January 10, 2012
Welcome back all and happy 2012. I hope all of you were able to spend time with friends and family this holiday season. Everyone returned to school healthy--albeit a bit tired--and ready to get back to work.
Although the weather has been unseasonable warm, please remind your children to check their change of clothes in the bathroom and replace them with cold weather attire. Also, we try to take the children outside as much as possible during the winter months. Please help your child remember to bring snow pants, hats, gloves, etc. so they will be comfortable during recess. Children can leave snow suits, etc here at school during the week.
Judith Naar, the elementary Spanish instructor, will return on Tuesday, January 17th. We miss her! I have been helping the older children with verb conjugations in the past and future tenses. We are also working on formulating questions. Maria Turner (business manager in front office) has been a wonderful help to the children. For those of you who are new to CMS, Maria was my classroom assistant and the elementary Spanish teacher for nearly six years. The older children still regard her as one of the family and seek her help when necessary. My thanks to her in keeping the children's conversational skills alive during Judith's absence.
There are many interesting events going on in the classroom. The older girls are working from the book of science experiments. There is a collaborative research paper on Zambia an Egypt. One student is taking notes on the Mongolian Empire. One of our 6th graders is beginning her final project (research, paper, PowerPoint, display, etc) on Dr. Maria Montessori. Our first year friends are exploring definitions for body functions (protection, respiration, circulation, reproduction, movement, and skeleton) for the five classes of vertebrates and are working on fraction multiplication. Others are working on cubing trinomials; square root (steps leading to abstraction); decimals; equivalencies between polygons; area; perfect tenses; positive, compariative, and superlative adjectives; and sentence analysis. There is always much astir in the Magnolia room. Last week, when I introduced the above mentioned adjective work, the girl receiving it exclaimed that she knew what to do since she had watched another student doing the work before the break. I smiled happily. This is what we strive for in the classroom. We want a variety of work going on between and within the same age group. In this way, children are exposed to more than their current lesson.
I am excited for the new semester. Please e-mail or call anytime. Below are some reminders.
- Friday, January 13--Pizza Friday begins
- Monday, January 16--No School MLK Day
- Thursday, February 2--Parent Education Night at 6:30pm
- Monday, February 6--No School/Flex Day
Carrie Wisser
Magnolia Room
Community Montessori School
Magnolia Room Wish List
Outdoor classroom:
1. Spring bulbs: Iris, Daffodils, Tulips, etc. The children will enjoy seeing the fruits of their labor this Spring
2. Shade plants: Our flower bed receives shade even into the afternoon. If you have any plants that you are separating this year, we would love to take them. We use our plants for classification in the botany area.
Classroom:
1. Colored electrical tape
2. indoor plants, except Philodendron (we have many!, that have interesting leaf shapes
3. Poetry books--anthologies, anything really. I would love to expose the children to as many poets as possible
