Sunnybrook Montessori School

The students dropped ink onto water then swirled it before placing sheets of paper on top to absorb the ink, creating marbled paper, a Japanese process called suminagashi.

During sign language Rose pointed to alphabet signs to spell out names, and the children “read” the letters as she pointed to them to figure out whose name was being spelled. She introduced some water signs, including ocean, sea, pond, lake, and river and we reviewed the ocean creature signs and learned crab, which is similar to lobster but just with two fingers pinching rather than all the fingers. She signed the song “Once I Caught a Fish Alive,” which we have been singing a lot lately. To finish up she read the Gerald and Piggy story Are You Ready to Play Outside?

We did some dancing to Octopus’ Garden and Yellow Submarine by the Beatles, which we were informed is the favorite band of several students. They had lots of fun dancing beneath the waves with their friends. We revisited our discussion of reflecting on our experiences with a game of race to your favorite place. The children all moved to their favorite areas of the classroom and shared what they liked about that area.

We have been reading St. Patrick’s day stories and the children were getting excited for a potential leprechaun visit. In keeping with the St. Patrick’s day theme Makenna introduced green fun foam made with shaving cream, cream of tartar, and green food coloring, which was a fabulous sensory experience.

Wednesday afternoon children used their brainpower to design and set leprechaun traps in hopes that a leprechaun would visit the classroom to steal the gold they set as bait and get stuck in a trap and then would lead them to his pot of gold.

St. Patrick’s Day morning was a most exciting experience, as a leprechaun did indeed visit the classroom. The children found gold dust and little green leprechaun footprints through the classroom leading to all the traps. The children excitedly checked their traps, but alas he was not in any of them. They followed the footprints all around the room, over and under the traps, and out the double doors at the back end of the room where it was decided he exited. After searching and searching we found that he had dropped his bag of gold, which the children dumped out, sorted, counted, and distributed evenly.

Makenna gave a brief history of the origin of St. Patrick’s Day in honor of St. Patrick who drove the snakes out of Ireland. She introduced Irish music, which was quick and lively and featured violins/fiddles, guitars, and drums. She showed some videos of an Irish music group playing music, then some others with some Irish bagpipe players. We learned about the parts of the bagpipe and how it is played. She then showed some Irish step dancing and gave us a quick lesson for how to keep our hands still at our sides or behind our backs and jumping/dancing by just moving our feet. Everyone was pretty worn out after dancing through two songs! She then introduced a craft activity of leprechaun lookers that the children could make and use to look for leprechauns. Finally, she shared some tasty Irish soda bread she made, topped with butter or blackberry jam.

We celebrated a sixth birthday. The birthday boy was born in the last days of winter in the month of March. He invited a friend to race around the earth with him before sharing tasty banana bread with everyone for snack.

Kindergarten students chose their own work, continued working on their newspaper article information and interview questions, designed and built Leprechaun traps, did some reading, and when they sat down to work on Thursday found a letter from Leprechaun Sean balled up on the table. In his letter he asked them to take good care of his gold and tell him how they had found it, so they each wrote their own letters with their own versions of how the gold was found.

The temperatures continued to increase through the week, from perfect snowman snow to melting snow and ice on our playground, creating fabulous slushy puddles, great alligator swamps, slushy slush for all kinds of play, and MUD! The children used hammers to break down some decomposing stumps and use the pieces to create some interesting concoctions.

Fish art was on the menu for Monday. The children drew their own fish then colored and painted them before cutting out a double set, stapling them together, stuffing them with crumpled paper to make it puffy, then hanging them from the ceiling for our classroom ocean.

The children worked with Michelle to mix up some homemade kinetic sand in the sensory table. They had so much fun digging, scooping, and hauling it with cups and trucks.

Rose read and signed the Gerald and Piggy story I am a Frog about playing pretend with your friends. When Piggy and Gerald disagreed about whether Gerald could pretend to be a frog all the children signed either “Yes, you can!” with Piggy or “No, I can’t” with Gerald. She then read, signed, and sang the alphabet forward then BACKWARDS, wow was that tricky. She introduced several fish and ocean signs, including fish, shark, octopus, and lobster.

