…much wisdom. If we do profit from it, it is only because of neglect on our part to become humble and to see the wonder of this soul and learn what the child can teach.” —Montessori

It was so wonderful to see you all this morning! We are ready for another week of Brown bear, brown bear, galaxy studies, and properties of matter—in addition to all of our amazing lesson work! The children have loved the smooth bossa nova sound of Joao Gilberto at lunch this month.

I hope you all have a wonderful weekend! Please check out the cicada that came to visit us very early this morning. I put it on the wooden fence to dry out and rest before it flew away to make music in the trees for us!

The older friends have been learning about the states of matter and mass. We used the Aquapod water rocket launcher to observe the effects of gravity on mass. All of our friends were invited to the launch!

We hope you are all enjoying this lovely day, with just a dash of strange adventure added to the morning!

It seems as if many, if not most, emails from our Yahoo accounts are being filtered to spam. If you send us an email, and do not receive a reply, please check your spam folder and mark us “not spam”. I’m unsure why this change has suddenly occurred, but you can imagine it’s inconvenient in August with all of our new friends, parents, and the many questions people have about the program! Thank you for your patience.

The sheep, particularly Scrooge, came over to the fence to visit with the children this morning! If you’ve never heard him bleat, his voice is VERY deep and VERY loud. The children enjoyed “talking” to him 😊

In the Montessori classroom, we build towards full independence of the child. This process is a journey with the child, however, and sometimes takes more than a visual demonstration of the lesson. We help the child gain muscle memory and scaffold towards independence with hand-over-hand practice. What amazing teachers and children!

We have so enjoyed having all our new friends join us! I cannot believe how quickly the first week of school zoomed by. We’re looking forward to another amazing week, beautiful weather, and a few more new friends next week!

Montessori is such a beautiful mixture of freedom, exploration, and structure. The child can choose when they have snack and they learn the snack rules as they gain experience serving themselves, cleaning their tables, and socializing with friends. Lessons work in a similar manner. The guides will show the child the parameters, goals, and points of interest for their lessons (with our younger friends, these tasks are sometimes carried out with just a point, a nod, and a smile so the child will stay focused on what our hands are doing rather than a multitude of words), but the child then has the freedom to explore all the many lessons that have been shown to them!

I snapped photos just before lunch in the Silly Dandelions classroom–they were enjoying a book just before they went to wash their hands!

The other two classrooms, the Awesome Axolotls and the Purple Unicorns, were ready to relish their food! We eat family style at Marimont–the placemats, besides looking neat, provide a visual marker for the children about where to sweep when they have completed their lunch.