Diary of a First Year Montessori Kindergarten Teacher - Week 8



Photo by Jerry Wang on Unsplash

Hello Montessori Kindergarten Families,

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
Math: Single Addition WORD problems
Letters: L,U

Wednesday:
Science/Practical Life/Math: Making Strawberry Sorbet
Art: paper weaving lesson
Emotion: Jealous
Math: skip counting by 3s (squared/cubed)

Thursday:
Emotion: Irritated
Letters: V, W
Science discussion: tornados
Continued discussion on temperature
Math: Memory game — 1 through 20
Introduction to the Moveable Alphabet
Art: Continue working on Kindness Quilt

Friday:
Emotion: Quiet
Letters: X, Y
Language: CVC ending sounds
Finish temperature work
Finish kindness quilt
Grace and Courtesy Lesson: the words we say to each other affects our emotions/what kinds of games are ‘good’ games — what is a good game?

Enjoy the rest of your weekend families.

Warm regards,
Mrs. Norgren