Henrietta and Wolfgang introduced reflecting on things to examine what worked well and what didn’t and how things could stay the same and/or change to improve. They shared some examples of interactions they noticed in the classroom and the children reflected and discussed what could happen differently the next time. We read Two by Kathryn Otoshi, about how left out two feels when one and three start to play together and how all the numbers begin to take sides. We reflected back on earlier in the year when that would sometimes happen at school and how the students had worked to change that and play together to include everyone.

String instruments were introduced on Thursday. We read Berlioz the Bear by Jan Brett then showed the students a variety of string instruments. We recalled that percussion instruments are played by banging or striking two objects together or against something to make a sound and discussed how string instruments make music when their strings are plucked or strummed. Makenna demonstrated how to play a ukelele, guitar, zither, lyre, and violin before playing and singing a couple of fun songs. First she played and sang the theme song to Scooby Doo then introduced Johnny Cash with “I’ve Been Everywhere,” which was a huge hit and amazing to hear her sing all the cities so quickly in succession! The children were clapping and stomping and moving their bodies. The children took turns through the next two days playing the ukeleles and zithers with lessons from Makenna. They requested more songs, which she willingly performed while they accompanied her on their instruments.

Our study of fish has expanded to include other ocean creatures so we looked at some other animal toys that are mammals or cephalopods or crustaceans. We checked out some real formerly but no longer living things from the ocean, including star fish, sand dollars, sea urchins, a cow fish, lots of mollusk shells (seashells), seaweeds, rock crabs, horseshoe crab, spider crabs, a variety of corals, mermaid purses (egg casings for sharks, skates, and rays), bony fish heads, and a sea sponge. The children took turns carefully holding an item and showing it around the group.

Outside play changed from ice to water and back to ice with the temperature fluctuations, but the mud made an appearance almost every day.

Kindergarten students were busy. They did some fish addition, tossing their fish in the pond, then adding up the yellows and oranges. The sh sound was taught then they sorted shells either by their type, shape, size, color, or texture then did an sh word to picture match. Newspaper reporting was introduced after reading the story Dear Mrs. LaRue about Ike, a dog who had been sent to obedience school, which was reported in the newspaper. We talked about how newspapers are responsible for reporting actual events, using How, Why, What, When, Where, and Who and interviewing people who were involved to get information. Each student recorded how and who they were going to write about, and some began to expand into when and where and why. They will work on this article over the next several weeks and months. They will identify one person to interview and determine some interview questions to ask. They will then compile their data, then write an article. It will be edited then typed up to include a Sunnybrook Kindergarten Newspaper. Thursday afternoon was a super short kindergarten time as we were so engrossed in our underwater sea creature exploration, so they did some quick sight word fishing, with some scaffolding from the more advanced readers helping them read the words they caught.

Friday morning we began to explore water. First we read the book The Wonder Thing and the children tried to solve the mystery of what was being described and shown through the book. A student finally guessed water and we reviewed the story to see if it matched. Is it high above the peaks, under melting snow, down the sheer mountainside, through the lilting rainforest, out in the tangy sea, precious as air, powerful as rock, and gentle as kisses? Yes! We did the parachute and bounced some fish and a shark, raced for our slippers, then played Great White Shark. The children then explored sink and float by taking turns picking items, predicting whether they would sink or float, then recording the material they were made of, plastic, rubber, glass, metal, or wood, under the appropriate column.

Henri Matisse is known both for the paintings he made in his early years and the cut out paper art later in life, particularly the well known piece “Le Garbe.” We read The Iridescence of Birds and Henri’s Scissors, about his youth and early love of art inspired by his mother, and the end of his life when he began to create paper cut outs. The students then got busy cutting and pasting to create their own paper cut out art pieces.

Rose began sign language with the alphabet song while a student pointed to each letter as we sang it. She read the Piggy and Gerald book There’s a Bird on My Head, which was quite hilarious. Rose then introduced signs for parts of the body, including head, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, neck, shoulders, heart, legs, knees, and toes. We then sang and signed “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.”

