letter love

One of the things I love most about the Montessori philosophy is that each activity is given equal importance.  There isn't separate play time and work time and this allows the children to engage in whatever they are drawn to.  Lately the children have been really excited about practicing printing letters.  

I wish you could see his excitement more clearly.  He was so proud of his 's' - and rightly so.

building blocks

The benefits of building with blocks are numerous - fine motor skills, hand-eye coordination, spatial skills, creative problem solving skills, and cooperative skills.

care of the environment

After the children finish eating their lunch they wash their dishes.  This has become very popular!  I can't guarantee that even as teenagers they will be this enthusiastic about dishwashing, but in the meantime it's pretty wonderful watching the children serenely perform this task.

The girls are folding the cloths that we use in the classroom.

classroom pets

Here are our two African dwarf frogs.  They are great pets - low maintenance but very entertaining!

solos

"The child's development is concentration.  The child who concentrates is immensely happy." 

- Dr. Maria Montessori

old friends, new friends

Summer Arts 2011!

Here is evidence of just SOME of the fun we had in July!

sponge painting

construction

 bean bag games

dress-up

marble painting

bubble painting

tissue collage sun catcher

flower prints

finger puppets

drum decorating

 

portraits

tissue candle holders

puffy paint

underwater prints

watercolours 

animal charades

dancing

Class pictures!

 Thanks to Jayme who came in to take some class pictures for the end of the year!

metamorphosis

Unfortunately I didn't take pictures of our Painted Lady caterpillars - but they were fairly ordinary looking and just crawled around eating their special concentrated food...

Days after we received them they crawled up to their lids, and started hanging like a 'j' - just like the books said they would! We transferred them to the bin where they transformed into a pupae by shedding their skin and revealing a hard skin called a chrysalis.

A week or so later they started emerging from their pupae, flapping their wings.

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Once they started hatching we were advised to place orange slices in the bin incase the butterflies became hungry before they were released.



Here are pictures from the first release.

Pictures from the second release.

The butterflies were kind (stunned?) enough to rest on the children's hands for a bit and then off they flew!  Pretty incredible!

”Dancing is just discovery, discovery, discovery.” - Martha Graham

*I apologize for the quality of these videos.

Five Incredible and Spectacular Performers!

They chose this beginning pose.  We have a book of paintings - one of which has a choir in this pose - which they said was also like the move they do in yoga!


Five Green and Speckled Frogs. from Stefanie Mendoza on Vimeo.

Namaste.

phonetic spellers - part 2

 Elsa pays homage to her aunt Jayme.

 These were taken on 2 different days.  The last time I really tried to convince him to spell something else - an animal, food, vehicle - but he insisted on once again spelling his favourite teacher's name (okay okay his only teacher's name).  

Francisco's ode to his favourite pachyderm.

Easter fun!

Weston is matching lower and upper case letters to create  coloured eggs (matched ones are on his left). Next the kids placed the eggs in alphabetical order.

These are some more of the Easter/Springtime activities that were on the shelves in April.

decorating eggs

Easter bonnets!