Notes

Our first month of school is behind us, and things have really settled down. The children are happy, busy and enjoying themselves, and we are grateful that the back-to-school transition has been smooth.

October is here, and so we will begin to discuss all things fall which include apples, pumpkins and leaves. At the beginning of the month we will talk about the many different kinds of apples including macintosh, honey crisp, red delicious, golden delicious, and granny smith. There are many different trees in our area and so we will focus on these and the leaves they produce such as the oak, maple, sweet gum, sassafras, gingko, beech and tulip.

Some of the new Practical Life exercises being brought in are pumpkin scrubbing. Table scrubbing, baby washing and water pouring have already been introduced, and the skills being developed as the children use these exercises will serve them well as they scrub a pumpkin in an orange basin with an orange sponge, brush and drying cloth. Also in Practical Life we will be tweezing and spooning tiny leaves and pumpkins, and we will also show napkin folding. In Sensorial, because we are learning to identify kinds of apples, we will have some fun tasting apples and “voting” on which ones we like best. We also have many colorful fall puzzles. We will be counting and adding apples, pumpkins, leaves and acorns in the Math area.

In Language, there will be circle discussions about the changes that fall brings including the colors of both the leaves and the grass as well as falling temperatures. We are able to observe these changes on our walks to the playground. As always, we will have concrete materials to enhance our learning, including baskets in each classroom which hold different kinds of apples and then leaves. Should you have any special leaves in your yard, the children may certainly bring them in as well as apples that you may collect if you go apple picking or even if you are shopping for apples at the grocery store. On the Language shelves there will be fall-themed matching exercises as well as go-together and sequencing cards. At the art table and the book corner there will be many fall-related art projects and story books.

Halloween is of course the highlight of the month for many of our students. As some of you may remember, the children will not wear their costumes to school that day. We will be celebrating with our large repertoire of Halloween moving games, songs and books, and in all of our curriculum areas, in addition to the autumn-themed exercises described above, we will add lots of concrete Halloween activities, many of which have been created by our teachers.

October is busy enough with Halloween, with all of the new materials related to fall being brought in, and with the ongoing Montessori exercises which will be added. Yet another fun and popular October activity is bulb planting. We will show the children four different kinds of bulbs including the crocus, daffodil, hyacinth and tulip. Each bulb has a unique look which the children will be able to clearly see as they handle them. And each will turn into a different and beautiful flower. We will be planting the bulbs in our garden space behind the playground and near our entrance, and every child will have the opportunity to do this. The bulbs will rest in their “cozy beds” deep under the ground all through the remaining months of fall and then winter and will hopefully emerge as lovely flowers in the spring adding a burst of beautiful color to the areas where we planted so many months earlier. The most fascinating part of this lesson is the application of pine straw over the planted bulb bed which, because of its scent, deters hungry squirrels from digging and then munching on our carefully planted bulbs. The sight of our growing bulb garden beginning in late March of next year has always been so welcome after the long and dreary winter.

We, as the teachers of your little ones, have always tried to create a classroom environment which is caring, loving and supportive. So it is fitting that early in the year we begin another important theme, that of Peace. Our Peace curriculum includes concrete lessons that we will present over the course of the school year. We explain to the children that peace in its simplest form mean showing kindness in the smallest of ways and caring for each other….helping a friend roll up his or her mat or put work away, comforting a classmate who is upset, giving up a seat next to the teacher to another who really seems to need it, helping a teacher clean up at the end of work time, holding the hand of someone who needs a partner as we exit the classroom. On circle we demonstrate by play acting with the children any number of scenarios which show peaceful and kind acts.

Each classroom has a “Peace Corner” in one area of the room. We have begun by placing our “Peace Bowl” on a low table in that area. Alongside the bowl is dish with pretty stones in it. The children are encouraged to place a stone in the Peace Bowl if they have shown kindness and consideration towards another child or a teacher. In the beginning of the year, our students love tossing the stones into the bowl, perhaps because of the sound or feel of them. But gradually they begin to understand that each stone represents an act of kindness and good will, and that these small acts have value in creating a happy and peaceful environment conducive to both learning and to positive social interaction. As we continue our Peace curriculum over the next few months, we will talk about sharing feelings that we all experience such as happiness, sadness, fear and anger. Later in our Peace Corner we will be working on helping the children with conflict resolution. We will talk more about that next month. In the meantime, here’s to a fall full of learning activities and fun.

“Peace is not something you wish for.

It is something you make, something you do,

something you are. And something you give away.”

John Lennon