This Week in the Tulip Room

The “bill” simulation this week was a hit! The children were able to pass several bills, a

few died in the house and others were vetoed by the president. It was so fun, they didn’t

want to stop.

With the winter holidays we begin our series on letter writing with a letter to Santa, then

friendly letters and as is often the follow up, a letter to someone you admire, often being

persons of fame with a request for an autograph, it was letter writing palooza this week!

Beginning our December holiday season was St. Nicolas day, we were lucky enough to

take a “trip” to Brussels with a real Belgian tour guide. We learned about some

landmarks, food, language and culture. We also made Belgian waffles and celebrated

St. Nicolas day as the Belgian elementary children would by having a party with board

games.

In the following weeks we will explore the holidays of Los Posadas, Hanukkah &

Christmas.

LOTS OF CALENDAR Reminders

For the next few weeks we will continue our emphasis on thankfulness and giving to

others. We will be collecting new mittens and gloves to donate to a local charity. Our

elementary class is challenging the school to bring in as many gloves as we did food

items! This amounts to 265 gloves or 5 gloves per student! Wow! We are aware that we

might not make this goal but if we challenge ourselves great things are possible! As of

today the count is 85 pairs of gloves! WOW!

On Friday, December 14th the Tulip room will be visiting Greenwood Villages South and

caroling the residents and delivering ornaments that have been made by extended care.

We will need a couple of chaperones/drivers but all parents are welcome to come. We

will have a rehearsal performance on December 12th at school, performing for the

primary room.

We will also be taking a field trip to the Scottish Rite Cathedral to see The Nutcracker

December 21st at 7:30 p.m. The school will cover the cost of the ticket for your

elementary child and you may purchase additional tickets at $12 each for you, yourself,

friends or family members. These tickets do need to be ordered in advanced and can be

done so with Ms. Brenda and must be done by December the 7th (please RSVP your

student by then as well). We are very excited for this opportunity!

During this season of giving we wish to request that in lieu of holiday gifts for the

teachers we ask that anyone interested in purchasing a gift, focus on gifts for the

classroom!

Our classroom could use:

Gift cards/certificates to

Jo-Ann fabrics

United Art & Education

Teachers pay teachers (website)

The Container Store

Ikea

We could always use these supplies as well:

Erasers

Pencils

Loose leaf paper

Construction paper

Colored pencils

Dry erase markers

Scissors

Cotton yarn

Crochet needles (g or h)

Latch hooking set

Fabric scraps

Ribbon

Poster board (medium sized)

Mark your calendars now! A Walk through math presentation will be held on january

24th at 6:30 pm put this one your calendars now, its a chance to see how your children

use the different math materials!

The children are lucky to have materials that have multi uses and can cross over during

their years in different aged classroom. How nice it is to see them seek out these

familiar materials in their first few months in the elementary classroom and begin to see

how these materials have even more new & exciting things to be discovered in them.

Such is the case with the constructive triangle boxes. The children learn beginning and

advanced shape names, explore congruencies and later the Pythagorean theorem with

these boxes. Ask your child about the triangle box, hexagon boxes and rectangle boxes.

 

This Week in the Tulip Room

With the election and our presidential studies we are now on the midst of a study of the US government. With our special studies, it is always exciting to do a “simulation”, so each of your children has been elected or appointed to a branch of government and a position in that branch, next they will work on passing a bill through the three houses. Watch for governments of the world studies to come next!

With our interesting art project that went amiss we want to remind everyone to send your child in play clothes everyday. While we learned something from this experience and stains are something we are better prepared to prevent, we also have noticed some children having difficulty during outside and P.E. time and don’t want anyone to get hurt.

LOTS OF CALENDAR NOTES

For the next few weeks we will continue our emphasis on thankfulness and giving to others. We will be collecting new mittens and gloves to donate to a local charity. Our elementary class is challenging the school to bring in as many gloves as we did food items! This amounts to 265 gloves or 5 gloves per student! Wow! We are aware that we might not make this goal but if we challenge ourselves great things are possible!

