January Classroom Review

We hope all of you had a wonderful start to the New Year! We welcomed the children back after winter break (a day later as planned, due to the snow day) by talking about their break and snow, we reviewed some guidelines and celebrated a few birthdays. We also talked about recycling and how this is an easy way for all of us to help out the environment. This topic includes a new “work” for the children to practice sorting a stack of cards with pictures of trash items and putting each item in the appropriate small container – garbage, recycle, or compost. Several other new materials and activities were introduced, such as table washing and a variety of winter art projects. The children also enjoyed a musical circle on rhythm with the use of tapping sticks.

We talked about Dr. Martin Luther King Jr., MLK Day, and the importance of this day. We will continue to focus on this subject matter during February, Black History Month, but throughout the entire school year we incorporate discussions about diversity, equality, acceptance, inclusion, respect, tolerance, and every day we aim to practice behavior in our classroom that represents these values.

We immediately dove into lots of new learning at the beginning of 2022 – the children learned about opposites, as an introduction to land and water forms. The landforms they learned about are island, peninsula, cape, and isthmus and their opposite water forms lake, gulf, bay, and strait.

The third week we started our unit on Biomes. The children will learn that a biome is a community of plants and animals inhabiting a large geographical area having a particular climate and soil. In order to make this material general enough for young children, the Montessori curriculum categorizes 8 biomes in the world: deserts, grasslands, mountains, oceans, polar regions, temperate forest, tropical forest, and wetlands. To further keep this extensive topic age-appropriate, we will focus on the biomes of North America. This unit will continue throughout February and will be wrapped up in March, just in time for us to get excited about spring!