2016
January
NEWS
Here we are, coursing quickly towards the end of January. The children are learning and growing at such extraordinary speed! I see children finding independence and striving for more. As parents and teachers, it is important to give “appropriate” independence to the child. It does not mean that the child now calls all the shots and can overrule the adult. The adult must be the one in charge and facilitate ways that the child can be independent. A wonderful way of strengthening family bonds while also promoting the child’s independence is through chores. Chores are another way of saying “We all work together as a family to make our household function, and each contribution is important.” I’ve attached a list of age-appropriate chores.
Chores are another way of saying
“We all work together as a family to make our household function, and each contribution is important.”
There are several chore chart ideas and really no wrong way to go about implementing them. I do like the photo button chore chart for non-readers. Here’s one version:
Keep in mind the words of Maria Montessori -
“The child seeks for independence by means of work; an independence of body and mind.� (The Absorbent Mind, Chapter 8, p. 91)
Mrs. Loree
MDO parents: Welcome back from winter break! We hope everyone enjoyed their time together as a family. We are excited to see the children back at school. Our students will be learning and exploring the sense of touch, by learning about what is cold and what is hot. The children have the opportunity to dress themselves independently, practicing how to put on their jackets, hats, mittens, and shoes before they go outside. The children are painting with white and blue paint using vegetables and cookie cutters. They will be turning pages in a book, stacking blocks and puzzles to refine the fine motor skills which will help control and coordinate the small muscles in the hand and wrist. Our practical life the shelves feature spooning white, blue, and purple beads, a train set work, and teeth brushing work. For language, a matching animals work and for math /sensorial we have a color sorting work and a number abacus. The main goal of the MDO environment is to help the children develop the skills to function independently, to allow them to explore the environment and manipulate the objects in the classroom freely, to assist them in their rapid language development and introduce them to methods of developing their minds and bodies. The classroom has activities meant to stimulate all areas of development: social, emotional, cognitive, physical and language. The children are allowed the freedom to choose activities based on their interests, and to master those activities at their own pace. The freedom to choose is tempered by the three basic rules of the environment: self respect, respect for others and respect for the environment.
MDO children have really been settling in to their routine in the classroom. They look forward to choosing their own work and succeed by doing it correctly. They are capable of so much more than we realize! During January, we began introducing Montessori Style art in the classroom. Each work is on a tray with the materials necessary for the student to explore and try the work on their own.
MDO PRACTICAL LIFE With the weather turning colder please remember to dress your child warmly. It is so important to LABEL. It is hard to keep all those hats and gloves straight and labeling really helps. Thank you very much! Ms. Eva, Ms. Mary, and Ms. Ashley
MDO
Dear T1 Families: The children continue to work on refining their skills, including competing a work cycle. Toddler 1 has taken on some big works this month and has had so much fun learning and experimenting with the “Pink Tower,” the “Brown Stairs,” and the “Knobbed Cylinders.” The children are continuing to learn about the primary colors (red, yellow and blue), but are also learning about secondary colors (green, purple and orange) using the color mixing work. Our practical life independent food works are always being used, orange juicing, apple coring and banana slicing. Some of the children make these works first priority when getting their mornings started. “Yummy!”
Toddler 1
We have also been learning how to put on and off coats/jackets. “Tag by your toes, arms in the holes, flip it over and on it goes� Try it at home, children love to be independent.
Annual Fund Lego pizza party Thank you Toddler 1 families! Love, Mrs. Anna and Ms. Annabel
Happy New Year! The school year is half way over, where is the time going? In the toddler classroom we are always learning new lessons daily. Grace and Courtesy in the classroom are always an important part of the toddler community. We are practicing table manners as well as showing compassion for others and respect for each other’s work. Toddlers are full of emotions and are pleased to see a gleaming smile when they show proper manners. They are forming important peer relationships which stem from the heart.
Emery is working on our popular work, Knobbed cylinder.
