SHOW AND TELL
Bring a machine your family uses (hammer, zipper, padlock with a key, etc.).
Topic: Machines
How machines make our work easier
The value is self-reliance. We want to have confidence in our own abilities. Because we think we can, we do.
For cooking, we’ll make orange/banana shakes.
Outside we’ll make a cityscape.
The songs we’ll be singing are Wheels on the Bus, It’s a Small World, One Hammer, and Do Your Ears Hang Low?
Our art activities are painting with stencils, making cars and trucks, and painting with wheels.
Creative dramatics will be pretending to be an egg beater, a needle with thread, popcorn in a popper, sticky popcorn, and a train.
For body development, we’ll work on flexibility with yoga poses. For motor development we’ll do vestibular function exercises with hopping, skipping, spinning, and rolling.
MONTESSORI PHILOSOPHY
The Montessori method is a unique and comprehensive approach to education based on the discoveries of Dr. Maria Montessori. Dr. Montessori was an Italian physician who began her career working with retarded children. The apparatus she designed for these children succeeded brilliantly. Her wards caught up to and in some cases surpassed the performance of their peers in a competitive reading and writing examination given by the public schools. With this success, Dr. Montessori reasoned that similar apparatus could be used to educate normal children from birth. As she wrote, “The most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six. For that is the time when man’s intelligence itself, his greatest implement, is being formed.”
Dr. Montessori’s approach was to prepare an environment to facilitate the child’s development, to suit it to the child’s specific needs. In this way, the Montessori classroom is an educational system consistent with the laws by which a child develops naturally. It is a child’s environment that enables the child to develop most freely and enjoyably. And it is the child who determines his own rate of development, not the adult, for Montessori wanted to ensure that “the environment reveal the child, not mold him.”
Dr. Montessori believed that no human being educated another person. He must do it himself or it will never be done. A truly educated individual continues learning long after the hours and years he spends in a classroom because he is motivated from within by a natural curiosity and love of knowledge. She felt, therefore, that the goal for early education should not be to fill the child with facts from a pre-selected course of studies but rather to cultivate his own natural desire to learn. As a result, Montessori children concentrate with enthusiasm and achieve a real and profound understanding of their work. This intellectual progress is accompanied by emotional growth. The children become harmonious in movement, independent in work, and honest and helpful with one another. Emphasis is placed, first and foremost, on forming the individual, on development of a well-integrated personality, self discipline, self motivation, and self confidence, Academic achievements, of course, always gratifying and welcome, accompany the child’s inner development. The Montessori method develops a sense of discovery and awareness that mere surface knowledge can never equal.
For Your Information
Machines All Around Us – Following on our Physics theme last week that talked about how everything has a “how” and a “why”, our Machines theme explains a lot of how our everyday tools work. Explanations include how a commode works, why cell phones have that name, and how cranes get on the tops of tall buildings. It’s a fun theme. You might follow up at home with pointing out all the machines that make your life not just easier, but even functional.
Classroom Seminars – Plan to join us for our classroom seminars to talk about how this method works and what you can expect for your little one. Infant class seminar will be Tuesday October 2, toddler class seminar will be Wednesday October 3, and primary class seminar will be Thursday October 4. Each class will be from 5:00 to 6:00. Please let us know if you plan to attend.
Picture Day – The photographer will be at the school on Tuesday October 2, to take individual and sibling pictures. If you want your child in special clothes for their picture, they should come to school dressed in their special clothes and we can help them change in to school clothes after their pictures have been taken.
Extra Clothes – Toddlers need at least three changes of clothes in their cubby for when they get wet, or spill food at lunch time or their diaper over flows for these and many other reasons you want to make sure your child does not run out of extra clothes.
CLASSROOM NEWS
Anderson (Didi) one of the newest students in the toddler class has grasped the concept of the mat/rug. It designates a child’s workspace. Once the work is placed on the mat the child knows that this is the area where they are working and it is to be respected by others. If a child must leave their work at any time then when they return their work is in the same place they left it. If the child has to go to the restroom, go to lunch, or is working on an activity that cannot be finished in one day having a work mat allows the child to leave and return without having to restart the activity it helps to teach order.
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