On Friday, December 14th the Tulip room will be visiting Greenwood Villages South and caroling the residents and delivering ornaments that have been made by extended care. We will need a couple of chaperones/drivers but all parents are welcome to come. We will have a rehearsal performance on December 12th at school, performing for the primary room.

We will also be taking a field trip to the Scottish Rite Cathedral to see The Nutcracker December 21st at 7:30 p.m. The school will cover the cost of the ticket for your elementary child and you may purchase additional tickets at $12 each for you, yourself, friends or family members. These tickets do need to be ordered in advanced and can be done so with Ms. Brenda and must be done by December the 7th (please RSVP your student by then as well). We are very excited for this opportunity!

During this season of giving we wish to request that in lieu of holiday gifts for the teachers we ask that anyone interested in purchasing a gift, focus on gifts for the classroom! Look for a wish list to be posted soon!

Mark your calendars now! A Walk through math presentation will be held on January 24th at 6:30 pm put this one your calendars now, its a chance to see how your children use the different math materials!

A very popular material lately has been our word study towers! In these towers the children work with compound words, synonyms, antonyms, homophones, homonyms, capitalization, punctuation, alphabetical order and much more! Ask your child about the towers (they might also call them drawers and tell you they are on g6) :).

Recipes

Hello!

The children in the elementary classroom have been gathering recipes that contain vegetables we have been working with, and have gathered some interesting and delicious ideas. We are organizing these into a recipe book that you may purchase as holiday gifts.

As we are getting these ready we have noticed that a few children have only one or no recipes. If you haven’t done this with your child please gather recipes by Friday, November 30th in order for them to be included in the book. Our recipes were in the following categories: broccoli, squash and apple. Thanks so much!

This Week in the Tulip Room

What an exciting week in the Tulip Room! Like most Americans we got our vote on! It was a good lesson in privacy, respecting the opinions of others and independent thinking. We also received a “visit” from a couple of past presidents (ask your child who they were), learned about the constitution & bill of rights and immersed ourselves in voting & government conversations. The children have taken a real interest in researching our presidents, learning many interesting and fun facts along the way (did you know that all the presidents have had siblings?).

As you may know, we have been collecting non-perishable food items for the food bank and the elementary class will be delivering them and touring the facility on Friday, November 16th. We will leave the school at 9am, please be punctual this day. Also we are looking for parents who might be interested in transporting & chaperoning on this day.

The mathematical mind is evident in our classroom every day. Even as parents most of us, when we first visited a Montessori school we were drawn to the bead chains. As a  student the children use these chains, first in the primary classroom to practice their linear counting, then to practice skip counting and now as elementary students to explore squaring & cubing of the numbers one through ten. Kate even discovered that if you add up all the numbers on the Pythagoras board it equals the same as if you were to add up all the cubes of one through ten. Watch your email in January as we are working on scheduling “A Walk through Math in the Elementary Classroom”.

This Week in the Tulip Room

….big anxiety! With the end of the month coming in the middle of the week we decided to put off our month long work plans until Monday and get out some B I G work! Students were very Montessori in their approach to this big work and it made us smile & tear a little at the wonderful humans we get to spend our day with! Some are making a map of the world (countries on continents) and some were re-creating the timeline of life or getting out our BIG timeline of human needs (it’s so interesting to see how our needs have always been the same across the B.C. /A.D. line but the way we meet them is a little different) and others chose to research things they have been hoping to research but didn’t have “time”. All of these ideas were their own and were so big and enjoyable and exhausting…..for them… But we are so happy, lucky and thankful to spend time with these amazing people each day who really do have a desire to learn and grow and be peaceful individuals. Thank you all for this amazing opportunity!

Calendar items: the elementary class is stressing about field trips!!! YIKES! We are currently accepting donations for non-perishable items that we will take to a food bank in Greenwood on November 16th. We figured that each student in our school needs to collect 3 items to meet a 180 item goal by the 15th! Can we do it? YES WE CAN! So please clean out your pantry, ask a neighbor, ask a friend, so we can help make this time thankful for all of us! We also plan to visit the statehouse this month as part of our government studies! Watch out for those dates soon!