Grace and courtesy was one of Maria Montessori basic social building blocks and is essential in developing the skills toddlers need to maintain a peaceful environment. Winnie working on movable beads
Toddler 2
The children are beginning to learn to accommodate others, read facial expressions, and empathize with their classmates. It is beautiful to see an older toddler help a friend up or invite them over to do a work with them. Food preparation and snack time are a perfect time to practice those skills. Toddlers are generally in the “this is mine” stage, so sharing isn’t always easy. Learning to ask a friend to stop touching their work in a kind way shows the child is growing in their own grace and courtesy. The ability to work with another peer peacefully is an advanced social skill. Toddler 2
Top: Alisha is working on her focus and concentration by slicing the wooden fruit. Middle: Ryan and Michelle are preparing quesadillas for group snack, while Charlotte is observing. Bottom: We welcome Charlotte, our newest member of the toddler community. Here she is enjoying looking at a book.
Toddler 3 T3 has been working hard with potty learning. Last month, a potty-learning parent education class took place and all of our toddler classrooms have gone diaperless! With potty learning comes more independence. The children are learning how to change their own clothes and shoes, all by themselves!
Olive is working hard as she wears her potty-learning baby legs.
Fitz proudly works on the pink tower.
Left: Ethan diligently working on the felt board. Right: Alexandra thoroughly enjoys apple slicing. Bottom: Anna enjoys slicing wooden fruits and vegetables.
We may not have snow outside, but our classroom is full of wintery work. Who would have thought that learning to put on a coat by yourself would be such a fun activity?! Many of the children try again and again with a smile on their face. Happy January! Ms. Coral, Mrs. Amy, and Mrs. Amanda
Montessori Education Thank you to everyone who attended our Montessori Education classes!
Dear Families of Primary 1, Welcome back to school! We hope that your family enjoyed the holidays. The children are excited about seeing their friends and are eager to get back to work. We are learning about the continent and culture of Austrailia in Geography. The children love learning about the animals that are native to that land. We are reading a book called Possum Magic, written by Mem Fox & illustrated by Julie Vivas. It takes the reader on a culinary journey through Austrailia and describes many of the traditional foods of that land.
Many of the children are doing more work with the Moveable Alphabets and are really excelling with their beginning reader books. Children are taking more of an approach to mathematics by working with the Teen Boards and Golden Beads, and using the Addition Strip Board to solve simple equations. It’s been a great couple of weeks back at school, and we are looking forward to all the lovely feels coming up in February! Sincerely, Ms. Amaris & Ms. Kim
Primary 1
Language In language the students have been working on the sounds of the alphabet. After a student has learned the sounds of the alphabet, they start “reading� to the reading helpers. This allows them to continue practicing the sounds they have learned. With continued work in the classroom on the MOVEABLE ALPHABET and other exercises from the language shelf, the student continues to build a knowledge of letter sounds and putting those sounds together to make a word. The older students continue to do more advanced works from the language shelf as well as working more on handwriting and the control of a pencil.
Primary 2
The MOVEABLE ALPHABET is a large flat box that has individual lower case letters in separate compartments. There are several cutouts of each letter; the vowels and the consonants contrast in color. The moveable letters allow the child to “write down� words as he or she determines each component sound. This series of exercises increases in difficulty from writing three letter words to writing stories. The students can start with the Moveable Alphabet as soon as they learn the phonetic alphabet. It is really neat to watch the student go through the progression of writing small words, to writing a short sentence, to writing a story and illustrating it on paper. We are trying to branch out on ideas, although it is challenging to do at this age. The stories and illustrations are so much fun to look at and read.
