Montessori Pathways' News
June, 2012
Notes from Miss Alena
It’s hard to believe that an entire month of summer has already gone by! However, it’s been extremely enjoyable and productive for all of us. During this month, our students have “visited” Australia, China, India, and Belarus.
At the beginning of camp, the children prepared a world map, where they are now marking these countries, adding the country’s flag, as well as a miniature person dressed in the national dress of the country.
A huge thank you to not only the teachers, but also everyone who had come in to share interesting facts or items about various countries throughout this month. A special thank you to Bob and Sherry Pan, who talked about the various traditions of China and shared delicious dumplings with the children.
Thank you to Ms. Laxmi, who was once a member of the Montessori Pathways family, for bringing various Indian decorations and dress, as well as her Sari. She explained the special ways a Sari can be worn (did you know that each part of India has a different way of wearing a Sari?)
Lastly, my daughter Masha and I shared different traditional items and facts about Belarus, which the children found interesting as well.
This month brought many new friends to our school. We are happy to welcome Alia, Heath, Mark, Alexandra, Quincy and Emily. It is also great to see friends from previous summer camps and alumni return, as they are always greeted by the many friends they make over the summer.
At the end of Australia week, we had yet another special addition to our family—a beautiful blue parakeet. Ironically enough, parakeets are native Australia birds! The children have begun voting for a name for the bird, but would like to extend the chance to all of their friends—we will let you know the results in the next newsletter. Our friend is very active, fun, and friendly, and it seems that he is also enjoying our school quite a lot.
During this month, we had our first training field trip, which we discussed in our previous newsletter. The children also visited Color-Me-Mine, where they prepared presents for Father’s Day (we hope you liked them!)
Unfortunately, our last field trip of the month to the Gazebo in Downtown Crystal Lake had to be cancelled due to bad weather. However, we tried to not cancel the picnic and make one in the classroom instead. We spread out a blanket in the class, ordered pizza, and the children enjoyed the lemonade they had made. Of course, this does not compare to a picnic outside, so we will try once again in July—hopefully the weather will be on our side!
In the coming month, the children can expect to visit Germany, Italy, France, and Africa. During Italian week, we will visit Georgio’s pizza to learn about how a pizza is made and make one ourselves!
When learning about Africa, our school will be visited by Helen Bond, who travels to various countries, and has spent a lot of time in Africa. She will bring various handmade African drums, perform a drumming routine, explain the drums to the kids and, finally, allow the children to try their hand at drumming as well!
Enjoy your summer and Happy 4th of July!
Warmly,
Miss Alena
Notes from the Classroom:
Ms. Christine and Ms. Ellen
Our summer camp "jet setters" have learned many new facts about interesting and diverse cultures from around the globe this month:
We set out on our journey with a visit to Australia in week 1. "G'day, mate!" We learned that although English is spoken in Australia, there is a difference in the vocabulary and their native voice sounds different than ours in the USA. Then...."blimey"...they have a fun toy called a boomerang and very diverse landscapes with animals that we do not see here in Crystal Lake. We also were delighted to explore the Great Barrier Reef with its richness of sea life (especially the sharks!) and coral reef formations and saw that at different sea/ocean levels, there is quite a difference in the life that inhabits each level. We introduced the concept that not only is Australia a continent, but it is also an island - unique! We tasted kiwi fruit that most of the children found delicious. Our plan was to try vegemite but it couldn't be located at any of our local stores......hmmmmm, wonder why? We created a Great Barrier Reef art project complete with shells, coral and hand print crabs; you will enjoy seeing these at the finale art show!
From Australia to China.....A huge thank you to Sophie Pan's dad who gave a wonderful presentation about the Chinese zodiac, intricate cutting .print ( which is quite a skill), a lesson in Chinese symbols such as water and sun, use of chopsticks and discussion of Chinese New Year. He was also so very generous to bring Chinese dumplings which we enjoyed. China is so rich with culture - the children enjoyed playing a traditional game called "Catch the Dragon's Tail" as well as reading "Chin Chiang and the Dragon's Dance". We practiced using chop sticks as well as tasting fortune cookies which we then, in turn, read out loud (it was really fun to associate each child's "fortune" with their own, unique personality!)
Then on to India, which is rich in culture as well as tradition. We learned that monkeys are one inhabitant that prevail every area - from jungles to cities and that people have to be on guard to close their doors and windows to avoid unwanted "visitors". We created "chakris" or pinwheels and made stamped prints of monkeys in various landscapes.
