Living Things Need Food
The Thanksgiving holiday made a short week, but we read at least two books every day to make up for it. We read about the history of corn, harvest celebrations and foods that various animals eat. Herbivore, carnivore and omnivore is one of the easiest concepts for our students to pick up and remember.
Some of our students from other countries learned about Thanksgiving for the first time when we read Gail Gibbon’s It’s Thanksgiving book. It was a lot to take in, what with the boats and babies being born on boats and Presidential declarations. Thanksgiving became a little clearer when our class made a list of special foods we eat on Thanksgiving and talked about harvest celebrations.
Every day we made a gratitude list, which we’ll be doing on Fridays from now on and other random days throughout the year. We are grateful for our families, our pets, our friends, the sun, red wolves, various toys and also maladies that befell our siblings but not us, just to name a few things. We also read a Japanese folk tale called Tanuki’s Gift about an old man and a magical Tanuki who teaches him about gratitude.
Our Montessori work cycle has lengthened since the beginning of the year. Some more advanced math work have been introduced, but our students are also doing more work with the larger sensorial manipulables such as the counting rods and the classic pink tower. We began counting by tens a few months when our number chart reached 20 and though we’re still only half way to 100 our students want to count to 100 by 10s every morning and sometimes at other intervals throughout the day.
Category: Preschool Room 1
