December Happenings
NPMLC E1
Busy Days!
We continued our tradition for Fridays at NPMLC. The students made a French puff pastry and delivered it to all of the staff at St. Germain Elementary. Along with the French pastry students served hot chocolate.
We also welcomed Maria the Elf into our school. She has been watching us daily and reporting to Santa about our amazing behavior. So far, we are all on the nice list and plan to continue to stay on the nice list for the remainder of December!
Upcoming Events:
December 11 @ 9:15- Parent Committee Meeting following SCRAM. If you would like to be part of the NPMLC parent committee or are interesting in listening please feel free to stay.
December 11 @ 6:00- Movie Night @ St. Germain Elementary
December 15 @ 5:00- Montessori Parent Material Education Night. Join us for short presentations on how to use the Montessori materials.
Volunteers
December 9- Cookie Decorating 9:30-10:30
December 22- Gingerbread House Creation 9:00-10:30 Shhh....Santa is coming, bring your camera!
December 23- Winter Stations 9:00-11:00
December 23- Snowshoe Outing 1:00-2:30 Everyone is welcome to come join us for an afternoon of snowshoeing! Please bring your families and enjoy the beautiful area surrounding our school during an afternoon snowshoe walk.
Montessori Material of the Week
The Pink Tower and Brown Stairs are standard pieces of material used in the Sensorial Area of the Montessori Children’s House. The materials are set up and designed to introduce the child to various sizes, dimensions and weights. But, building upon curiosity and creativity, the materials can be used for a variety of building designs. Think castles, towers, skyscrapers!! Anything the child can imagine! When people dispute that a Montessori Classroom does not offer any creativity or free play...they have not observed the child working with these materials.
As the child works with these materials, they gain knowledge through their senses (the Sensorial Area) seeing the size variations, feeling the differing weights, lengths, size, thickness...etc… The smallest pink cube, being 1 cm, matches the smallest end of the thinnest brown stair. The largest, 10 cm, matches the thickest end of the brown stair. The cubes are also introductions to the Math area, which uses the smallest (units) and largest (1000 cube) to help the child to visualize numerical place values.
But are they only for the Children’s House? The beauty of the materials in all the classrooms is that they can be used and reused and reintroduce with a whole new concept. The E1 classroom uses the these materials as a visual introduction to sentence structure focusing on adjectives.