The Solar System

This long black line represents the entire 4.5 billion year history of Earth.
Ask you student where humans are on this line.

Josh stopped by for the first art lesson of the year.

Writing Practice

Ask the 2nd Years about 'Verb Man' and all of his crazy adventures.

Some students practiced sphere drawings this week.

Some highlights from the second week of school:

Allagash Group (1st Year)

* Our geometry lesson was about classifying triangles by their sides. Ask your first year to tell you about the special ladders the Greeks used for picking olives, the triangle who thinks he’s too perfect for the other shapes, and have them show you their built in isosceles triangle.

* For language we took out the movable alphabet. This is a great material that allows the students to write words without tiring their hands. We wrote the names of friends in our classroom and spelled out various objects around the room.

* We worked on telling time this week using our clock with movable hands and the clock stamp. Students worked on telling time on the hour and half hour. Telling time is an essential skill in the elementary classroom and is great to practice at home. Help your child to notice the time at key points in your day (dinner, bed time, etc). Keep in mind we use analog clocks at school.

* We built on our decimal system skills this week by doing static addition with the golden beads. Students were very excited for this big work and they love working together on this assignment.

Moosehead Lake Group (2nd Year)

* This week we reviewed the four fundamental concepts in geometry: point, surface, line, solid.

* Our language lesson focused on verbs. Next week you will see lots of ‘verb-men’ coming home in take-home bags. Students drew our verb symbol doing different actions like swimming, climbing, singing and sleeping. This was a very popular assignment.

* On Thursday we had a lesson on ‘decomposing numbers’, which I always think sounds like a pretty creepy lesson. However, it is actually just choosing one minuend, like 11, and finding all possible subtrahends and differences. Students completed this work in their notebooks.

Acadia Group (3rd Year)

* In geometry we examined adjacent angles. Students drew and labeled complementary and supplementary angles. Ask them to define each type for you.

* We dug deeper into our adjective work this week by studying adjectives that point. Students created comic strips using sentences with adjectives that point. Refresher for adults: this, that, these, those. Students are learning to check their work by making sure that their pointing adjectives are followed by a noun (or else, we discovered, they are not adjectives at all).

* We took out the much anticipated Timeline of Humans on Wednesday and explored the many human developments throughout time. We discussed the three gifts of humans (the head, the heart, the hand). We also talked about how important our imagination will be while we study early humans. While we can use the timeline and scientific discovery to guide us, we can never know the exact person that created the first art or told the first story. Students broke into two groups and each will write and perform a skit about any human first of their choosing (the first medicine, the first tools, the first song, etc).

* We visited our old friend the snake game for our arithmetic lesson. This time we did both addition and multiplication facts using the snake.

Katahdin Group (Upper El)

* This year will largely be about 3 big concepts in geometry: congruence, similarity and equivalence. I have not mentioned these terms to this group yet (and will not do so for a few more weeks). However, we have already begun to get our hands on these concepts. This week we reviewed the parts of the square (midpoint, diagonal, base, height). Then we learned what happens when we fold the square in various ways. This was a fun activity for our origami fans!

* In language we went over the rules for plural nouns. Students have a basket of rules that they must fill with words that correspond to each.They are finding some rules more challenging than others. The biggest challenge so far has been identifying words from Greek and Latin that still follow Greek and Latin rules (radius, radii/vertex, vertices). We have had the most luck when looking through our mathematics work for these words.

* The Katahdin group also participated in the timeline of humans activity and will continue to do so for the remainder of the year. (see Acadia notes for more info)

* We discussed the relative size of the sun when compared to earth and when compared with other stars. We discovered that stars have a life cycle. Students are writing poems about the life cycle of stars.

* We continued our work with multiples this week by making charts of more than one number and finding common multiples. Next week we will work on Table A – this is a large table that will help us become very familiar with common multiples.



Library Day

Library day was rained out last week, but we had a beautiful day today! Students were a bit tired after our 1.9 mile round trip to the Freeport Community Library. We spent a few minutes resting in the shade at LL Bean.

Upcoming library days:

September 22nd

October 6th

October 20th

"To keep alive enthusiasm is the secret of real guidance, and it will not prove a difficult task, provided that the attitude towards the child's acts be that of respect, calm, and waiting, and provided that he be left free in his movements and experiences."

Maria Montessori





Welcome to the Elementary Classroom Blog!

The 2011/12 school year is off to a wonderful start in the elementary classroom. It gave me such joy to see the students practically sprinting from their cars and into the school on Tuesday! We began our first class with a story from my childhood about the first day jitters I experienced in the 3rd grade and students shared some of the things they felt nervous about coming to school this year. Many students shared the same fears (surprise, surprise!) and it didn't take long before we were all laughing our nerves away.

We got right down to lessons and have covered a lot of material already. In addition to exploring areas of interest around the room, here are some subject area highlights:

Allagash Group (1st Year)

- Metal Inset designs, which will prepare their hands for cursive writing

- We cut land & water forms out of construction paper. New vocabulary: island/lake, cape/bay, isthmus/strait, peninsula/gulf, archipelago/system of lakes

- We practiced composing numbers into the thousands place and fetching the appropriate number of golden beads

Moosehead Lake Group (2nd Year)

- We reviewed article/adjective/noun and created lists of phrases

- We combined fractions with calendars and discussed different ways to break up the year

- We took out the subtraction strip board and reviewed vocabulary (minuend/subtrahend/difference)

Acadia Group (3rd Year)

- We began an in-depth study of adjectives by discussing counting adjectives (one, tenth, etc)

- We started our semester long "study of the nation" be reviewing what we already know about the United States

- We did a multiplication review by focusing on some of the patterns we can see. We talked about multiplication being a bit like magic.

Katahdin Group (4th Year)

- We began with a fantastic story about a walk I took in Chicago (ask about the ducks with braces & the foxes on a leash). This kicked off our study of collective nouns.

- Students chose countries of interest that they might like to research this semester.

- We explored multiples in order to prepare for our work with LCM and GCF

Students had their first fiddle/violin lesson with Andrew on Wednesday. We all had an amazing time and I look forward to this group experience. Their homework for Friday is to practice rest position and taking a bow. We are looking forward to starting art and French in the coming weeks.  Our library trip was rained out today, so we will walk over on Monday and then return to our regular schedule, which is every other Thursday.

Check back often for updates & photos. Remember to like us on Facebook!

Anna

Composing Numbers

Searching for the Lowest Common Multiple

Geography Work

Preparing for Art History 

"If we could say, "We are respectful and courteous in our dealing with children, we treat them as we should like to be treated ourselves," we should have mastered a great educational principle and be setting an example of good education." 

Maria Montessori