Sunnybrook Montessori School

The final workshop of a three part series will be held on Monday, November 18th at 7PM.  We will be exploring the materials in the Language Arts area of the classroom.  If you are interested in learning more about the Montessori Method and how the foundations of reading and writing are promoted in a Montessori classroom, we invite you to join us!

1.5 Professional Development hours will be earned by early educators.

Raking Leaves

painting with natural dyes

This week we continued to learn about Native Americans.  We have been learning a Native American Medicine Wheel Chant, so we took out the big drum and took turns beating out the rhythm.  We looked at photographs of pictographs and discussed how stories were passed down orally and were also recorded on cave walls and animal skins with drawings, as there are no Native American alphabet systems.  We discussed what they may have used to make their drawings, such as berries, animal blood, and dirt, as there were no paints available.  On Thursday the students used mashed blue and wild berries and tinted water made by boiling onionskins to paint on their clay tablets.

constructive triangles

bead work

alphabetizing the sandpaper letters

tracing circles

letter formation work

kindergarten students teaching numbers

naming animals

painting

peg board

sand garden and transfer work

string instrument nomenclature cards

ten board

Cabeza, Hombros, Piernes, Pies

During Spanish Zeanny continued to teach the names of many foods that could be used in stone soup.  She introduced us to the Cuban singer and dancer, Celia Cruz, and her music and we began learning how to salsa dance.  We are excited to show everyone during our Winter Performance!

naming the animals

turkey hats

short chains

sorting sounds

rolling out the new runner

cleaning time

John playing the guitar

On Thursday, John McCormick visited with his guitar.  He taught us the difference between playing a single note and a chord.  We counted all of the frets on the neck, and the six strings, three of which play high notes, and three that play low notes. Everyone was excited to have a turn strumming the strings. We sang several songs together, and are looking forward to another visit when we will get to sing Feliz Navidad, a popular request.

letter sounds

balloon rockets

Friday students had fun making balloon rockets and blasting them across the room taped to straws on a string.

releasing the balloon rocket

recording the experiment in the science notebooks

turkey song with Gerrie

Little Red Riding Hood Gerrie came to visit.  She brought hand cut outs which the students turned into turkeys then used to act out a poem about a turkey who goes wobble, wobble and says gobble, gobble, gobble.

landscapers raking up the leaves and composting them in the garden

Stone Soup

We continued to learn a bit about Native Americans this week and the tradition of passing a tribe’s history on through oral story telling.  Zeanny introduced this tradition by telling us a story about when she was a little girl at her Abuela’s house and how her family got together to cook a special soup with ingredients that everyone brought to share.  This story was the first of many stone soup stories about cooperation, generosity, and friendship that we will be reading over the next few weeks.  We were also introduced to the storyteller Pete Seeger, and read his version of the Stone Soup story.

number rods

slime in the sensory table

sound matching

stamp game

string instrument nomenclature

world map puzzle

papa caliente

During Spanish we began to learn the names of many foods, such as papa (potato), ajo (garlic), zanahoria (carrots), tomate (tomato), cebolla (onion), and pollo (chicken).  We had a lot of fun playing the game papa caliente (hot potato).

At the art table we made clay tablets, which we will paint with pictographs next week, in the style of the Native American pictographs found in caves and on animal hides.

block buildings

dice addition

golden beads

beaver skull

On Thursday we spent the morning at the library with Leah from the Appalachian Mountain Club.  She shared many animal pelts and skulls, including beaver, skunk, moose, bobcat, bear, and ermine, all of which we were able to hold and examine.  We discussed many features of different animals, such as the stripes on skunks acting as a warning for other animals to stay away.  Several students had the opportunity to “be” different animals by wearing various fabrics that looked like a beaver tail, an ermine in winter, and a bobcat.  We then used special animal track stamps to make animal track prints.

skunk pelt

animal fur

moose skull and antlers

Sillyness!

During our last week of October we began to talk about North America and the people that lived here before the arrival of Christopher Columbus, the Native Americans.  We learned from Zeanny that you could distinguish members from different tribes by how they wore the feathers in their hair.  We will continue to study North America and Native Americans throughout November.

strip board

string instrument 3 part cards

teen board

pegs

cylinder blocks

circle matching

bank game

bank game 2

alphabet puzzle

walking the line

sorting tray

At the art table we began to make a Thank You card to Sue for coming in to play her viola and violin.  We will finish it next week.  The kindergarten students completed their fall lap books.

zombie and princess potions

As this was Halloween week, we enjoyed singing and reading Halloween songs and stories.  We were excited for our costume party on Thursday!  We mixed up potions, made slime, colored crowns and pirate hats, cut out shadow puppets, and made Halloween art.  During circle me heard the story of Zeanny and the chocolate tree in her Abuela’s back yard, and mixed up some yummy hot chocolate to have with our Halloween treats.  It was such a fun day!

making hot chocolate

Halloween art

slime

shadow puppets

Halloween treats

Niez

During Spanish we continued to learn about the parts of the body.  We made a wacky monster with body parts all mixed up.  It was pretty hilarious to see his legs and feet coming out of the top of his head!

wacky monster

charting rainfall

Friday students learned a song about precipitation and condensation and monitored and graphed the rainfall during the day.  They set containers out in the morning, then measured the amount of rain each hour and recorded it in their science notebooks.

We did some drumming, and began to learn the rhythm of the “Medicine Wheel Chant,” a Native American drumming song, which we are planning to perform at the Winter Celebration in December.

This coming month we will be learning about oral storytelling traditions, making cave paintings, and enjoying our annual stone soup cooperative meal.

drumming