SHOW AND TELL
Bring picture of two prehistoric animals and know their names.
Topic: Prehistoric
About a world we didn’t know
The value is humility, which is not boasting about ourselves.
For science, we’ll do a timeline on the earth’s history and experiments about fossils and sediment.
Outside, we’ll match the sets of natural items we brought from home.
The songs we’ll be singing are Them Bones, Ain’t It Great to be Crazy, I’d Like to Teach the World to Sing, and Catch a Falling Star..
For creative dramatics, we’ll play musical dinosaurs.
Our art activities are dinosaur eggs, dragonfly wings, and dinosaur rubbings.
For motor development, we’ll work on flexibility with leg and arm stretching. For bilaterality we’ll do a crawling relay, play homerun, and play to music.
THE DISCIPLINE OGRE
When talking about children’s discipline with one of our interns, who is taking the Montessori training with a number of public school teachers who are seeking those same answers for their children. Almost parallel to this discussion I’m seeing and hearing news articles about over stress in our whole society, stress over too much to do, too little time, drinking and eating too much, spending too much. Could it be that our beautiful and sensitive little barometers, our children, are reflecting a national phenomenon of lack of personal self-discipline? William Bennett’s Book of Virtues talks about self-discipline:
“In self-discipline one makes a “disciple” of oneself. One is one’s own teacher, trainer, coach, and “disciplinarian.” It is an odd sort of relationship, paradoxical in its own way, and many of us don’t handle it very well. There is much unhappiness and personal distress in the world because of failures to control tempers, appetites, passions, and impulses . . . . Rene Descartes once remarked of good sense that “everybody thinks he is so well supplied with it that even the most difficult to please in all other matters never desire more of it than they already possess.” With self-discipline it is just the opposite. Rare indeed is the person who doesn’t desire more self-discipline and, with it, the control that it gives one over the course of one’s life and development. That desire is itself, as Descartes might say, a further mark of good senses. We do want to take charge of ourselves. But what does that mean?
The question has been at or near the center of Western philosophy since its very beginnings. Plato divided the soul into three parts or operations – reason, passion, and appetite – and said that right behavior results from harmony or control of these elements. Saint Augustine sought to understand the soul by ranking its various forms of love in his famous ardo amoris: love of God, neighbor, self, and material goods . . . . But the question of correct order of the soul is not simply the domain of sublime philosophy and drama. It lies at the heart of the task of successful everyday behavior, whether it is controlling our tempers, or our appetites, or our inclinations to sit all day in front of the television. As Aristotle pointed out, here our habits make all the difference. We learn to order our souls the same way we learn to do math problems or play baseball well – through practice.”
For every one of the adults in our children’s lives to begin to practice personal self-discipline and to expect self-discipline from our children every day, then we can get to the world of respectful and respectable citizens that we know is possible.
WHAT IS SUCCESS?
This quote came from an actor named Fiennes when he was asked if fame and success had isolated him from what he was before and from the people he loved. He responded: “Success? Well, I don’t know quite what you mean by success. Material success? Worldly success? Personal, emotional success? The people I consider successful are so because of how they handle their responsibilities to other people, how they approach the future, people who have a full sense of the value of their life and what they want to do with it. I call people “successful” not because they have money or their business is doing well but because, as human beings, they have a fully developed sense of being alive and engaged in a lifetime task of collaboration with other human beings – their mothers and fathers, their family, their friends, their loved ones, the friends who are dying, the friends who are being born. Don’t you know it is all about being able to extend love to people? Really. Not in a big, capital-letter sense but in the everyday. Little by little, task by task, gesture by gesture, word by word.”
CLASSROOM NEWS
Dawson has been practicing his hand writing by tracing his name and using the metal insects, because he is showing interest in writing he seeks out the work that allow him to practice every day. Diyann was introduced to the movable alphabet he used this material to lay out the letter in perfect alphabetical order, this work also helps in learning how to sound out letters and spell words. Luke is showing interest in the pencil, when watching his older classmates use a pencil he wants to do the same and as a result he is learning how to hold a pencil and move it in many directions.
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