Our Diamond Jubilee Celebration

 

This year marks the 60th anniversary of Queen Elizabeth II's accession to the throne.  She became Queen of the United Kingdom, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, Ceylon and Pakistan, as well as taking on the role of the Head of the Commonwealth.  She was just 26 years old when she became Queen and has remained tirelessly dedicated to the service of her subjects.

In order to mark this historic occasion, we had a special Diamond Jubilee 'tea' at our little yellow school.

We began by making crowns.

A few of the teachers already had their own.

The children are familiar with Queen Elizabeth as they see her head on the back of our coins.  Mrs. P. brought in some royal items to share with the children. 

Our Diamond Jubilee 'tea' consisted of strawberry milk and digestive biscuits.  The Queen likes digestives with her tea.

Our 'tea' was followed by a book, Tea for Ruby, written by the former Sarah Ferguson, the Duchess of York.

It was a lovely way to pay tribute to Her Majesty. 

God save our gracious Queen

Long live our noble Queen

God save the Queen

Send her victorious

Happy and glorious

Long to reign over us

God save the Queen

More Blog Posts to Come

More blog posts are on the way! The past few months have been productive, eventful and thoroughly enjoyable ones at our little yellow school.  You can look forward to blog posts about our study of the sun,  our Diamond Jubilee celebration, our annual end of year concert, this year's graduates and some of the fascinating Montessori materials our graduates have been working with in their last year of the three year Montessori preschool program.  They are not to be missed.  Thank you for continuing to visit our blog.

A Field Trip ~ Stream and Insect Study ~ Part 2

Here is part two of our post about our field trip to a local outdoor education centre.  The first part of this post described the stream study.  This post is about the insect study.

Insect Study

After our stream study, we walked across the bridge to an open field to begin our insect study.

Our leader had placed short pieces of coloured yarn - red, yellow, white, green and brown - around the field.  The yarn represented insects.  The children were asked to pretend they were birds looking for different insects to eat.  Each of our little 'birds' set out to collect the 'insects'.  

Once our little 'birds' had found all the 'insects' they could, we headed off to the gazebo to see what we had collected.

We divided our pieces of yarn into piles according to colour. 


Our piles of red, yellow and white yarn were large, while the green and brown piles were much smaller.  Our leader told us that she hid an equal number of each colour. Why is this the case?  She explained that many insects are green and brown so that they camouflage with their surroundings making it harder for predators to find and eat them.  We also learned a song about the parts of an insect.


After this, the children were given bug boxes so that they could go out into the field again to find some real insects to observe.

We had a fantastic day on our field trip with parents, teachers, grandparents and children learning together.  We all agreed it was our best trip ever!  We will be visiting again in the fall to participate in another program.  We can't wait! 

It's Potato Planting Time!

At the very back of our half acre property, we have a large vegetable garden and pumpkin patch.  Each year the children help prepare the garden for planting and plant vegetables.   This year's mild winter, coupled with a warm spring, meant that we were able to get into our garden earlier than usual.  During the second week of May, the children planted seed potatoes in our back garden.

Here is our bag of seed potatoes.  Although they look like the potatoes you buy at the grocery store, seed potatoes are grown specifically for the production of potatoes and are as disease free as possible.

Each child was able to place a seed potato in our garden.

Our vegetable garden is at the very end of our second playground, affectionately known as the 'soccer field'.  Each day the children check on the progress of the potato plants. 

Here are some children from the full day class checking on the potato plants.

Here is a picture of our very healthy potato plants taken at the beginning of June.

The potato plants will continue to grow throughout the summer and will be ready to be harvested in the fall. 

Digging the potatoes out of our garden in September is one of the very first things we do when school begins.  It is a lovely way to bring our new Montessori community together as returning students and new students join together to experience the earth's harvest.

A Field Trip ~ Stream and Insect Study ~ Part 1

This week our whole school took a trip to a local outdoor education centre to participate in a stream and insect study.  This was the first time we had attempted a trip where the children would actually be going into water so we were a little worried.  All decked out in our rubber boots, away we went!

Stream Study

The stream study took place in a shallow stream. Before heading into the stream, our leader talked to us and showed us some of the creatures that live in the stream.

Here are the children heading down into the stream with our leader.

Here are some children exploring the stream.

The children turned over rocks hunting for stream creatures.

This is K.  His dad is a fly fisherman.  His dad knew all of the names of the insects and water creatures found in the stream and helped many children find crayfish.

This is the only picture I have of K.'s dad.  He is helping J. with his crayfish.

The children also found water insects.

 Part two coming soon.

A Visit From Reptilia

This week Reptilia visited our little yellow school.  N. from Reptilia introduced the children to a variety of reptiles and amphibians.  He even brought in a tarantula!  Here are the animals that N. brought to show us.

Biscuit The Box Turtle

Later in the presentation Biscuit busted out of her box much to everyone's delight!

Carnage The American Alligator

 

Pyro The Fire Salamander

We were not able to touch Pyro as his skin needed to remain moist.

Blueberry The Blue-Tongued Skink

Conan The Gopher Snake

Chile The Tarantula

We were not able to touch Chile.  We were quite happy just to look at him.

Uncle Buck The Boa Constrictor

The children enjoyed seeing the animals up close and were able to touch.  All in all we had a lovely morning with Reptilia!

A Graphing Experience

In March, the children in our classrooms were introduced to graphing activities.


Graphing activities in the Montessori casa classroom provide children with the opportunity to collect data and organize it in many different ways.  These activities also introduce the children to statistics (data analysis) and probability.


We chose to do one of our graphs about the different types of weather that we experienced in March.

Our question was Which Do You Like Best?

Our choices were:

Snowy

Rainy

Sunny

Windy

Each child wrote their name on a piece of paper and placed it underneath the type of weather that they liked best.

When everyone had placed their name on our graph, we all discussed the results.

Snowy weather was the type of weather that the children liked best, followed by sunny, with windy and rainy tied for last place.

Through our graph, the children were able to:


~  collect information
~  count and sort
~  read graphs
~  make observations from a graph
~  ask questions about graph results


Over the next few months the children will be creating and analyzing more graphs.  Our soon to be graduates are looking forward to creating a graph and collecting data from their fellow classmates.