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.

Spring Fever

In our little corner of the world, the first week of March roared in like a lion giving the children some much desired snow. 

Here is a group of happy children playing on a snow pile.

A March Lion

This didn't last long as March has now given us some of the finest record breaking days we have ever seen.  We have gone from snowpants, heavy coats and mittens right to shorts.  Yes, shorts on March 22 in Southern Ontario, Canada!  Today the temperature reached 28 degrees celsius giving all of us a serious case of Spring Fever.

No coats for us!

Look at our knees!

We decided to go out looking for signs of Spring around our school property.  Here are some of the things we found.

The tulips in our flower garden are growing.
  

So are the tulips we made for craft.

 

We also found a blooming crocus.

A little wooly bear caterpillar was crawling across our parking lot.

All this lovely weather has the children asking "When are the summer holidays?"  Unfortunately more seasonal March weather is set to arrive in the morning.  Thank you to Mother Nature for giving us a preview of the warm summer weather that is to come.  We enjoyed it while it lasted.

"Little Sparklers"

Breaks from my regular school routine usually find me immersed in books.  Last summer, I spent some time reading the Ramona series of books by Beverly Clearly.  As a child, I read (perhaps devoured is a better word) some of the Ramona books, but not all. Beverly Cleary wrote them over a span of 20 years and by that time I had long outgrown Ramona. 

 

Ramona the Pest remains my favourite book in the series.

As I read Ramona and Her Mother, a passage where Ramona's teacher has just called her house to speak to her mother made me smile.  Here is the passage:

"Why, no" said Mrs. Quimby.  "She didn't even mention spelling, but she did say you were one of her little sparklers who made teaching interesting."  And with that Ramona's mother left the room.

A little sparkler!  Ramona liked that.  She thought of the last Fourth of July when she had twirled through the dusk, a sparkler fizzing and spitting in each hand and leaving circles of light and figure eights as she had spun across the front yard until she had fallen to the grass with dizziness.  And now she was one of Mrs. Rudge's little sparklers!

 

In my almost twenty years of teaching, I have come across a few 'little sparklers'.  These are the children you will never forget.  They are the children who challenge you and ultimately make you a better teacher, ready and able to reach all of the children you are fortunate enough to get to know and work with.

 

In the first few years of our little yellow school, we had just such a 'little sparkler', J.  If you wanted everyone to come and sit for circle, J. wanted to work with the Montessori materials.  If it was work time, J. wanted to be singing and moving around.  J. always wanted to be doing the opposite of what you expected.  When J.'s younger sister joined our classroom, she would cry if J. wasn't cooperating.  J. was unaffected by all of it. Even though J. was challenging both in the classroom and at home, we could see glimpses of the person he was to become.

Once J. graduated and left our little yellow school for elementary school, we would hear stories of J. disrupting classes and having to sit right beside the teacher's desk.  Now, six years after J. graduated, we heard some wonderful news from his mom recently.  J.'s days of being a Ramona kind of 'little sparkler' are now over.  He has grown and matured and become a dependable, kind child with a very loving nature.

Our experience with J. and many other 'little sparklers' warms our hearts.  It serves to illustrate what Montessori knew all along, that we must 'follow the child'.  Each child has their own time.  We, as parents, teachers and adults in their lives, must provide a positive, supportive and loving environment to enable the child's true self to unfold and emerge allowing their inner light to shine bright.

A Different Kind of Winter

This winter has not been a typical Canadian winter.  While the parents and teachers at our little yellow school are enjoying the unseasonably warm and snow-free winter, the children are not.  They are longing for snow, snow and more snow!  They want to build snowmen and slide down the hill in the playground. 

Since this isn't a typical winter, most days the children do not believe that they still have to bundle up to go outside.  Our getting ready to go outside routine often goes like this:

A Child:                      Do we need to wear snowpants today?

Mrs. P.:                        Yes.

A Different Child:      Do we need our hats?

Mrs. P.:                          Yes you do.

Yet Another Child:      How about mittens?

Mrs. P.:                          Yes, you need those too.

L., age 5,  recently wrote a story about a little girl who went outside without any winter clothing and was perfectly fine.  Imagine that!  L. tells me that it is a true story.  I am particularly impressed with her use of exclamation marks. 

Here is her story.

One time a girl went outside without a hat and mittens or anything else!  She was not cold!

Cheep! Cheep! We're Here! ~ The Eggs Hatch

This morning we arrived at school to find three tired, wet and newly hatched chicks in the incubator.

The children (parents and teachers) were so excited to see the baby chicks!  By lunch time we had five chicks.

After recess we were surprised to find another wet little chick that had just hatched.  That makes six.

Here is a little chick trying to get some much deserved rest.  Hatching is hard work!

At the end of the day a group of children, parents and teachers were awed to witness a little chick hatching out of its egg. Here is the wing.

Here is the head. 

By the end of the day we had nine cute little chicks and more eggs with cracks.  We can't wait to see what tomorrow brings!

An Incubator Full of Eggs ~ Experiencing the Life Cycle of a Chicken

At our little yellow school, our students are fortunate to be able to experience the life cycle of plants in our very own pumpkin patch and vegetable garden.  This academic term, the children will also be experiencing the life cycle of a chicken.

During the last weeks of January, we received an incubator full of chicken eggs from a local farm.

The automatic turner (the black box visible in the picture) turns the eggs five times per day.

The children enjoy monitoring the daily progress of the eggs daily.

The children are keeping track of the days until the eggs hatch on a calendar.

We will stop turning the eggs on February 5.  The eggs are set to hatch during the week of February 6.  We will post pictures of the baby chicks when they hatch.