Making Friends!

It has been a wonderful week two! Thank you so much for making the time to make it to out Back to School Night! We have so much to share with you! The most exciting observations we have during the first two weeks of school are always the unique ways students connect with each other and with the classroom materials. This year we started the day with open-ended materials for our new and returning students to explore. In this way we get to observe the interests, motivations, and personalities of our new group. We have been teaching for many years and no year is ever the same! This cluster of classmates are clear-minded, goal oriented, and exploratory. They have also been very open to cross-classroom partnerships, especially on the playground.

Fine Motor and Helpful Classroom Connections

Our clever and creative group discovered the fuse bead trays and have been working in LARGE groups creating all kinds of geometric shapes. A student will shout out, “I need some transparent reds.” Another student will rush to the rescue, and we will acknowledge, “It is so it is so fabulous to have many eyes looking at colors!” Visual discrimination, clever conversation, grit, and delicate fine motor skills have been on full display this week!!

Literacy Introductions

As we demonstrated last night, each morning we spend the first part of the morning on handwriting and phonetic exercises. Monday:Metal Insets, Tuesday: Handwriting, Wednesday:Word Sorts, Thursday: Vocabulary, Friday: Journal Writing. This week we have introduced all these activities slowly and carefully, making sure that all the students understand WHY and HOW of the morning work. All these discrete experiences combine to create well-rounded writers and readers!

First Weeks of our Math Block

We have spent the last two weeks observing our students closely and their use of very basic math materials! The bead stairs are a series of 9 colorful glass beads that represent the numerals from 1 to 9 that Maria Montessori developed early in her career over 100 years ago. They have been copied over the years by many educators including Georges Cuisenarie in 1945. Maria’s are more beautiful and have a distinction that Cuisenarie lacked… a clear definition of ones in the form of separate glass beads. Our students have been using these beads to add, subtract, multiply and divide although we have only introduced addition and subtraction! WOW!

We have also been participating in a school-wide assessment process that will assign our students with the very best teacher and learning group. Acera is unique in that we can provide each student with the “just right” level as they move at their own pace through math curriculum.

Creativity Stations

This trimester we are partnering with Ms. Kathy (fiber arts) and Mr. Dylan (stop motion animation) every Wednesday morning and afternoon. Both instructors are masterful in their own ways and bring areas of expertise to our students that we don’t necessarily focus on while teaching our core subjects. We do, however, learn from each other and bring the talents, interests, and skills that they learn on Creativity Wednesdays into our classroom!

Listening Conferences Zoom Link

We look forward to seeing everyone in person or on ZOOM tomorrow! We will be asking many questions about your child, their interests & hobbies, family, and routines. We will also ask for your hopes and goals for your child this year to incorporate into the Individual Learning Plan (ILP) which is a living document. It is a commitment between teachers and parents, teachers and students, students and parents as we are partners in the year ahead!

What Your Child can do at Home

Warmest Regards,

Lisa and Jen