“For every exit, there is also an entrance.” -Trenton Lee Stewart, The Mysterious Benedict Society

Upper El students have had a fun week of preparations for our Winter Concert. This group of students worked incredibly hard and showed what amazing leaders they are during our practices as well as the performance, as we welcomed families and friends back to our Winter Concert tradition after two years without being able to gather as a whole school community.

A colleague stopped by the class towards the end of the week and remarked at how amazing it was that the children were so focused on their work. They worked on geometry, spelling, history, and reading comprehension assignments and they started putting finishing touches on their personal narratives. They also had grammar lessons and worked on follow up work for those lessons. Fifth years spontaneously decided to collaborate with each other on their grammar assignment and some included characters from each other’s story in their own. They are looking forward to sharing their stories with the class.

Thank you to all who sent in goodies for our class party! A big thank you for all of your support throughout the year. It is not by chance that this is such an amazing group of humans. We feel very fortunate to be guiding these incredible students and we are grateful to you for placing them in our care.

Wishing you joyful and peaceful holidays filled with love,

Karen and Angie

“An education capable of saving humanity is no small undertaking; it involves the spiritual development of [the human], the enhancement of [their] value as an individual, and the preparation of young people to understand the times in which they live.” -Maria Montessori

We were active and engaged this week! Individually, we continued to make great progress in our math lessons and work. In geometry, fourths learned about the difference between congruent, similar, and equivalent plane figures. Fifths learned formulas for finding the area of a rectangle and inverse formulas for finding the base or the height when given the area. Our history study of human evolution continued with the children adding information and illustrations to our class timeline of humans, and we began researching Homo neanderthalensis. In our language lesson this week, students learned the rules for capitalization and are now working on editing passages for capitalization errors. We also squeezed in some time to plant 52 flower bulbs in our garden beds!

After a week of hard work and lessons in math, geometry, history, and language, we spent Friday morning serving the greater community by making sandwiches for the St. Vincent DePaul Mission in Waterbury. This work is aligned with this age group’s grace and courtesy work of caring for others by being conscious of their needs and taking action to support them. Thank you to all who contributed ingredients for the sandwiches! These awesome students are getting very efficient at making sandwiches and I think we will increase our bread supply next month so we can make even more!

Wishing you an lovely weekend,

Karen and Angie

“This system in which a child is constantly moving objects with [their] hands and actively exercising [their] senses, also takes into account a child’s special aptitude for mathematics. When they leave the material, the children very easily reach the point where they wish to write out the operation. They can thus carryout an abstract mental operation and acquire a kind of natural and spontaneous inclination for mental calculations.” -Maria Montessori

Happy December! The first few months of school have gone by so fast! We had a wonderful Thanksgiving celebration last week. Thank you to Raquel for helping us bake bread! Our pumpkin bread and cranberry orange bread came out delicious. We made enough to enjoy as a class on Monday and share with the school community on Tuesday.

Throughout their elementary years, Montessori students master math procedures and develop conceptual understanding of math concepts at a deep level. This is because their work begins concretely, with the use of carefully designed materials, before moving to the abstract. Their individualized work in the Montessori math curriculum prepares them for their later work in middle school and high school. But the benefits of Montessori don’t stop there. Students experience joy in this work. They look forward to tackling challenging problems instead of shying away from them. This week has been full of enthusiastic students participating in new math lessons, with everyone moving onto new concepts in their individualized work.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend,

Karen and Angie

“As we observe children, we see the vitality of their spirit, the maximum effort put forth in all they do, the intuition, attention and focus they bring to all life’s events, and the sheer joy they experience in living.” -Maria Montessori

An observer of our Upper Elementary classroom would see most of the children collaborating on their work; this is intentional. Montessori elementary communities are designed to support this collaboration because it is recognized as a need for this age group. Elementary children crave interaction, not just in a purely social setting, but also in organized groups where they are focused on a goal with their peers. At this age, children form strong attachments to friends and want to be surrounded by their peers. For this reason, most of their work is collaborative, with the exception of when they are working on individualized skills. This is also the phase for “acquisition of culture” (Montessori). This is one reason why there is such a strong focus on learning about how people throughout history have contributed to society. The children assimilate this new knowledge about history as they are learning to contribute to their own world, classroom and beyond.

There is a great energy in the air the week leading up to a holiday. These children managed to harness that energy this week and put it into their work. They had great focus, working on assignments and research together. They were quite busy with math and vocabulary lessons and assignments as well as their collaboration on our class timeline of humans.

I’m really proud of these students for their leadership in our school community, leading the way with our composting program. Each day, two Upper El students went around to each classroom and collected their food scraps from the day and deposited them in our composting bin. Each day we saw increased participation throughout the school. Way to go Upper El! I leave you with this poem, spontaneously written by Cecelia.

Composting

Composting is good
You can compost wood

What can you compost?
Not a steel post

Wood chips, wood chips, you can compost that
But maybe not a big wet hat

Remember to compost every single day
And after you do, say “Yay!”

“We stand now where two roads diverge. But unlike the roads in Robert Frost’s familiar poem, they are not equally fair. The road we have long been traveling is deceptively easy, a smooth superhighway on which we progress with great speed, but at its end lies disaster. The other fork of the road – the one less traveled by – offers our last, our only chance to reach a destination that assures the preservation of earth.” -Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

Last week Upper Elementary students viewed the documentary, Kiss the Ground, a film that explains how we can stabilize Earth’s climate by drawing down atmospheric carbon using regenerative farming. We were all inspired by this film to take action. The following is the message Upper El students wrote to our school community.

