My Own Montessori

Apples apples apples! It's Fall, and we love to spend a week learning all about apples at this time of year. We have drawn them, stamped them, counted them, tasted them, and cooked them, and so much more!

We've been back to school for a little while now, and our new friends are settling in beautifully, while our returning friends are helping everyone find their way.
At the beginning of the school year we teach lots of 'Grace and Courtesy' lessons - how to invite a friend to play, how to tap a teacher's shoulder for help, how to choose a work, roll a rug, or clean up a spill, and how to sneeze into an elbow, amongst many! All these lessons help set the tone of the classroom and soon that Montessori magic starts to take hold :-)

If you are learning about space, it's important to know about space travel and rockets and astronauts too. We built our very own rockets out of cardboard boxes, sent our own bottle rocket waaaay high into the sky, launched a balloon rocket across the yard, and created rocket ships from popsicle sticks! Lots of fun!

It's time for Summer School! This year we are learning all about Space! We've been having a super fun time learning all about the planets and the big star in the middle of our solar system :-)

Our afternoon (pre-k) class diligently counted each day of school until we reached 100! We celebrated with a fruit salad snack with 100 pieces of all kinds of fruit, and lots of special 100 day works. We made a list of 'things we would *love* 100 of which included strawberries, stickers, scoops of ice cream, penguins, halloweens in one day, Charlie Browns, horses, and hugs, and then things we would *not* be so thrilled with, like q-tips, spiders, jellyfish stings, and mosquito bites!

Our wonderful MOM community came together to spend a morning sprucing up our yard and school! We had a lot of fun and our sweet school looks amazing! Thank you everyone!

There is always something fun happening on the yard at MOM, whether we are stretching our gross motor skills, or decorating and hiding in boxes!

We love having visitors at MOM, and especially family members coming in to share about a special holiday or tradition that they celebrate. In November we welcomed M's Mom come and teach us all about Diwali, and more recently another family came and shared a lovely Slovenian tradition of creating intricate patterns on eggs with leaves and flowers, and then coloring them in onion skin dye to reveal beautiful patterns.

You might think this is just a pile of leaves, but nope, it's a nest full of eggs apparently!

The Montessori 100 Board is a hands-on wooden grid numbered 1 – 100, used to help children really see how numbers line up and build on each other. As children place the tiles in order, they start to see that math is full of patterns! It's a big work that might be completed over a number of days and when a child finishes it for the first time there's a moment of pride and accomplishment to be shared with friends!

We celebrated our 39th Stone Soup Lunch in November! The children all brought along a some vegetables to share and we spent the morning chopping and cooking. We made pumpkin hats and napkin rings, shook cream into butter, and re-told the Stone Soup story with the help of the MOM children. Our grown ups came to eat lunch with us and for the first time in many years we had to move inside because of the rain! Still, a wonderful time was had by all!