No hablo espanol? Me too! But this week we will begin Spanish language studies! I can’t wait!

Pumpkins, Stamp Games, Halloween… Oh My!

This week in the Tulip room we were crazy for pumpkins! Life cycle of a pumpkin, parts of the pumpkin as well as gourd research is going on! We cut open a pie pumpkin and looked at its parts, then roasted it for our pumpkin soup that we made Friday! Thank you Ms. Kristine for staying and making our pumpkin soup and homemade croutons with us, and great job Leo for reading a pumpkin story to the Oak room and to Gargi & Lilli for sharing a sampling of the pumpkin soup with them! We even saved the seeds because we have lots of different ideas of things we might do with these seeds, we might bake them, plant them or even do some art with them. In addition we have three different sizes of pumpkin in our classroom that we are estimating the seed count for and have voted for which one might have the most; could it be the small, medium or large pumpkin?? Who knows!!  Along with our pumpkin studies we are asking  each child to bring in a …… (You guessed it!) recipe to share! So we have had apple, broccoli & now pumpkin recipes assigned! Can’t wait to see them all!

With our calendar studies going on, we did some fun birthday studies and to wrap it all up the 3rd, 4th & 5^th graders prepared a “Birthday Party” for the classroom! They did a marvelous job with invitations, decorations, food & games! We had quite the party Friday afternoon!

Things were stamp-mazing this week with the stamp games! The stamp game is a Montessori material that we use to do all the operations, from addition to squaring. We have two in our classroom and they were being used most all the time and even being waited on! New lessons abounded with the stamp game this week! Ask your child if they have used the stamp game!

 

Wow, those spelling tests are really improving! You can see the confidence in the children on their spelling tests if they had time to practice. Keep it up and be looking for their spelling words in their backpacks each Friday!

Just a reminder of things coming up; First it is fall break this week (please insert the sound of cheering here) which means we have a half day on Wednesday with pick-up at 11:45am (no lunch) and are off on Thursday and Friday. Second is that Halloween is around the corner! On Tuesday, October 31^st we will put on our costumes (please nothing scary or violent; including no scary masks or weapons) and take a parade to surrounding business (by pre-approval).  Please have your children pack their costumes in their backpacks for this event, as we will still have a full day of learning that day.  The joys of the Elementary class are that these children are able to dress/un-dress themselves, if you feel like your child might struggle with the costumes, please practice with them before the big day. Thank you to everyone for signing up for a conference time! We can’t wait to speak to each one of you!

Thank you to our observers who have come to watch our classroom lately, and a special thank you to Brenda Mack who worked like a champion, copying, sorting, laminating and so on, making my life a dream, you are amazing!  I also want to send a “Thank you” shout out to whoever is picking up cutting works for us! It’s like magic! I simply hand something to Brenda and back it comes a day or two later! So thank you secret cutters!

This week in the Tulip Room

It was a map-tastic week in the Tulip room! The glory of Montessori is frequently when one child is working on something they found interesting another child will see and say “Hey, that looks fun can I do it next?” That occurred this week with our pin maps! Pin Maps are maps in our classroom that have flags, country names & capital names for the continents. Children work at their own level (flags only for the youngest child and all three for the older or more advanced learners) with the maps and follow ups (a follow up might be to research a flag or a country or a capital they find interesting or to make their own map by drawing flags & labeling countries/capitals).

During last month we focused on our continents and oceans and this month North America so all children have some sort of activity they are required to complete with these maps, however many have chosen to do other continents as well!

This week we talked about Broccoli, cutting & serving during the week, then making a dip and reading to the primary room on Friday. The children were invited to bring in a recipe idea to share (if your child hasn’t done this feel free to send it next week).  We heart broccoli!

In group lessons this week we enjoyed some BIG lessons/ideas! The birth and death of a star lesson this week has provided a launching pad to studies of atoms and elements. We also began the presentation of the time line of life this week and were excited to learn about the many animals and plants that we have today that were also alive 450 million years ago! WOW!

Thank you Ms. Dana for coming in on Friday to walk with us to the library, we hope for her face to become a regular Friday occurrence for us!