Dear Fraser Woods Montessori Community,

As a class, we want to do our part to begin to take steps to help reverse climate change. Our first initiative is to create a composting program at Fraser Woods.

This week, we worked together with Mr. Fuchs to build a school compost bin. The bin is located beside the dumpster. We would like you to participate by saving your food scraps each day at snack and lunch. We will come around each day after lunch to collect the scraps and deposit them into the bin. These scraps will break down and become rich soil instead of releasing methane gas into our atmosphere.

Examples of things that CAN be composted are:

• raw fruits and vegetables
• egg shells
• tea bags (with the string removed)
• coffee grounds
• unbleached paper products
• wood/lawn scraps

Examples of things that CANNOT be composted are:

• processed food
• dairy
• meat

If you are interested in learning more about our inspiration, we invite you to watch the documentary, Kiss the Ground.

Thank you for helping us do our part to take care of our planet!

Sincerely,

Students of the Upper Elementary Class

 

Have a wonderful weekend,

Karen and Angie

We had a lively week of celebrations, lessons, and sandwich making.

Our week started with an enjoyable day of Halloween celebrations. We began the day with a costume parade around the field to the amusement of the Toddler and Primary children. After our parade, we joined Kindergarten, Lower El, and Middle School for FWM Monthly, a meeting run by our eighth graders each month. After our meeting, we returned to our room for our class party. Thank you to all who contributed yummy treats for our celebration! In the afternoon we had a great time scooping and carving our pumpkins.

The middle of our week was packed with lessons and classwork. In Biology, we continued with our Vital Functions of Plants lessons. This week we learned about the needs of the plant. In History, students collaborated on research of Homo habilis. Next week they will present their research to the class and begin a class timeline of the evolution of humans. They will then work on research of Homo erectus. In Geometry, the fourth graders learned about key parts of polygons and the fifth graders learned to prove equivalence of a trapezoid to two different rectangles. Individualized math lessons were in abundance this week, as well as collaborative work on vocabulary and reading comprehension.

Perhaps the highlight of the week was the end. On Friday we spent the morning enthusiastically making sandwiches for the St. Vincent DePaul Mission in Waterbury. This mission “support[s] and empower[s] people experiencing poverty, [housing insecurity], hunger, and mental health challenges so they may recover with dignity and develop sustainable solutions for a brighter future.” (svdpmission.org) This is a monthly activity in Upper El and is work that the children love. Maria Montessori’s vision was of a peaceful world, created through children. With this in mind, we intentionally plan lessons and spend time teaching our students to care for the Earth and its inhabitants. Our monthly community service work helps students become caring, empathetic people who think beyond themselves and feel the joy of giving.

“I have found that among its other benefits, giving liberates the soul of the giver.” -Maya Angelou

“Writing, to me, is simply thinking through my fingers.” -Issac Asimov

We start each morning with quiet writing time. We warm up for writing with a journal entry and then move into our personal narrative writing time. We are learning the stages of writing a personal narrative: prewriting, first draft, revising, editing, and publishing. Most students are finishing up their first drafts and are working on revising them. They will edit next, first with a peer and then with a teacher, before moving on to publishing. This has become a very pleasant way to enter into our work cycle each morning and provides a nice bridge between our arrival activities of recess-yoga-read aloud, and the work cycle. We are finding that this quiet writing time really settles the children and prepares them to have a focused work time.

We had two highlights of our week. The first was a fabulous snare drum presentation by one of our fifth graders who recently joined a fife and drum corps. The second was the fire safety presentation by the Botsford Fire Department. They demonstrated what to do if there is a fire in your house, how to feel for heat from a fire on a closed door, and how to get out of the house safely. They also showed us how smoke moves through a house and we got to sit in their fire truck and ask questions about the equipment inside the truck. The presentation ended with a demonstration and explanation of all of the gear a firefighter wears and how to operate a fire extinguisher.

During our short, but productive week we had our first student-led, Upper El Community Meeting, lessons, and our first Eighth grade-led monthly meeting of the year.

During our Upper El community meetings, the fifth graders lead. They consult our class binder to set the agenda and lead us through the meeting steps of: stating the problem as a question, brainstorming solutions, openly discussing options as a class, and taking a vote on the final solution. Teacher involvement during our meetings consists of note-taking, occasionally contributing to the open discussion, and recording the results of the vote. The fifth graders did an amazing job! They kept the class on topic, moved us from one step to another, and facilitated a very productive meeting. We are looking forward to many more meetings throughout the year!

In history we are learning about early human cultures. This week we learned about Homo habilis who lived 2.4 million to 1.4 million years ago in Eastern and Southern Africa. Over the next week students will work in small groups to research more information about the Habilenes to share with the class and add to our Timeline of Humans. In biology we learned about the concept of taxonomy and the classification system used to label and study plants and animals. Students will use this information in future botany research as we study the vital functions of plants this year.

Our week ended with our October Birthday Breakfast and the first monthly eighth grade-led meeting. Upper El students had a great time gathering with first through eighth graders to hear highlights from each level, Lower El through Middle School, and play an energetic game of Freeze Dance.

Have a wonderful weekend,

Karen and Angie