown to reduce your risk of getting Lyme disease. Showering may help wash off unattached ticks and it is a good opportunity to do a tick check.

Check your body for ticks after being outdoors. Conduct a full body check upon return from potentially tick-infested areas, which even includes your back yard. Use a hand-held or full-length mirror to view all parts of your body. Check these parts of your body and your child’s body for ticks:

• Under the arms
• In and around the ears
• Inside belly button
• Back of the knees
• In and around the hair
• Between the legs
• Around the waist

What a special week we had! We started our friendship celebration week introducing a very special project. We call it “the mail box work.” This is a multi-step work used to strengthen pre-writing skills in our students while reinforcing the concept of care for others. The first step is to choose a friend’s picture. This helps the child to maintain the focus on the activity. Then the child chooses a piece of paper and creates a beautiful card for his/her chosen friend using large colorful crayons. The child then can ask one of the guides to help him/her write the name of the friend, fold it and place it inside the mail box. One of the details they liked a lot was making sure they put the flag up on the mailbox, so the mail carrier can deliver the cards. In this case I was the mail carrier! Children enjoyed making card after card for all of their friends! This was definitely the favorite activity of the week!

Another popular work this week was our new baby. We talked  and demonstrated the gentleness and care we need to have for our class baby. Through this work the children grow in their social skills and it teaches them how to process emotions, such as empathy and compassion, allowing them to grow up into caring people. It also  teaches them responsibility. We can’t wait to model for them how to give the baby a bath.

Preparing for Valentine’s Day children had a great time creating Love Bugs boxes. Peeling stickers is a great exercise to strengthen the hand muscles and refine the pincer grip needed for writing. They also made friendship bracelets using pipe cleaners and heart beads. They created heart and flowers shapes out of fruit using cookie cutters, shared the valentines they made for each of their friends, and celebrated together our beautiful friendship, enjoying the fruit salad they helped to prepare!

We hope everybody had a special Valentine’s day. Let’s keep the love flowing!

Dr. Maria Montessori introduced Practical Life exercises to provide the children with opportunities to perform simple tasks that they have already observed at home. Practical Life exercises enable the children to care for themselves, take care of the environment and develop respect for others.

Care of environment activities encourage children to interact with the environment, exhibiting respect and love. We believe that these activities help the children form a connection with the environment.

One example of a care of the environment activity is flower arrangement. This is a beautiful activity that offers so much to your child’s development. Through this exercise children develop a sense of beauty; the mental task of sequencing; they learn to exercise the judgment of size and capacity in matching flowers to vases and in pouring water; also, manual dexterity in using scissors. This activity also indirectly prepares your child for botany studies and offers a great opportunity to work on independence and concentration Your children love it! We can’t thank you enough for your weekly flower donations!

Preparing our environment for friendship month, children worked this week on creating beautiful heart suncatchers using tissue and contact paper. They seem to really enjoy sitting down and looking at this beautiful piece of art on our windows while watching the sun shining through them.

A new favorite language activity this week was learning the name of animals through sign language. Children learned how to say bunny, butterfly, cat, frog, pig, duck, mouse and dog. In math, children practiced associating little snowflakes to numerals 1-5 at the bottom of some colorful snow mittens. They also loved playing “I Spy” hunting for colors, shapes, and quantities of objects around the classroom.

As always we had a blast at the gym! This week we had group games using the parachute. We had so much fun while encouraging cooperative, non-competitive play and reinforcing turn-taking and sharing. Using the parachute, we worked on strengthening the shoulders, arms, and hand muscles. There were so many laughs and giggles!

They are three! This week we celebrated  Hayden’s and Ryder’s 3rd birthday. Kevin, their dad, joined the celebration. He chose two of their favorite books and read to the class. We celebrated the special moment with yummy vanilla cupcakes with chocolate frosting and sprinkles. Hayden baked the cupcakes and Ryder decorated them. Every morning Hayden’s and Ryder’s smiles as they enter our environment fill our hearts with happiness and we are so honored to see them blossoming and reaching their full potential during this stage of their lives!

On another note, we know that working on gross motor skills helps a child gain strength and confidence in his/her body. This week, children were fascinated with the idea of jumping distances with two closed feet. You could see them practice this skill all by themselves in different areas of the classroom and also create their own activities involving their friends. One of our students had the great idea to place the movement dots (which are usually used for a matching activity in the movement area) on the white line of our community rug and practice this skill. Other friends joined very quickly and they had a great time! As guides, we were delighted to see their independence and ability to create ways to fulfill their own needs! This is now a daily activity in our class and they love it!

A popular group activity this week has been “I Spy with My Little Eye,” either using oversized books or objects around the classroom. Through this activity, children learn adjectives, review colors, and shapes, and learn a great amount of new vocabulary. “Red Light, Green Light” is another one of the favorites, as is “Freeze Dance,” which was a daily request by all!

One of the most popular pieces of work this week has been the matching overlay picture to the wooden board work. We even had to add another board, so now children enjoy analyzing and finding the correspondent match of 16 colorful pictures. This will usually overwhelm a typical toddler, but that’s not the case with your children. This confirms for us how intense the sensitive period for language is that your children are experiencing. The trucks work was also a favorite. Your children now recognize the difference between excavator, steamroller, cement mixer, dump truck, forklift, and bulldozer.

Our Friendship Month has started and we can’t wait for all the fun we will have in our environment. We are also looking forward to talking with you about your child’s progress during our February conferences.

Parent Teacher Conferences will be on February 15 (1 pm start – last conference at 7:30 pm) and February 16 (7:30 am start and last conference at 11:30 am). Please schedule your appointment by 5:00 pm on Wednesday, February 14th.

If you would like to meet outside of the scheduled conference times, please email me directly and we can set up a mutually convenient time. In addition, if you would like to meet with one of our enrichment teachers, please email them directly to set up a time to meet. Enrichment teachers will be available for parent conferences on Thursday, February 15th from 1:00 pm to 6:00 pm and on Friday from 8:00 am to 11:30 am.

Please note that conferences are 20 minutes in length.  The block you reserve is a 30-minute block to give time for the teachers to make notations and prepare for the next conference. We thank you in advance for being punctual and adhering to the 20-minute limit.

As you know, food tasting was a big hit last week, so we created a few more activities to engage the children’s senses.

We made new sound shakers using recycled baby food jars. We covered all but the bottoms of the jars with tissue paper and glue so the children could focus on just the sounds the jars make when shaken. For those who were curious as to what was inside the jars, they could easily look through the bottoms to see rice, seashells, and flour. It was fun to see the children compare the loud and soft sounds of the rice and shells, and then wonder what was going on when they shook the flour jar!

Grating cinnamon has been another popular activity of late. Feeling the hard, curled cinnamon stick with their hands and gently touching the prickly metal grater has been a big draw. They also appreciate how hard they need to run the cinnamon stick over the grater to produce the form of cinnamon they are familiar with. Of course, the children also enjoy smelling the cinnamon after they have grated it.

Smelling jars filled with the scents of lavender, orange, and peppermint have also been received with excitement. The children gather around the table and LOVE when it is their turn to smell. As of now, they just enjoy smelling the scents and saying their names. Perhaps later in the year, we will be able to match scents to one another just by using our noses!