Mrs. Barrineau and Ms. Marla
Happy 2016, everyone! The children returned from Christmas break looking rested, happy, and ready for school! The winter months are wonderful time for focused work, as the children gladly settle into their school routine and as they are ready to build on lessons that they mastered in the fall. The children are working with challenging practical life materials such as funnels, pitchers of varying sizes, and lacing/sewing lessons. We are also practicing with the dressing frames to increase independence with the snaps, buckles, hook & eye closures, and zippers that are common to winter coats. In art, we have introduced color mixing, water colors, and more advanced collage. In the sensorial curriculum, the children are working with extensions to earlier lessons using the geometric solids, the knobbed cylinders, and the pink tower. Math and language lessons also become more challenging at this time of the year and it is a joy to watch the children’s eyes light up as they grasp concepts that had previously been beyond reach.
Top: Chloe combines blue and yellow to make green using the color mixing work. Left: Jolene matches the faces and bases to their corresponding geometric solids as Madeleine looks on. Right: Jackson combines the knobbed cylinders and then sorts them back into place.
Our January continent study has been Oceania and the country of Australia. The children have enjoyed learning about Australian wildlife, climate, geography, music, and food. Ask your child what a koala eats, where the kookaburra lives, or how a wallaby is different from a kangaroo. This month also included a birthday celebration for Jackson Anderson, who turned five over the Christmas break. The new year is off to a terrific start and we look forward to watching the children grow and mature as we make our way through the winter months. Joyfully, Ms. Tamara and Ms. Jaymie
Top: David writes down the four digit addition equation that he solved using the stamp game. Left: Levi uses the nomenclature cards to name the animals of Australia.
Primary 3
Right: Aidan sorts the buoyancy of objects using the sink and float work.
Happy New Year! We hope everyone enjoyed a wonderful and magical holiday season! The children seemed so anxious and excited to get back to school and get back into the swing of things. I know how nice it is to get back on a familiar schedule after the hustle and bustle of the winter break. With that being said, it has been just as delightful for me to get back into the classroom as well! The children have come back from the break eager to learn very intrigued with the language area of the classroom. Our first year students have been working very hard on their sounds using the Sandpaper Letters. This material is such a great tool as it allows for a tactile experience with the sound from the sandpaper, a muscular memory experience as the child traces over the sandpaper, and a verbal experience as the child is allowed to repeat the sound.
After each child has mastered a set of sounds, we then allow them to work with different objects to help with isolation of the initial sound (i.e. a=apple, s=school).
Primary 4
Our second level students have been seen choosing the large Moveable Alphabet and their pink reading materials, which help build early reading skills by allowing the child to both spell and read short vowel sound words. These works help make reading an exciting discovery for the child and offer a lifelong love of reading!
Kindergarten has recently received their own story writing tablets. We began this lesson by story mapping a story together. We learned what the words title, character, setting, and body mean when writing a story. We then brainstormed ideas for our own story and discussed each element needed. Afterwards, the children took to their story tablets to begin their own creative writing process. It is so fun to see what their creative minds come up with! 2016 is off to a swift start and we cannot wait to see everything the children accomplish during this semester! Ms. Sarah and Ms. Sheila
Happy 2016! We have had a great start to the new year. Both the Kindergartners and the second level students have done fun projects for the past couple of weeks! The second level students started out the new year making their own marbleized paper. The process was so fun! First, we took shaving cream and spread it out in a square on a sheet of waxed paper. Then I had each student choose two colors of food coloring. We dropped the food coloring onto the shaving cream, and then swirled it around with a skewer.
Next, we took a sheet of paper, placed it on top of the shaving cream and patted it down so all the edges were touching the shaving cream. Then we peeled the paper off the shaving cream, put it down on a clean sheet of waxed paper, and used a squeegee to removed the shaving cream.
It revealed the beautiful marbled color of the food coloring that had soaked into the paper! It was a really fun process, and each paper turned out differently! It was a complete surprise to see how the marbling turned out!
