My name is Robin Norgren, M.A. and I am here to help make Montessori philosophy more relevant in the classroom. My projects include: Josey's Art School, The Gifted Learner, Creativity and Wonder and A Montessori Way of Seeing. I found my way into educational spaces as a mother of Creative children yet I am not an art teacher. This information is important because my style empowers teachers who are shy about teaching art but looking for products that promote expression over technical perfection.
Drawing practice builds vital hand-eye coordination, boosts memory retention through visual learning, and acts as an early form of problem-solving where children actively process the physical world rather than passively consuming media. [1]
Key Facts About Kids' Drawing
Brain Boost: Drawing connects both the left and right sides of the brain, which helps kids improve logic and creative thinking at the same time.
Writing Prep: Holding crayons or pencils to make lines and shapes builds the fine motor hand muscles needed later for writing letters.
Better Memory: Sketching things they learn helps children remember facts and understand difficult ideas much better than reading alone.
Fall is here! It’s the end of the month and so your students will come in tomorrow with a transformed room full of activities that reflect the season. We will begin to move more into our study of other cultures and continents with a discussion this week on how Autumn looks around the world.
We continued to study length and standard and nonstandard measurement and we had a week long discussion on temperature and practiced reading a thermometer — I hope your student enjoyed marking the temperature each day on the sheet I sent home. We learned about Celsius and Fahrenheit, degrees, warmer, colder and continued using what we learned about antonyms and synonyms in these discussions as well.
We talked about the part of the speech “article” and said it was a good indicator that “announces, “A NOUN IS COMING!” and tied that back to our discussions about nouns.
You are now seeing not only sounds in the secret message books sent home but also sight words — we will be moving more into engaging these words in the next semester. I am so excited to see how engaged each of your children are with the beauty of learning to read, write and communicate their thoughts on paper. With our newest project, many of them asked, “Can we write words too?” — YES YOU CAN!!!
Just a quick note to please make sure to send readers back the next day so that we have them for other students.
We continued with our Handwriting without Tears curriculum which has come to the forefront as one of the most favorite times in class — everyone loves working on the chalkboards together and talking about the beautiful and simplistic ways that uppercase letters are created.
Monday:
Sequencing work: How to make a snowman
Emotion: grumpy
Lesson: How to read a thermometer
Geometry: Discussion on the BASE of Geometric Solids
Student led reading time
Letters: H,K
Tuesday:
Antonyms, Synonyms
Emotion: happy
Language lesson: fahrenheit, celsius, degrees, hotter, colder, marking the temperature on a thermometer
I hope your weekend is full of fun adventures! We have a lot going on over the next two weeks as far as half days and conferences so please make sure to mark your calendars appropriately. This Wednesday we have a shortened day as well as NEXT Wednesday, Thursday and Friday which will be our first parent teacher conference today -YES! I am incredibly excited to share what I have been experiencing with each of your children in the classroom and to hear your feedback on your Montessori journey thus far. For SPECIFIC times of dismissals please check out your newsletter from Mrs. E. We worked on a couple of major projects this week: peace banners for International Day of Peace which was Friday and a science experiment on Frost and Condensation which turned out so cool! 🙂
Monday:
We had our first Farmer Sean visit and our special guests were Charlotte the pig and a piglet that was so new the members of the farm had not named her yet. We also began to work with a program called Handwriting without Tears. I attended a workshop on Saturday and I was really excited to roll the handwriting curriculum out in the classroom. I work with the students in 2 groups — 1/2 day and full day — and we go back to the basics of how letters are formed. We had a lesson on 3 options for how to hold a pencil, we practice together on chalkboards (thank you to L’s family for the chalkboards!) and then they work on the letters separately on a sheet of paper using the techniques we have practiced on the chalkboards. We use the terms ” long line, short line, large (or big) curve, small (or little) curve. The emphasis is on uppercase letters at first but we are still working on lowercase letters. We started creating our peace banners by choosing fabric and designing mandalas and thinking about our wish for the world.
