Montessori Villa of The Woodlands

Ages 2.5-6
11:10 am - After children arrived we changed from our rain boots to normal shoes and hung up our raincoats. Though all of this is work, children began choosing their invidious lessons around 9:20/9:30 am.

We replicated our classroom news period via zoom this morning. This was our 3rd successful Zoom! Thank you parents for your patience and support.

This week as children received a how to make a bird clip art and the previous build a bird feeder video we decided to add Rockin’ Robin to our collection of music. We sang this piece last spring as well.

Thank you to our lovely community of parents, grandparents and teachers. We cannot express our gratitude enough. Thank you for your kindness and support.

Together we will get through this.

Welcome to our class Muncher!

For the last few weeks we have been learning about metamorphosis.

We’ve had five caterpillars in the class and just yesterday a few of them transformed into beautiful Monarch butterflies! Truly a real life experience for the children to observe this beautiful life cycle.

Today we set the butterflies free.

Happy Birthday Adam.

The traditional birthday celebration for children in a Montessori classroom includes the “Walk Around the Sun,” a powerful, special, and educational Montessori tradition. The basic form is used by Montessori Villa: to place a lit candle or yellow circle in the center of the class floor to represent the sun, while the birthday child’s classmates form a large circle, or an ellipse, on the floor surrounding the candle, to represent the Earth’s orbit. The birthday child holds the continent globe and begins to walk a circle around the sun, while her classmates surrounding him, sing.

Classmates of the birthday child help count and talk about significant stages or developments that happen in each year. Ms. Naushaba notes the tradition is extra meaningful when a child brings photos of themselves at each year for their teacher to share with the class as they circle. We lay down the months of the year around the sun, allowing the birthday child to start their walk on their birth month and step from month to month as she circles the sun.

In addition the birthday child brings treats from home (if he wishes) to share with his classmates and a book for his classroom library.

Reading and writing are sometimes taken for granted by adults who have mastered the skills—but looking at them from a child’s perspective, they are skills of Herculean difficulty.
Literacy is a complicated, integrative process that involves the association of symbols with sounds, sounds with words, and words with ideas. It means learning to fluidly encode ideas into symbols and decode symbols into ideas. On top of everything, it involves acquiring complex physical production skills, such as the fine motor skills involved in writing with a pen or pencil.
The Montessori approach uses a distinct set of practices that nurture a positive, natural learning experience to teach reading and writing. The Montessori curriculum is thoughtfully built around teaching children the many elements of reading and writing one by one, in a way accessible to and enjoyable by a child.
Here are a few of the steps in the sequence used in a Montessori environment to ensure that children master literacy with joy.
Children in a Montessori environment learn to write first, before they learn to read. This approach is organic, as children are able to put the letters for the sounds they know together into a word before they are ready to interpret and string together the sounds of a word on a page. Children begin learning the letter sounds using sandpaper letters, which incorporate the sense of touch to further reinforce learning. While the child learns the letter sound, they trace the letter with their fingers on a textured sandpaper inscription of the letter, learning the strokes used eventually to write that letter on paper.
Once a child has mastered the sounds associated with each letter, she'll be shown the moveable alphabet, which will allow her to easily put letters together, sounding them out to spell simple, then progressively more complex, words. Children love to move, and learn by doing. They learn best by physically interacting with the world, so why not take advantage of their natural tendencies to do so? The moveable alphabet allows children to begin “writing”—even before they develop the fine-motor skills to control a pencil.
Writing is a hands-on process, and the Montessori approach fully leverages the fact that children are naturally hands-on learners. In the Montessori classroom, children develop hand strength early on during activities that encourage use of the “pincer grip”, such as the cylinder blocks. The hand position used to pick up the blocks is the same as the one used in holding a pencil.
Teaching children to read and write at Montessori Villa is an incredibly rewarding experience. Our guides follow your child through these and other steps, guiding them through a process carefully designed to encourage enthusiastic producers and consumers of the written word. We take pride in growing these fundamental roots of each child's education—the foundation that will support their learning for the rest of their lives.

Alaia
Age 3.5

Sew Fantastic 🧵

Not pictured or recorded both children threaded the needle and tied a knot.