Art&Technology
The Kindergarten students also had a fun project this month. They made marble art! First, they took a piece of paper and put it into a shoe box. Then they took marbles, and put one into each different color of paint. The children, selecting one color at a time, took the marble and placed it into their shoe box. Then they tilted and shook the shoe box around moving the marble across the paper. The marble left a paint trail behind it!
They repeated this process many times, choosing different colors and moving their boxes in different directions. The result is a very fun, very colorful, work of art! In technology this month we started LEGO robotics! The kindergartners have gotten to build three different LEGO structures that move when you plug them into the computer! First we built dancing ducks, and then we built a top, and then a monkey! We have had a great time hypothesizing what will happen with each robot. After we build the robot, we look at the structure and try to decide what is going to happen when it starts to move. The children have been right each time! After we have watched our robot move, we look at it again, looking at the gears and the rotating mechanisms and watching them move in slow motion. The children really seem to love this unit, and I am excited for them to see what robots are next! Thank you! Ms. Hanna
In the Children’s
Garden
Our children at SJES are such terrific gardeners. They’ve begun to recognize that some plants are not cold weather hardy. The older children have been introduced to the terms “annual and perennial.” This past Friday the Primary helped me clean up all the plants that have died back for the winter. We lugged big armfuls of asparagus, salvia and basil to the wheel barrow so we could place them in the dumpster. The garden looks pretty bare, but we know that will all change with the spring.
We also know that certain crops/flowers really love the cool weather. We planted Easter egg radishes. We learned that a seed needs three things to grow - sun, water and soil. One child chimed in that seeds also needed time and patience. :) The radish seeds were so tiny that they only needed a ½ inch hole. We used a Dibbler in one of the prepared beds to make sure we weren’t placing the seeds so deeply that they would not be able to emerge. One kindergartener said he believed that was important because radishes have such a short stem. (Again…so smart!)
Happy winter gardening! Mrs. Loree
The after school care area continues to be a burst of activity. We love spending time with your children. I noticed that the primary and toddler both enjoy reading or listening to teachers read to them. It is a long day and they love to cuddle with a teacher. It is a nice and relaxing way to end a day. Thank you for sharing your child with us. The ASC has continued to grow and there are a large number of children staying in the afternoons. We want to make sure that we have staff to cover our large numbers and we ask that you reserve a spot. The snack is prepared before the children arrive in ASC and if we happen to have drop-ins that we are not expecting, it makes it difficult to prepare more snack. If you arrive after 3:30 to pick up your child, please make sure that you let me know that you are taking them. Just a reminder - if your child is in a toddler classroom, Mrs. Barrineau’s classroom or Mrs. Amaris’ classroom, their jacket will be in a basket in the ASC room. Please be sure to take their jacket when you pick them up. We would really appreciate if all jackets were labeled, so often a child does not recognize their jacket and it makes it difficult to get ready to go outside to play.
As always, if you need to reach me after 4:30 p.m., please call the school phone 214-348-1349. Lisa Wilson
ASC
God’s Love Is Big Happy New Year! I hope you all had a blessed holiday break and enjoyed time with your families. We came back to chapel in the New Year with a Eucharist Celebration. It is such a joy to see the children go up to the altar to receive the Eucharist or a special blessing from Father Gardner. We also spoke about friendship and kindness being “contagious,” using the story of Ruth and Naomi from the book of Ruth as our reference. You may have heard your child singing the little poem -
“Where you go, I will go to Cause you’ve got me, and I’ve got you.”
We spoke of how we are able to show kindness and friendship to others because we know about God’s big love for us. We know that when we spread that same love to others, it’s like making kindness “contagious!” Friendship and kindness are great things to give and “catch.” We were also blessed to have Ms. Ashley lead our chapel service one day when I had to be out. I’m sure the children enjoyed having her back for that special visit. I can’t believe we are almost half way through our year! The Kindergarten class continues to do a wonderful job, and I’m sure there will be many more beautiful moments to come! As always remember God loves your child and you, BIG! Ms. Amaris
Chapel