Share 1 minute of silence with the Montessori students all over the world
work plans go home
30 days of Emotions: proud
Geometric Solids: Ovoid, Ellipsoid
Sensorial Lesson: Baric Tablets
A little note about the work plans: you may see that sometimes a student is working on the same topic/math type all week. I want to point out a few things that you need to know about the way the classroom works. Because most of the work in the classroom is choice based, a child at this age tends to work on something for about 5–10 minutes and they she/he is ‘finished’ or when talking about the single addition math work, the student works on 3–5 math problems. So what’s key to remember is this age group is working on concentration and repetition is a valuable part of this process. Also, please know that I try my best to pay attention to a student who may be picking something that does NOT invite the child to grow in knowledge.
Extending the learning:
1. On Monday, we are going to discuss types of thermometers and I will give a lesson on temperature. A worksheet will go home on Monday and each day your child is invited to find out what the temperature is for the day and mark it on the log I am sending home. I leave it to you to decide how you would like to have them discover that information. Please send the log back on the following Monday.
2. Now that we are in full swing of the handwriting process, those of you who have students that are wanting to practice writing at home, have them practice making lists of things like items you need at the store or chores for the day. They do not necessarily have to spell word correctly — phonetically is fine. The invitation is for them to discover organizational skills, how time works and the amount of time tasks take to be completed and the way words work as they attempt to figure out the sounds. I leave these choices to you as you notice your child’s developmental stage.
3. (I know! Last week I did not share any learning extensions — here is my week to make that up to you) Also I want to keep in mind that you have a half day this week and a few next week so I want to make sure you have some ideas handy. I found a great tutorial on how to make a barometer which would be a bit too cumbersome for me to do with 20 students. Here is the link and if anyone tries it, feel free to have your child bring it to class:
Philosophy means the "love of wisdom" and is all about asking big questions like "why?" and "what is fair?" You do not need to be a grown-up to do it—kids are natural philosophers because they love to wonder about how the world works. [1, 2, 3]
Fun Facts About Great Thinkers
Socrates never wrote anything down: One of the most famous ancient Greek thinkers didn't write books. Everything we know about him comes from notes written by his student, Plato. [1, 2]
A philosopher who lived in a barrel: An ancient Greek thinker named Diogenes gave away all his things to live a very simple life, and he actually slept inside a large ceramic barrel. [1, 2]
A math teacher for everyone:Pythagoras (the triangle guy) started a special school in 530 BC where he welcomed both men and women as students to learn philosophy and math.
I
hope you are having a good weekend. I saw the documentary about Mr.
Rogers a few weeks ago and it was a reminder for me just in time for our
classroom discussion on 9/11 that the world’s problems can seem so
overwhelming AND YET we each have a part to play in shining light in the
world. This week we talked about 9/11. I used something that Mr. Rogers
has mentioned his mother saying to him in ‘his day’ when bad things
happened. She said to ‘look for the helpers.’ This aligns so beautifully
with what we are talking about in class about community helpers and how
each one can help one another. It also aligns with this week’s
conversations about emotions and how we can still feel our emotions and
yet find a way to still be kind.
We
talked about the 20 World Peace Bells that have been created in the
world to remind us to strive for peace. The students got to watch a
video of the bell located in Kentucky ringing and then they created
their own peace bells. The peace bells WERE NOT easy to make and that
was intentional because the reality is peace is not easy. But when we
work together each day at it in our choices and in our interactions, the
results are beautiful.
30 days of kindness: Say hello to someone you don’t know OR make a card
Math: discussion about the bead cabinet, what is multiplication
Math: 100 chain, count to 100, skip counting by 10
Continue peace bell project
Language lesson: What is a statement/What is a question
Wednesday:
Start new Grace and Courtesy Conversations: 30 days of emotions
Day 1: mischievous
Science:
Weather write the room — there are real life pictures of different
weather systems on the walls of the room. Students take a clipboard and a
checklist and set out to find AND WRITE the names of the weather
systems.
Introduction to writing informative l texts: 6 steps for how to fly a kite
30 days of emotions: lonely
Game:
what’s wrong with this picture (afternoon only — will present again on
Monday with whole group) Looking at real life pictures with one silly
thing one with them. DO NOT SAY what is wrong until the whole group has
seen the picture (this is SOOOO hard to do!).
Thanks
again everyone for coming through with the dishwasher pods and the
disinfecting wipes. It is the little things that help us to be inspired
to bring our best to the classroom every day for your children.
