Our week was packed with lots of activity! Our group lessons focused on History and Biology this week. In History we continued learning about our closest fossil relatives and had lessons on Homo erectus, Homo neanderthalensis, and Home sapiens. In Biology we had a lesson about the vital function of sensitivity and learned which animals have nerve nets, ganglia, nerve cords, and brains.

We were fortunate to be gifted the raised garden planter which was purchased at the auction by Lydia’s family, and on Tuesday we planted some flowers and tasty herbs. A special thank you to Kristina and Brian for the gift!

On Thursday we were finally able to have our visits with the next level. The fourth graders welcomed some third grade friends to our classroom for the morning and they were wonderful mentors. The fifths were thrilled to visit middle school and had a great time going to math class, humanities, and science with their sixth grade peers.

We are excited to go on our big trip to Nature’s Classroom next week! Our group leader, Anna, has given us a wonderful variety of fun and educational activities to choose from. We had a class meeting, and after discussing our options, we chose some terrific ones to participate in while we are there.

Students should arrive at school between 8:00 and 8:10 on Tuesday. They can be dropped off in the back or, if you like, you can park in the front and walk them in. The bus will leave at 9:00. We will return in time for dismissal on Thursday. Please reach out with any questions about the trip.

Have a beautiful weekend!

We had a wonderful week working outdoors! We set up tables, chairs, and tents and moved our classroom outside for the week. True to form, upper elementary students adjusted quickly to the change and were quite impressive in their ability to focus on and complete their work. Yoga on the field was beautiful with the birds singing and the lovely morning breezes.

To end the week, we had our last sandwich making of the year for the St. Vincent DePaul Mission. Thank you to all of you for volunteering to bring ingredients throughout the year. This is an incredibly valuable experience for the children and they truly embrace the act of giving to those in need.

Next week we will get back to our normal classroom routine with lots of Montessori lessons and work before leaving for our big trip the following week.

This week in Biology, we continued to work with circulation while simultaneously reviewing respiration and nutrition in our vital functions of animals work. Students worked cooperatively to lay out the first three rows of a vital functions matrix. They enjoy doing this work together and are learning so much about the internal systems of animals. Our History work with Humans’ Closest Relatives this week focused on Australopithecines, extinct apes that lived between about 5 million and 1.5 million years ago. We experimented with knuckle walking during our lesson and quickly confirmed that our human bodies are not designed to move around this way! In math, in addition to our individualized lessons, fifth year students are focusing on multiplying binomials, using the bead materials to fully understand the process before moving away from materials. Fourth graders have continued their grammar work with adjectives. Fifth graders continue working with pronouns, this week rewriting a story which used no nouns, only pronouns, adding antecedents and detail. We all enjoyed listening to the fifth grade students share their creative pronoun stories with the class.

We have been working hard on our songs for the Grandparents Day video, “We Don’t Talk About Bruno,” and “Let It Be.” I must confess, I have a very hard time keeping my composure while listening to their beautiful voices singing. I can’t wait for you to hear them!

I hope to see you on Sunday evening at our gathering at Aquila’s Nest Vineyards! Look for the movie and pizza night silent auction item, hosted by yours truly.

Have a lovely weekend!

“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 the earth.” -Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

We had a great week of lessons and fun. We put the finishing touches on the garden box for the auction that we built and painted. With the help of Mrs. Reid we added a tree, using fingerprints for the leaves. I hope you can come to the auction on Sunday, May 1st and bid on this beautiful piece for your garden!

In recognition of Earth Day, we spent the afternoon cleaning up all of our outdoor spaces, picking up trash and beautifying our environment. This activity was greeted with excitement and enthusiasm, as is usually the case with this amazing group of humans.

In our Vital Functions of Animals lessons this week, we studied circulation. We learned that animals can have incomplete or complete circulatory systems and that complete circulatory systems can be either open or closed. We are in the process of studying the circulatory systems of the fourteen animals on our evolutionary strip. In History we learned about our closest fossil relatives. We learned that, according to fossil records, we have a closer relative than chimpanzees, Ardipithecus ramidis, “Ardi.” These are extinct apes that lived about 4.5 million years ago. In Grammar, fourth graders learned about two types of adjectives, interrogative and proper. Fifth graders learned about personal pronouns and their antecedents.

Have a wonderful weekend!

It was nice to get back to our regular work cycles and lessons this week! Fourth graders learned about proving the equivalence of a rhombus and a rectangle, first working with materials to prove equivalence sensorially, and then learning the elements that go into the formula for proving equivalence. They also learned to identify indefinite, demonstrative, and possessive adjectives. Fifth graders learned to multiply a binomial by a binomial, using numbers less than ten. They will continue with this work next week, using numbers larger than ten. This is in preparation for learning to find the square root of numbers. They also learned about special aspects of the adjective – the three degrees of quality, comparative, and superlative.

We enjoyed working on our gift for the auction this week with the help of our parent volunteer. Thank you, Kristina! The students built the garden bed and started painting it. They will put the finishing touches on it next week.

“Joy, feeling one’s own value, being appreciated and loved by others, feeling useful and capable of production are all factors of enormous value for the human soul.” -Maria Montessori

After three months of gathering information, interviewing family members, and writing research papers, the Autobiography Project is complete! Upper El students did an amazing job preparing and presenting their projects this week. They all seem to feel a real sense of accomplishment, seeing everything come together after so much focused work. They should all be very proud of themselves. As I watched each presentation, I noticed there was such a sense of joy among the students. We all enjoyed learning more about each other throughout this process. I hope you relished the opportunity this project provided to make connections and share details of your family’s history with your child. I am working on editing the video of presentations and will share it with you this weekend.

Please check your email for information about our overnight field trip to Nature’s Classroom coming up on May 24th through 26th. There are important documents to be filled out and returned to school which are coming home with students today.

Have a wonderful weekend!

Karen

We had a full week of putting the finishing touches on autobiographies. We will wrap up the editing and practice presentations at the beginning of next week and will be ready to record starting on Wednesday. I will send an email next week confirming the day each student will be presenting. They should plan on dressing in nice clothes for their presentation.

We were happy to welcome a new fifth grade friend to our class this week and would like to extend a warm “Welcome back!” to the Krueger family!

Thank you very much for your donations to our Brian Bags for The Brian O’Connell Homeless Project! The project’s website says, “We want to improve the world for everyone. We want to make life easier for those that are homeless by helping provide them with food and services. Our mission is to pass on aid in the name of Brian O’Connell who passed away while homeless. Everyone deserves access to basic necessities of life.” We spent our morning assembling twenty bags for the Project. The joy with which your children spend volunteering their time is inspirational, as always.

Wishing you a wonderful weekend!

Karen

 

“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

It has been a fun and busy week of wrapping loose ends up before break. We had lots of individual lessons, collaborative work,  and enjoyed a wonderful research presentation on the Amazon.

As we get ready to present autobiographies after we return from March break, the excitement in the classroom is building. During the last week of March, we will devote our work cycles to editing and finalizing papers and presentations, and recording. If students are not yet finished with papers, they will need to work on them over break. I am available during break to answer any questions and provide any needed help. I will be reading and editing  students’ docs over the next two weeks. I look forward to sharing the presentations with you at the end of our first week back!

I hope you all are able to spend some enjoyable and restful time with your beautiful children over the next two weeks!