This week we embarked on our first library trip of the year. We practiced our library manners, enjoyed a fall story hour and made leaf rubbing pictures. It was a great way to spend a rainy morning.

Popular activities this week included: using pumpkin spiced play dough and pumpkin cookie cutters, practicing letter sounds, counting, sorting, stringing beads, building words, doing geography puzzles and making numbers 11-19 with the Teen Board.

At circle we enjoyed stories about apple picking, made a “spiderweb” with some yarn and took turns being the spider crawling through the web. We also read “Our Peaceful Classroom” which is a book about attending a Montessori school. The illustrations are done by Montessori children from around the world. It’s a beautiful book and we had fun seeing the similarities between our classroom and the classrooms in the illustrations.

The Friday students have been busy, busy! They have started making their own geography maps and we’ve been reading about South America together. So far, they’ve been interested in learning about the animals in South America so we’ve read about spectacled bears, anacondas, piranhas, jaguars, poison dart frogs and capybaras. We’re practicing our handwriting and writing down important facts we find in “Geography Journals.” They’ve also been enjoying the Bank Game.

The Bank Game:

“The Bank” (Bead Material)

Golden Beads are a great tool to introduce the children to the decimal system and understand unit quantities of ten, hundreds and thousands. A single bead equals one unit, ten beads strung on a wire indicates ten, one hundred is indicated by 10 bars side by side (which makes a square) and one thousand is ten one hundreds stacked on top of one another to make a cube. In our bank game the children go back and forth to the “bank” to exchange their quantities. For example if a child counts that they have 10 units, they may go to the bank to exchange them for 1 ten. If they count that they have 10 hundreds they may go to the bank to exchange them for a thousands cube. The Golden Beads and the small and large number cards allow the children to perform simple addition with really BIG numbers. Due to missing small number cards we used the large number cards in the pictures below.

Outdoor balance beam fun!
Forgot to post these a couple weeks ago.