The Bengal tiger is the national animal and the peacock is the national bird. We learned that the Taj Mahal is one of the seven wonders of the world and that it took many years and men to build this tribute. A good friend, Ms. Laxmi who is from India, came to talk and show us the extensive beading and jewels that are part of Indian saris and culture. We learned that children go to school six days a week and that most generations of families live together in one house. Because the art of using dye is prevalent in India, we chose this week to tie dye our white t-shirts.......the children enjoyed choosing their color palette and hopefully will enjoy wearing their creation.
We wrapped up our first month of camp in Belarus; a small but diverse country in Europe which just happens to be where Ms. Alena and Alex's and Ms. Masha are from! We had a beautiful presentation of culture as well as books and crafts from this country. We created the flag which is red, green and white embroidered with red; we also learned how to embroider using a mesh stencil; threading a needle, tying a knot, and working up and down was a challenging, but rewarding experience for some children.
We usually start our day outside playing while it is still cool and having a group snack in the gazebo. We tasted home grown green peppers from our own school garden and also made lemonade. We all enjoyed refreshing watermelon and huge thanks for your contributions to The Sharing Basket - we appreciate and enjoy every item!
We've been having fun with material extensions in the classroom this summer. Number sequences have become visual patterns on the hundred board as children read clues and place the tiles on the board. Books have come alive as children retell, summarize, categorize, and illustrate the information they have just read. Data is being collected throughout the classroom as bar graphs are introduced and created.
We are also working diligently with Grace and Courtesy at lunchtime. Teachers are modeling the magic words please, thank you, you're welcome, and may I. We are encouraging and reminding children to use good manners throughout the day as we walk through the halls, speak to our friends, and ask for assistance. During our rushful lives, we encourage parents to take the time to reinforce these magic words throughout your days and evenings with your children. The rewards are priceless!
Happy Birthday to Abby A., Treyson M., and Shawn J. and thank you for your special birthday snacks! We're looking forward to more travels in the weeks ahead.....
Stay cool and enjoy this magical season with you families! Happy Summer to all!
Miss Christine and Miss Ellen
Notes from the Classroom:
Miss Terri and Miss Masha
The afternoon class has been a busy place as we make related crafts and art work for each of the countries we are visiting.
Each week we make the flag of that particular country; so far, we have visited Australia, China, India and Belarus. The children also color in the country on the world map and place a small flag of the country along with a paper doll (or person) wearing traditional or symbolic clothing from that country.
The first week we visited Australia, so we picked two animals commonly found in that country, the Koala Bear and the Kangaroo. We drew, colored and cut out the animals before gluing them to the appropriate habitat. Our Koala Bears are in a Eucalyptus tree, which has the only leaves they eat, but which most other animals find poisonous. Interesting!
During our week in China we chose to make a Chinese kite out of poster board. The children spend several days making designs, cutting out and coloring our “pretend” kites. We chose the Panda from China as our favorite animal to draw, cut out and color; eating bamboo leaves, of course! The Chinese flag we made with a red background and five yellow starts. The only large star represents the government and the four smaller stars represent the people.
We next looked at books on India during week three. We saw decorated elephants used in special ceremonies or celebrations. They were painted with beautiful colors patterns, so we made a couple of elephants out of poster board for the children to decorate and color with markers. For the clothing on our paper doll we made a sari which is traditionally worn by the women in India.
To make the flag the children cut strips of orange, white and green paper. The white stripe stands for truth. The orange stripes stand for sacrifice and courage. The green stripe stands for soil and plant life.
The blue wheel in the center stands for the cycles of life and fate. Several children also chose to make a picture of the Taj Mahal. We traced a pattern on white paper, cut it out and added details like windows, pillars, lattice work, archways and in fine tipped permanent markers. Then we glued pretend jewels on to adorn our building. The Taj Mahal is a huge white marble building, built by Shah Jahan for his favorite wife after she died. She is buried there.
This past week we looked at the country of Belarus. Ms. Masha brought in several items from her country which we enjoyed looking at. One item we really liked was a beautiful floral head dress worn during special celebrations. We made our own headdresses by twisting several pipe cleaners together and adding tissue paper flowers of several colors. We finished with yard “ribbons” which some of us chose to braid.
Next, we saw a picture of a stork which is the country bird. Ms. Alena told us that if a stork builds its nest on your house they believe this means good luck for the whole family! So, we drew and cut out our own storks and glued them onto houses which we had colored. We made nests for our birds by cutting pieces of paper into strips and gluing the “pile of branches” onto our rooftops under our storks. The children really loved this project and got lots of practice cutting.
