The Saplings Times
August 31st, 2023
Settling in with week one!
Meet the Teachers
Dawn
Hi, everyone! My name is Dawn, and I am the lead teacher in the Saplings classroom. This is my 8th year with the Saplings, and my 9th year at MVCS. Teaching at Mountain Village allows me to honor my philosophy of whole child education. I developed a passion for nature-based education while in grad school at Antioch University New England, which brought me to Mountain Village. Once I was here, I quickly developed a connection to Montessori education and felt that the philosophy perfectly aligned with my own. It has been an amazing 8 years of learning and growing, and I'm more excited than ever for this year's journey!
When I'm not teaching, you'll most often find me in my vegetable garden listening to an audiobook or relaxing at my camper in Vermont. My interests include cooking, swimming, traveling, and anything related to animals. I love animals and would love to some day have my own small rescue farm! For now, I have one sweet cat named Brann who is great company. I also love music of (almost) all genres and spend a lot of my free time attending live music events. A love of music is something that I enjoy sharing with my students and hope to inspire at least some of them to become music lovers themselves. My friends and family are the most important part of my life, and I try to spend as much time with them as possible.
Please feel free to reach out to me any time with questions or concerns. The best way to get in touch with me is via email at dawn@mountainvillagecharterschool.org.
Pauline
For fun, I enjoy growing crazy big flower gardens, reading, and doing all kinds of art. I also love spending time in nature, seeing friends, swimming, and drinking tea. My dislikes include loud machinery and littering! At home I have 3 dogs, 1 bearded dragon, and 1 Russian tortoise.
I'm looking forward to a great year with the Saplings! If you need to get in touch with me for any reason, I can be reached at pauline@mountainvillagechartersschool.org.
Here are some of this week's highlights
Reader's Workshop
This week, we practiced our first Reader's Workshop. During Reader's Workshop, students will be reading independently, participating in small group reading lessons, and meeting one on one with their reading buddy to share what they've been reading. We started this week with just a few minutes of independent reading followed by reading buddies with some classic Highlights magazines.
Fungi!
Fungi hunting is a favorite activity in the Saplings class. We never know from year to year if it's going to be a good fungi season, but this year has been perfect. The fungi kingdom is having a party in the woods right now! Here is a glimpse of some of the beautiful fungi we've found so far and an example of how we record our observations in our nature journals.
Why do we use math?
Math was introduced this week through exploration stations where students were invited to visit various stations of math materials throughout the room. Stations featured materials that focused on geometry, measurement, and operations. These stations provided a taste of what it will be like to choose your own work once work mornings get rolling.