Pineland Farm Trip

Thank you to Erin and Marlene from the Education Center at Pineland Farms! We loved our hands-on farm yard exploration. 

We introduced ourselves to the cows in the dairy barn. 

The dairy cows took a break from breakfast for a caress on the head. 

Rain or shine, there's work to be done on the farm.

Marlene explained the rules of the hen house. 

Hello

We filled three of these baskets with very fresh eggs. Many of them were still warm. 

Practical Life-cooking

As with other areas of the classroom, snack time provides many learning opportunities including: how to care for self, food preparation, independence, coordination (using cooking tools, setting the table, serving self), order (following a sequence to prepare snack and clean up), and cooperation (waiting your turn, eating with a friend). Everyday nutritious snacks are provided that the children serve themselves at a time of their choosing during the morning work period. Our small group of friends that attend Friday mornings, cook a snack together. Some of the snacks we have made are: guacamole, pink lemonade, pancakes, jam, noodle soup, carrot pennies, oatmeal, and bagel faces.

This week the friends made toast and added toppings. Some friends just wanted to spread on butter, some had sunbutter, and others piled on sunbutter with banana slices and raisins.

The Mathematical Mind

"That the mathematical mind is active from the first, becomes apparent not only from the attraction that exactitude exerts on every action the child performs, but we see it also in the fact that the little child's need for order is one of the most powerful incentives to dominate his early life." -Maria Montessori

The sensory impressions that the child gathers through his/her work with the practical life and sensorial curricula are retrieved during work with the concrete apparatus of the math curriculum. It is through the use of the Practical Life activities, such as the fine motor exercises, that the child's inner concentration, cooperation, independence and sense of order are developed. The child's senses are prepared through the Sensorial materials to discriminate between materials, such as working with the length rods creating a sensory impression of increasing and decreasing which is later used in the mathematics curriculum with the numbers rods which increase by units of one.

The mathematics materials like the other curriculum areas are logical and ordered. There is a natural progression of challenge from one lesson to the next, which follows the natural instincts of the child. This logical, ordered curriculum not only isolates a particular mathematical concept with the use of a particular lesson, but each lesson uses the skills that the child has attained through previous work and builds on those skills.

Numeration 1-9 1:1 correspondence

linear counting with the hundreds board

Decimal System (base 10) place value, correspondence of the bead material to symbol

 Passage to abstraction -using the stamp game to add complex numbers.

Mother's Day Tea

Mother's Day Tea bunting made by the children using the triangle metal inset

The children made tissue paper flowers with help from our friends from Freeport Middle School

treats

Eating and enjoying the violin music by the elementary students

The elementary students volunteered to play a concert for us.