We also made pictures of birch trees commonly found in the Belarus landscape. Each child cut and colored white paper strips to look like birch bark. We colored white clouds in paper with cray-pas before painting the sky blue with water colors. We then glued on our trees to the background and added green grass, branches, leaves, and a sun, etc. Ms. Alena almost cried when she saw our pictures. They were so beautiful and they reminded her of her homeland.
Our newest member of our classroom, as you probably have heard, is our beautiful blue parakeet. We have been learning about handling, watching and feeding our new class member. He has been let out of his cage several times now for a visit with the children. Several children were allowed to touch him and even let him sit on their fingers! Thanks to all of his visitors when he was in the pet store. He is now a very child friendly bird. We are voting on a name for him – some of the suggestions (there are many) are Blue, Sleepy, Flash, Aquwee, Periwinkle and Pangaea.
We’ll let you know what the final decision on his name is when all of the votes are in!
Miss Terri and Miss Masha
Notes from the afternoon classroom:
Miss Terri
This certainly was a unique month as far as the weather was concerned. The afternoon January temperature went from sunny and 58° to snowy and 35° within a couple of days. We decorated the wooden train on the playground with beautiful, chalk pictures one day and the next day we were shoveling snow into a snow hill. It was amazing.
I highly recommend buying a child’s size snow shovel if you don’t already have one. We have had many hours of fun outdoors using our muscles and this simple tool! It may take a while to dress for the outdoors as far as snow clothes but it worth it. In fact, I think our little snow-hill had a “boy magnet” buried in it. Every time I look at it, the snow-hill has about a dozen boys rolling or laying on it. It’s been great!
Art this month has involved using several different mediums. We have been enjoying drawing on scratchboard paper with wooden sticks. It’s so fun to see the colors magically appear. First, we practiced making patterns on one paper – diamonds, checkerboard pattern, stripes, circles, squares and more – then we drew pictures of our houses on another. We all ended up with rainbow colored yards and houses. For our next project we again drew houses using square and triangle insets for the frame. We added windows, doors, chimneys etc. to make our houses complete. Then we outlined our drawings with markers, colored them with craypas then finished them off with watercolors. It’s always fun to see the water-resist effect with craypas as the watercolor doesn’t stick to the colored clouds, sun and trees.
Our large group project this month was a winter mural. First, we painted a winter blue sky and brown tree trunks with tempura paint. Each tree was painted as if we were inside looking out through the bare branches - or in the case of the pine tree, through the pine needles. We are now in the process of making all kinds of winter animals to add to our mural.
Some of the animals we have made so far are foxes, wolves, cardinals, blue jays and owls with plenty more to come. The animals are drawn, then colored and finally poked out of colored construction paper.
Some of our snacks this month have included apples, clementines, grapes, bananas, banana bread and popcorn. We particularly enjoyed making home-made pretzels for our baking projects. The smell of the yeast in warm water was new to most of the children. We were amazed to see the dough double in size before we kneaded it. While the texture was different, it was a lot like kneading the play dough we made for art. We pressed it, folded it, pounded and rolled it before dividing it into about 32 small bowls (it was a little math project as well!) Then, we rolled out the dough and made twisted shapes, hearts, rings and more. It was so much fun! The pretzels were then brushed with egg and water before baking. We definitely want to make this recipe again!
Designer Pretzels
Ingredients:
1 ½ cups warm water
1 pkg dry yeast
1 tbsp sugar
4 ½ cups flour
Topping ingredients:
2 tbsp water
1 egg
coarse salt, poppy or sesame seeds
Getting ready:
1. Put the 1 ½ cups of warm water, yeast and sugar in the large bowl. Let it sit for 5 minutes.
2. Stir in flour and mix well, first with the spoon, then with your hands.
3. Put extra flour on the counter, turn out the dough and knead about 20 times by folding the dough over onto itself. You can bang it, slam it, give it a good karate chop.
4. Put the dough back in the bowl, cover with the towel and let it rise in a warm place for about 1 hour until double in size.
5. Divide the dough into 20-30 balls, about the size of a golf ball. Use extra flour on your hands if the dough is sticky. Roll out each ball with your hands into a long stick as thick as your thumb.
6. Shape them into hearts, stars, snails, fish, pretzels, initials—anything!
7. Turn the oven on to 400oF. Place all your creations on cookie sheets.
8. Use a fork to mix the egg and water together in a bowl and brush on the pretzels with a pastry brush.
9. Sprinkle with coarse salt, poppy or sesame seeds or leave plain.
10. Bake about 20-25 minutes until hard and brown. Cool on a rack. If you want more bread-like pretzels, bake them for only 15 minutes (but they won’t keep as well).