In the next few weeks lessons & activities will turn to fall! Watch for nocturnal animal lessons, creepy crawly insect lessons, and parts of a leaf, gourd lessons, continued recipe sharing & cooking.

Elementary Happenings

Work plans, spelling tests, lessons, end of the day jobs, presentations and homework, oh my!

The year started off with a “Bang”. We began our school year preparing a classroom puzzle, our clipboards, our binders, our placemats, learning about manners and classroom culture and navigating this world of work plans! Then quickly on to creation stories & the big bang, planet studies, the “dance of the planets”, maybe a song or two from Ms. Kristen & Ms. Melissa (think…our whole universe was in a hot dense state, then nearly 14 billion years ago expansion started…WAIT!..Who knows this song?).   The children researched planets, researched animals and researched plants, all while receiving lessons on math operations, materials, grammar & handwriting, spanning across so many different levels. We really feel during this time we have gotten to know where your child is and have a good plan for where they will go.

Each level or year has their own one month work-plan (reduced to a day or week for some) that helps them know what their level will be working on. However we alter these to suit each child, so if a child isn’t ready for a lesson we move it to next month, if they are ready for more advanced lessons, we pencil that in. The children are just now getting used to the flow of their work plans and spelling tests and are coming along nicely.

I’m sure you have been welcoming home exhausted children and our families have been welcoming home exhausted guides, who still need to prepare things for the next day, week or month! Please forgive me in my slowness to blog! But I MUST tell you of all the fun we are having!

Last week we were all fruity for apples! We learned to cut an apple (following detailed instructions!), life cycle of an apple, explored apple seeds and made applesauce.  We also had the pleasure of experiencing “Glow Germ”, when Ms. Erica and her nursing student friends (I named them the Germ Squad) came in and let us experience a lesson on how germs spread and travel. Thanks Ms. Erica!

This week we made play dough and learned about the layers of the earth, hemispheres & continents! A special “thank you” to Ms. Toni for coming in to teach us finger crocheting, next week we will start crocheting with needles. We also helped to set a world record! Ask your child about “Read for the Record” with Ladybug Girl and working in a blanket fort. We also wrapped things up with a “five kingdoms brought to life” presentation and a five kingdom salad.

Not to mention PE, music (with Mr. Adam), art (with Ms. Jama), Yoga (with Ms. Hansa), Sign language (with Ms. Taunya) and library time!

This week you will notice we are finally in the swing of things and everyone’s work should’ve came home today, including a practice sheet for next week’s spelling words. We reserve Fridays for spelling tests, but if the children feel ready earlier we can test them at any time during the week. What we have found is that currently the children are so busy during the school day that they aren’t having time to study their words as much as they’d like, so we will send them home on Fridays for the following weeks words so they can enjoy some extra practice time at home. We are also sending home special projects and homework that the children need or want to do but ran out of time to finish during the school day, feel free to ask about any of this special work that comes home.

We are entertaining the idea of letting some of the older children bring home their reading books as well, so you may see them come home one night a week in the near future to read out loud to our parents.

Parent teacher conferences are coming up, October 24^th. See Ms. Brenda to sign up for a time slot or if you have a special circumstance where you can’t make it that day. We look forward to sharing our observation of your child in the Montessori classroom with you.

Check Facebook for some pictures of the crazy times in Elementary!

** Did you receive information about the Bubble maker’s class? If not please see Ms. Jama or Ms. Melissa for more information or to express your interest. Bubble makers is a Scuba class for 8 & up. We are trying to put together a group so we could have our own weekend class.

Claude Monet

Each month the students will learn about a new artist. We will cover a brief history, see examples of the artist work and try our hand at emulating their style. This month is Claude Monet.

An early impressionist, Monet’s paintings paved the way for artists to free themselves from the restraints of the studio and to experience “pleine air”, or “outside” painting. Monet’s most famous paintings were of waterlilies in his garden at Giverny.

The students tried their hand at Monet’s style of painting by using Q-tips. They applied the paint in “dabs” just like Monet. I hope they continue trying out the technique and have fun.