October 28, 2013

Happy Monday Morning Turquesa Folks,

We had a fantastically busy week last week – traveling all the way from the Salmon Hatchery on Monday morning to our first history project to firefighters visiting to liquid nitrogen ice cream with Morado on Friday. Incredible! Loads of fun and loads of learning!

As a Montessori teacher, I’m always searching for the balance between spectacular and normal. Spectacular events provide wonderful landmarks and memories. Normal provides the opportunity for deep concentration, creativity and independence.  Ironically, I’m looking forward to this week feeling a little bit calmer and more predictable.

As I imagine you are all aware, Thursday is Halloween. We do not over-emphasize Halloween at MCH, but we do take notice of it by creating Spooky Lunch and Super-Spooky Lunch. To channel the sometimes-intense Halloween-related energy, we conduct mild transformations of the classrooms before lunch so that children can have a festive and entertaining experience. We tell spooky age-appropriate stories, change the lighting, add some decorations and have some fun. After lunch, we return to a normal work time. School ends at 3:25 on Thursday, just like every other day, so we ask that you not pick your child up for Halloween related festivities until dismissal. It is disruptive to the children, the classroom and the learning if some children are leaving earlier than normal. We do not wear costumes to school on Halloween.

In other news this week, your children will write the drafts of their Early Humans Reports this week. This is the time when they transform notes, ideas and research into full sentences and paragraphs in order to create an organized structure. This is often a transformative and rather huge process for children who are new to formal writing, so I recommend that everyone gets lots of sleep and eats healthy breakfasts this week to prepare for all the mental activity. At the end of the week, we will move into the revising process. I hope you enjoyed doing some Early Humans pre-writing with your child this weekend. Please let me know if you have any questions.

I also wanted to remind you that on Friday, November 1, we will have class pictures and portraits taken.

Thanks so much!

Nicole