Here it is, hope you enjoy. Special note: We baked out pretzels for 15 minutes instead of 25 so they stayed nice and soft.
Miss Katy
The Nappers came back from Winter Break and eased right back into the routine of their normal day. The children continue to practice good manners and are now reminding one another of when to say “please” and “thank you”. On a daily basis we are practicing talking and listening skills. The children are either asked a question such as, “What is one fun thing you are going to do this weekend?” or “What did you have for dinner the night before?” Sometimes I simply ask the children if they have something they want to share (which they all do!). We then take turns, one at a time, sharing and listening to the answer. This is a wonderful way for the children to practice their listening and conversational skills.
Our activities this month started with thinking about a common cold weather animal: the penguin. We made paintings of penguins using potatoes as stamps. The children were not only able to learn penguin facts, including parts of the penguin, but they also were able to notice the characteristics of a potato.
The Nappers then spent a week working with watercolor paints. Our first day, we worked on keeping the colors separated in the paint tray. The second day we did a crayon-resist using white crayon. The children found it interesting that the white crayon appeared once they applied the watercolor paint. On the third day we soaked our paper in water, applied water color paint and then shook salt on top of the wet, colored paper. The next day we checked our art and discovered it produced an interesting and colorful texture. The children fastened their work together as a book of watercolor art.
During the last part of the month, we began talking about the Arctic. We used an atlas and a globe to figure out where the Arctic is located. The Nappers learned about the different types of animals that live in the arctic.
We made polar bear faces using cotton as fur. The children worked cooperatively to pull apart the cotton balls to create a more realistic version of polar bear fur. Next we talked about the Arctic wolves. We looked at photographs in books to see the different colored layers of fur that the wolves have. We used colored pencils to practice a layering technique to display the different colors of fur the wolves have. The last animal we worked on was the Arctic fox who’s fur turns completely white in the snowy months. The Nappers pin poked out the form of an Arctic fox (which is an excellent use of small motor skills in preparation for writing). We glued them on snowy paper and noticed how well they blended into their environment.
We are currently finishing up our exploration of the Arctic with one last project. The children are very excited about what they have created. Look for it to come home within the next week or two!
Miss Terri and Miss Katy
Gym Class with Ms. Donna
We have been working on keeping our bodies moving for a longer period of time and playing more games. Sleeping Giant begins by the children jumping up and down until they hear "Sleeping Giants!"Then, they collapse to the floor and lie very still. When they hear "Waking Giants!" the children start jumping again.
Number Ball has us standing in a circle passing a ball around. The first child counts, "One" out loud, and as the children pass the ball to the next person, they say the next consecutive number. We reached up to 55.
Through the Hoop teams have a hoop, the first player goes through the hoop and then gives the hoop to the next person in line, then they go to the end of the line, etc.
Buckets is another game, we used hoops to hold the primary and secondary colors. Colored papers were scattered all over the floor. A movement was called out and the children then selected a colored paper and put it into the correct hoop. We put folding mats on the ground, then the children would stand on the mat and then jump off as this was mastered we tried jumping over the mats (low hurdles).
The kinders played a game called "Swamp", two teams, 2 alligators on scooters and lots of balls. If the balls landed in the swamp the alligators would collect them and put them in their team baskets. Balls could also be put in to the team basket if a team player caught a fly ball. When all balls were in baskets new alligators were chosen and the game began again.
Human bowling pins was also played. Two teams each with a soft ball would roll the ball at the children who were acting like bowling pins; however, these pins could move to avoid being hit by a ball. When a child was hit they would trade places with the person who had hit them with the ball. The tricky part for the human pins they had to always be looking for a ball because they could come from both directions.
Miss Donna
Gym Class with Ms. Donna
March had us continuing our loco-motor skills, as well as throwing and catching a ball with a partner. We also began leaping or jumping over folded mates and jumping over the long jump rope as it was wiggling on the floor.
Stations were introduced this month. Children were assigned a station for a certain amount of time. When time was called they had to make sure that their station was set up for the next group before they could move on.
The stations were ski jump (you jumped over a jump rope on the ground keeping your feet together), throwing bean bags underhand and overhand into a small ring inside of a hula hoop, scooter trail (following a path while sitting on the scooter just using your legs and then following the path laying on the scooter using your arms and legs, and our last station was crawling through tunnels.
Miss Terri and Miss Donna
