Kayleigh leads students on a scavenger hunt during French class.

Hello Everyone (especially those of you with sons),

Jill and I attended a very informative workshop on Friday given by William Maier of Lexington Montessori. He spoke about the current issues that boys are facing in education and in life and offered many strategies on creating boy friendly classrooms - this is often difficult for female teachers. This was an eye opening lecture for me and for many other attendees. I'd love to chat with anyone who is interested about this lecture. Please visit my new "Book List" page on this blog to see some book recommendations regarding this topic.

We will explore this topic during our new monthly book group, which will kick off in November. Just a note (very far in advance): The author of Raising Cain and other books about boys, Michael Thompson will be speaking at the Friends School of Portland in May. It might seem far off, but it will be here before you know it!

It's the end of the 5th week of school already. That's a grand total of 144 classroom hours, 75 lessons, 24 visits to the playground, 10 fiddle classes, 4 walks to the library, 3 art lessons, 2 field trips and 1 teacher who was ready for the 4 day weekend!

Thank you to all of you for helping the first month of school to go so smoothly for everyone. I have enjoyed getting to know our new families and I look forward to talking with you all at conferences on the 19th & 20th. A big thank you to Scott (Curtis) & Heather (Sutter & Alexandra) for being such amazing chaperones on our overnight to the Bigelows. I think they would both tell you that our students handled this trip with exceptional maturity, good manners and most importantly, a great attitude. We look forward to many overnights in the future. Thank you to Tori & Robin (Elyse) for providing yummy snacks for the trip and donating the first bag of James Place Blend coffee to the Lodge (come in and try some! The lodge is now open to parents).

Some general notes:
Josh has 2nd year students and up working on Bargue plates. These are graphite drawings done on the easel that help students to observe and copy master work. Ask your student to tell you about these plates and which ones they are working on.

Andrew has students working on the song, 'Boil 'em Cabbage Down'. Students are to practice this song at least 10 times each week. It takes about 30 seconds to run through the song, so this should not be a problem. This class is going to start moving a bit faster, so it is very important that students make time to practice at home. To guide them, you can remind them to do all the steps to get into playing position. They know these steps, but might need to be reminded that we don't just grab the violin and start playing - even at home they should complete all the steps. We've been talking a lot about this in class.

Here are some classroom highlights:

Allagash Group (1st Year)

* Nouns are everywhere in our classroom lately! Students had great fun searching for nouns around the school. They discovered that tables, chairs and even classroom friends are nouns. Students performed a skit about nouns and created posters with photos of people, places and things.

*First years continue to practice writing in cursive. It is helpful to encourage cursive writing at home. Very soon they will write only in cursive while at school.

* We used the addition strip board & the snake game to practice addition facts. Students have been enjoying working on this in small groups.

* Students have been studying polygons for the past couple of weeks. We identified pentagons, hexagons, septagons, octagons, nonagons (everyone's favorite) and decagons. Most of our lessons include word etymology and geometry is a great subject for this. Ask your students about poly & -gon.

* "I live in the universe..." That was the beginning of a favorite lesson last week. Ask your first year to explain where they live starting with that phrase. This lesson is meant to help students begin to understand that cities are within states/provinces, which are within countries, etc.

* We are exploring fish during biology class. Students identified and labeled the different fins on fish and we discussed the different jobs performed by each fin. We took a trip to Jill's classroom to meet their fish and see which parts we recognized.

Moosehead Lake (2nd Year)

* This group continued their verb/adverb study by using a new special paper we have in our classroom. I wrote them a basket full of sentences to symbolize with the parts of speech they already know.

* 2nd years have been anxiously awaiting the arrival of the new time line of life that I purchased over the summer. It finally showed up on our doorstep last week and students have been exploring all of the illustrations and labels. This time line will be the focus of our second year history curriculum. Next week we will begin work with the 'Clock of Eras' & we will begin working with the time line in a few weeks.

* We continue to work with memorization of subtraction facts. Students have their first timed test coming up soon. We also brought out the stamp game earlier in the week. 2nd years will work with dynamic operations using the stamp game for the next month or so.

* In geography we began a study of South America. We reviewed the names of different land and water forms (lake, island, cape, bay, strait, isthmus, gulf, peninsula). Students are working to label these land and water forms on a map of South America. 

Acadia (3rd Year)

* 3rd Year students continue to work with large numbers in arithmetic. We introduced the Golden Bead Frame a couple weeks ago. Students are focusing on multiplication with multipliers in the tens place and multiplicands into the millions place (1,232,589 x 51). They also continue to practice multiplication games aimed at the memorization of facts.

* Students who have been at Meadowbrook (or any Montessori school) have always seen grammar as a series of special symbols that represent each part of speech (the noun as a black triangle, the verb as a red circle). We had a discussion last week about how helpful that has been, but that when they are in middle school or high school, their teacher's won't use - or even know - these symbols. I introduced the grammar boxes which will help the students to take all of the grammar studies from previous years and remove the tricks and symbols. This is a perfect example of the Montessori curriculum moving from concrete to abstract. As I slowly remove materials and move students toward paper work, they will build on the very concrete foundation we have been laying for the past 2 years. If you can't tell, I am THRILLED to have 3rd years!! It truly is the year that puts the icing on the cake.

*Students have been doing scientific illustrations of leaves that can be found in Maine. We created field guides and brought them along on our trip to Flagstaff Lake. Ask your student which leaves were most commonly found near the lake and why they think that might be so. Ask them which leaves we were unable to find.


Katahdin (Upper El)

* We continue our work with the 3 geometry concepts of congruence, similarity and equivalence. Students have completed some amazing work with equivalence.Congruence and similarity are relatively simple concepts for students because you can see them. Equivalence gets a little trickier. The upper el students have made many discoveries about equivalence by using our guide square and cutting out shapes using the diagonals and midpoints. This work has sparked a lot of excitement.

* Upper El students have each chosen a nation that they will study during the first semester. Their October assignments include creating a poster with basic facts about the country and designing a travel brochure that will entice people to visit their country. We have many examples of travel brochures for them to look through while they complete this project. Students will also choose a notable citizen (past or present) from their nation and create a project around that person.

* Students tell me that the best lesson all year has been the one about matter and energy. We discovered that matter is like a noun and energy does for matter what the verb does for a sentence. Students are making charts of energy they see around home or the classroom and deciding whether that energy is kinetic (motion) or potential (stored). They enjoyed the story I told about getting to school as a child (I grew up on the top of an island with no cars - this story is filled with potential and kinetic energy!). Students were filled with questions after the lesson, which is always wonderful for me. Next week we will talk about the laws of thermodynamics.

* Our arithmetic work has focused on long division using the test tube division material. Students have also been practicing division facts in preparation for the first timed test of the year.

Art Lesson

Fiddle Class

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