Bring a picture of a large and small machine
Topic: Machines
How machines make our work easier
The value is self-reliance, which is confidence in our own judgment and abilities. It is our judgment that creates the machine and then uses it in a useful way.
For cooking, we’ll make orange/banana shakes.
Outside, we’ll make bubble sculptures and in the sandbox make a city-scape.
The songs we’ll be singing are The Wheels on the Bus, It’s a Small World, One Hammer, and Do Your Ears Hang Low?
For creative dramatics, we’ll be popcorn poppers, eggbeaters, and trains.
Our art activities are painting with wheels, cars and trucks, and painting with stencils.
For motor development, we’ll work on flexibility with yoga poses. For vestibular function we’ll hop, jump, gallop, skip, spin, roll like a log or a roly-poly, and hang upside down on the chinning bar.
THE STATE OF THE YARDSTICK
In a few weeks, you’ll be meeting with your child’s teacher for a conference. You’ll be preparing questions you’ve been wanting to ask, and the teacher is preparing your child’s status report, the snapshot of what work your child is doing right now and has done over the past six months. Nagging in the back of your mind might be how you judge that what should be happening is, in fact, happening. We understand that concern, and have developed a system of analyzing not only academics that we want to insure are being presented to each child, but also emotional and physical criteria for helping each child be successful. This is how we keep track.
Every child in the school has a progress sheet appropriate to the class she is in. From the tiniest infant to our graduates, these are the criteria that we use to evaluate how a child is doing and how he should be doing. You are encouraged to ask for a set from your child’s classroom. You’ll see incredible detail from when the child first rolls over in the infant class to studying the needs of man for our graduating kindergartners. Art skills, physics, and whether your child can catch a bounced ball are part of the analysis, as are whether your child needs a lot of close attention from the teacher or if a stimulating environment is better than a more peaceful class.
You’ll be impressed, maybe even skeptical. It’s a lot of material. How can all that happen? The Montessori equipment helps tremendously, as does the independent work of the Montessori child and older children’s teaching younger children. Our extraordinary enrichment curriculum is a powerful tool. The children learn American history, physics, motor development, music, and creativity. A lot of time on the playground (3 to 4 hours each day) makes a difference. The large motor activity, sensory integration, and oxygen uptake make a huge difference in academic achievement.
The staff is a huge factor. Their attention to the child and the secure relationship over many months or several years enables the child to invest energy in learning. The Montessori emphasis on following the child and capitalizing on “sensitive periods” makes development move at a pace that is the most advantageous for your child. This enriched environment at the preschool level can make a 20-point improvement in the child’s adult IQ. (See Joan Beck’s book How to Raise a Brighter Child.) Having a good yardstick gives us exciting goals for each child. The possibilities are enormous.
On the Calendar
Parent Teacher Conferences – On October 18 we will have conference week. Conference times will be 12:30 and 1:00 Monday – Thursday. Please email us what day and the time you would like to schedule. Each conference should take about 20min. Because our infants are new (less than three months) we will not have conferences for the infant class.
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