// What we have been up to these days... //

Week of February 24

It happens every February: growth spurts! Some children suddenly reveal their gifted pitching arm, others’ spines suddenly seem so long and their limbs so lanky, others realize they can solve a conflict with a friend with much less help from adults, do simple addition or count to 100 by themselves,  or blend sounds together and read! What!

Did these things really happen overnight? 

Or were they slowly happening every day in tiny increments until one day they became wonderfully obvious? 

Who can say, but we’re so excited either way!

While Dr. Montessori can’t exactly get credit for the pitching arms or lengthening limbs, she would be proud of the hard work the children have been putting in day after day with the classroom materials, on their own and in their lessons. This daily practice is what helps them to push forward and upward, much like the seedlings on our windowsill. Everyone has their own timeline for learning and growth, but what we know for certain is that they each, in their time, thrive in Montessori!

Week of March 4

Wow, we can feel the cold weather down to our bones!

With “feels-like” temps below 25F again, we’ve been stuck inside — but with so many new works being introduced, it’s been just fine! We’ve been productively busy all week long!

We’ve refreshed our Practical Life shelves with new works to challenge our fingers and build the stamina and dexterity of our hands, so if the children come home talking about their “muscular fingers,” and doing body-builder flexes with just their thumbs, it might be because we’ve been talking about how strong their hands are getting!

We’ve also been introducing lots and lots of dinosaur and prehistoric animals activities! The children have been very busy using a variety of matching works including memory games and dino dominoes,  jigsaw puzzles of varying levels of difficulty, to categorizing activities which help the children learn which prehistoric beasts were carnivores, herbivores and omnivores. There’s such a great deal of interest about these ancient animals that we have many more activities and works planned— stay tuned!

One more thing: we have a dino-themed Book of the Week: Oh Say Can You Say Di-No-Saur?: All About Dinosaurs, by Bonnie Worth and illustrated by Steve Haefele. This book is perfect for us right now because the children are all so excited about dinosaurs AND our K students are literally working on All About books of their own in Writers’ Workshop! Hooray for cross-curricular overlaps!