This past week we focused on Nursery Rhymes during our morning message/group activity. We chose one rhyme to focus on each day: Jack & Jill, Hey Diddle Diddle, Hickory Dickory Dock, Baa Baa Black Sheep & Humpty Dumpty. We practiced reciting & reading the rhymes each day. The children also had the opportunity to work with sequencing cards for each rhyme. The children also really enjoyed matching the cut-apart poem to the sentence strips in the pocket chart. This is a great lesson on concepts of print--learning about words, spaces between words, punctuation & more. Next week we will be learning about Goldilocks & the Three Bears. We will work on sequencing, size order, creating a story map (learning about characters, setting, etc.) & more!
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As I mentioned in my earlier 2 posts, last week we learned about apples & this past week we studied shapes. I wanted to share some photos of the work we've been doing to give you a peek into Room 350! We've been making patterns with apples (on the left--matching patterns, on the right creating their own pattern). We've also made apple books & labeled the parts of the apple. Making a graph: Children sort the apples by color and then color the graph accordingly. Cards for the life cycle of the apple On our art shelf, we've been doing apple dot-to-dots working on our number recognition, counting as well as fine motor practice. We've also been making apple collages! Below I thought I'd give you a peek at our Morning Messages for the week. Each morning, I begin our message with the same greeting (Good Morning!) as well as a sentence about the date & weather. We read the message and fill in the missing words. Then I always add something else--sometimes it's a question and we graph our answers, sometimes I write a sentence telling them what we will do that day, etc. These are our completed charts from our days learning about shapes. This week we are starting on a review of shapes. Yesterday & today we've talked about circles, squares, rectangles & triangles. We reviewed how many sides and corners each shape has. Today we filled out our morning message with that information: A circle has 0 sides and 0 corners. A rectangle has 4 sides and 4 corners. etc. We've also been learning how to tell the difference between a square & a rectangle: The sides of a square are ALL the SAME. A rectangle has 2 short sides and 2 long sides. Today we had a lesson on the pattern blocks and using shapes to create designs. Tomorrow we will have a group lesson on the Constructive Triangles, a Montessori lesson that teaches the children how to use triangles to make other shapes such as squares, hexagons, etc.
Later in the week we will begin reviewing our 3-dimensional shapes using the Geometric Solids. We will learn about the sphere, cone, cylinder & cube. We will discuss what each shape looks like (all the sides of the cube are squares, the cylinder has a circle on the base, the cone is pointy on one side and has a circle base on the other, etc.). We will look throughout the classroom to find things that are each of these shapes. Lastly, we will review the difference between the shapes & the solids (shapes are flat). Have your child try to locate shapes in his environment! You can find them everywhere--on street signs, in magazines, in books, etc. We've had such a great start to our school year! We started off the year
building community and learning classroom rules/procedures. While we continue to work on those as well as other grace & courtesy lessons, we have also begun studying some other topics as well. We've already covered the Five Senses & learned a number of Montessori Sensorial lessons using our senses (such as the Smelling Boxes, Touch Boards, Color Boxes, Sound cylinders and more!). Last week, we discussed community helpers and read about a different helper each day. We learned about how a police officer, doctor/nurse, letter carrier, fire fighter & dentist each help us in their own way. As we began September, this past week we started learning about apples. We tasted red, green & yellow apples and graphed which we liked the best. We also cut open an apple and learned the names of the parts of the apple. You may see some apple pattern sheets coming home in your child's backpack or an apple collage. Next week, we will begin focusing on shapes (two-dimensional and three-dimensional). We use our Morning Meeting time at the beginning of the day to review these group lessons. The majority of our morning, however, is spent working on individual lessons with the Montessori materials. Check back here for updates on our group lessons and come to curriculum night next week for a peek into A Day in the Life of a Hull-Jackson Montessori Student!!!! |