Ms. Sheela's Primary Montessori Classroom: Week of Oct 7th to Oct 18th

I plan on sending a newsletter at the end of every week, as this was a short week I am combining last week and this week's information.
Parent-Teacher Conferences are scheduled for Tue, Oct 22 and Thu, Oct 24from 4 to 8 pm, please sign up, on the Signup Genius website, http://www.signupgenius.com/go/10C054DA5AC2CAA8-october if you haven't done so already, parents of new students who started late Sept or Oct, I will meet with you at end of Nov/Dec to talk about your child.
We talked about some of the changes that happen in Fall/Autumn, and why leaves change color.
Cultural Topics
Fall
Living/Non Living
Plant/Animal
Vertebrates/Invertebrates
Mammals
Leaf/Fall Walk- Full Day students went on a Leaf walk
Van Gogh- Introduction to the famous paintings of Van Gogh

Songs/Finger plays
Five little Pumpkins sitting on the gate
The first one said, "Oh my, it's getting late"
The second one said, "There are the owls in the air"
The third one said, "But we don't care"
The fourth one said, "Let's have some fun"
The fifth one said, "
Then Whoo went the wind and off(clap) went the lights
And the five little pumpkins rolled out of sight.

Art
Fall Trees- using torn paper
Sunflowers inspired by Van Gogh
Sound for next week –'g' - Gordo the Gorilla
We practice Zoo Phonics sounds as a large group activity; these are animals that represent each letter/sound of the alphabet, they have a little rhyme and an action that goes with it. For example for the letter 'a', the rhyme is Allie the alligator, 'a', 'a', 'a', and the action is arms extended out to represent the teeth of the alligator
a - Allie the alligator-Extend arms out to form alligator mouth, open and close mouth ay the a sound
b - Bubba the bear- Reach an arm above head to an imaginary honeycomb and bring the honey to your mouth
c - Catrina the cat- Pretend you are a cat washing your face with your paw
d - Dede the deer- Use two fingers of each hand to form deer ears in head
e – Ellie the elephant- Clasp hands and swing them from side to side as a trunk
f – Francie the fish- with hands in front of you place the palm of one hand on the back of the other hand to form a fish, wiggle thumbs
We are getting ready to begin a new and exciting unit on Johnny Appleseed/Apples, and we need your help! We have a lot of fun and educational activities planned to teach us everything from graphing, patterns, measurement and cooking applesauce.
In order to do all this we will need lots of apples! We are requesting that each student bring in at least one apple of any kind by Wednesday, Oct 23, 2013.
We are looking for a variety of types of apples for our various projects, so we'll take anything we can get.

Talking to your preschooler about school

Some great opener questions to start a conversation about school with your child might be: