This week at Sunnybrook we had lots of artistic endeavors going on. Many of our students made paper sunflowers by tracing their hands on yellow paper then cutting them out to be the petals, painting paper towel rolls green for the stem and gluing sunflower seeds in the middle. These came out great and the children really enjoyed making them.
We also learned about the life cycle of a butterfly. We read Are You A Butterfly? and made a butterfly life cycle out of clay and next week we’ll be painting them. We talked about how caterpillars hatch from eggs, how they eat until their skins splits so they can grow, and we learned that moths hatch from cocoons and butterflies hatch from chrysalis. We’ll get to observe this over the next few weeks as we have five caterpillars we are watching that will (hopefully!) become painted lady butterflies.
Our afternoon students began working with Zeanny on Cinco de Mayo masks. They used brightly colored tissue paper and flour/water/glue to paper mache. When they are finished they are sure to be very festive!
At music we have been singing lots of songs about numbers such as, “This Old Man”, “28 Scoops of Ice Cream” and “10 Green and Speckled Frogs”.
Kindergarten/Friday students are working on independent science projects. They’ve been very busy finding out information about their subject, writing interesting facts they find, drawing pictures, making life cycles and clay models. We are in need of shoe boxes for dioramas and science boards if anyone would like to donate!
Thank you for the donations of sidewalk chalk, bubbles, sand toys and sand! We had a great time outside this week.
You’re invited to a special Montessori workshop by Gerry Tobin to be held at Sunnybrook Montessori School on Monday, April 30th at 7 PM.
This workshop will focus on the Montessori approach to language instruction. The workshop is open to the public. Parents considering a preschool or kindergarten placement for next school year are highly encouraged to see this critical part of the Montessori method in action.
Refreshments courtesy of the Polish Princess Bakery. Free babysitting during the workshop is available with advance sign-up. Please send an to e-mail Lyn.Schmucker@gmail.com to arrange.
The school is located at 129 Main Street in Lancaster (across the street from the library).
April 22 to 28 is Week of the Young Child, a time when we can reach out in our communities to help young children. Sunnybrook Montessori School is celebrating this special week with a Welcome Spring event on Saturday, April 28th from 10 AM to Noon. It will be held at the school on 129 Main Street in Lancaster. There will be music by Katie Rose, storytime with Ronnie Zajac, treats provided by Polish Princess Bakery, and lots of fun games and activities for young children in our community. There will be guided tours of the school too, for any parents interested in learning more about Sunnybrook’s unique curriculum for preschool and kindergarten.
For more information, call Sunnybrook Montessori School at 788-3884
We’ve been learning about the parts of the tree and talking about maple sugaring. Many children made beautiful tree books, cutting out pictures of the tree and matching labels to the shaded portion: leaves, branches, roots and trunk. We learned that cold nights and warm days make sap run, that about 40 gallons of sap equal 1 gallon of maple syrup and that you can’t tap a tree that is too old or too young. We learned that sap keeps the trees from freezing in the winter and did an experiment freezing plain water and sugared water to see what happens. See if your child remembers the difference in freezing between the plain water and the water with sugar.
We’ve also talked about Spring and enjoyed reading books about hatching ducks and planting sunflowers. We learned about the life cycle of a sunflower and on Thursday everyone got the chance to plant their own sunflower seed. Hopefully they will sprout and we can watch them begin to grow!
The children were excited about Easter and enjoyed some Easter practical life activities. We put different beans, beads and grains in plastic Easter eggs and matched them by sound, we enjoyed Easter play dough cutters and a Easter bunny peg board to practice fine motor skills.
On Wednesday we blew through straws and experimented with how much force was needed to move different objects. We realized it was easy to move feathers, beads, cotton balls or anything light but it was much harder to move heavier objects. The children realized if they had a partner (or two, or three) they were able to move the heavier objects when they blew through their straws together.
We then used our straws to blow around food coloring on some paper eggs and made the most beautiful Easter eggs!
During music we’ve been singing, performing a Spring pantomime, going on “A Bear Hunt” and working on some folk dancing!