Students have been particularly creative in their fort, castle, and hide-out block constructions this week. We brought a large piece of cardboard in for a roof, as they really needed some protection from the elements and spying eyes.

We sang, read, and acted out several animal stories before refreshing our memories about which characteristics make different animals a reptile, bird, or mammal, then the children took turns selecting animals and sorting them by which class they belong to.

Makenna brought Ukelarry to school and the children had so much fun listening and singing along to “Kookaburra Sits in the Old Gum Tree,” “In the Jungle,” “Five Green and Speckled Frogs,” “You Are My Sunshine,” “If You’re Happy and You Know It,” and “Banana Fanna.”

The weather was pretty crazy with ups and downs, from single digits then into the fifties and back to a frozen ice land, we had quite the weather ride this week!

Kindergarten students did some reading, sight word roll to the top, hundred board building and writing, and other literacy and math work of their choosing. They were introduced to adjectives and created some silly sentences before drawing a picture and writing a descriptive sentence about it. To wrap up the week they invited younger students to join them for a pirate treasure hunt. Each team had a tracking sheet where they would document their loot, adding up the gems and coins in their treasure boxes. Each team also had a map to mark where their treasures were hidden. They took turns plundering the big treasure box, placing the treasure in their own treasure chests, hiding them, and marking where they were hidden on their map. Their partners then used the map to find the treasure, bring it back, and add up and document their plundered loot.

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Monday students took a field trip upstairs to check out the stained glass windows in the chapel. They looked at the beautiful pictures and chose their favorites, noticing the black metal connecting the colored glass pieces. The students used colored cellophane and black paper to create their own stained glass type windows, which look particularly lovely when the sun shines through.

During sign the children each found the first letter in their first name on our ASL alphabet caterpillar. They sang and signed some songs and Rose signed and read the Piggie and Gerald story The Thank You Book.

We continued our conversations around negative and positive thoughts. Makenna did superhero stretches then we read the story Your Thoughts Matter by Esther Pia Cordova, about Romy, a girl who has two invisible companions, Growi and Fixi. Fixi is unkind and says harsh things to Romy when she makes mistakes or is trying to do something new. Growi is encouraging and says kind things to help Romy feel better about giving new things a try and forgiving herself for mistakes. We learned that everyone has these types of friends and words in their heads, and everyone agreed they much preferred Growi, who was kind and encouraging, and who we would want to listen to.

There was a box of Sunnybrook T-shirts, and anyone who wanted one could have one to put on. They were all the same size to make sure it was equal, so everyone got the same shirt. They decided that they might work for Makenna or Lyn (well, too small for Lyn) but they were way too big for everyone else. Lyn and Makenna wear glasses, so everyone got to take a turn wearing glasses to make it equal, but the children decided that they didn’t help them see better, so even though it was equal, it wasn’t what they needed. We talked about equal vs fair, and that fair is when each person gets what that person needs, which is not always equal.

The ribbon sticks came out for some fancy dancing. Some Cuban music inspired some hip swaying and ribbon twirling moves that kept some children moving for quite a while!

Kindergarten students enjoyed reading, choosing their own math and literacy work, cutting, sorting, alphabetizing and reading rhyming words, and learning odd vs even numbers and counting by 2’s.

We celebrated a sixth birthday with the birthday girl who was born in the middle of winter in the month of February. After she quickly orbited the sun through the seasons she asked each child whether they would like a pink unicorn cupcake or a yellow one.

Friday scientists did some deep breathing to bring oxygen into our bodies, but once it is in our lungs, how does it get to our brains and our toes and our fingers and our muscles? We placed our hands on our chests to feel our heartbeats, then found our pulse on our wrists and necks. The children took turns tossing a heart beanbag onto a heart with a picture of a different exercise, then we all did the exercises together. When we were all done exercising we felt that our hearts were beating faster and our breathing was a bit heavier. We talked about how the heart pumps the blood out to the lungs where it collects oxygen then comes back to the heart to be pushed out into the body and back through arteries and veins. We looked at a model heart, the size of a human fist, and we all made a fist to see how big our hearts are. We watched a couple of brief videos about the heart and the circulatory system, then took turns “pumping” the blood with our heart “pumping” bottles.