Marching Forward – Mrs. Brown’s and Ms. Prestas’s Class

Welcome back from Spring Break!  Please enjoy some moments from our days in March, with captions!  

• Hunter and Ariana show beautiful ways to arrange the color tablets from Color Box 3, grading 9 colors from light to dark.
• We need the largest mat we have to display all of our Black History cards, and yet that would never be enough space to display the countless black people who have made important contributions to our world.  February, also, is too short, and so it becomes a year-round endeavor.  Joan Higginbotham, engineer and astronaut, Claudette Colvin, inspirer of Rosa Parks, Bob Marley with his songs of peace and love, and Percy L. Julian, pioneer in medicine, are just a few of the people currently featured on our wall.
•   Amalia finds calm concentration while going through the many steps of scrubbing a table.
• Socially distant seating during lunchtime, eating and listening to a story. 

• The moveable alphabet empowers children to build their own words with the sounds that they know.  Maria Montessori observed that this aspect of literacy precedes decoding (reading words made by someone else.)  
• Savannah experiences the true meaning of teen numbers by arranging bead bars side by side with ten bars.  Don’t we love base-10?!  
• Ariana paints at the easel after kindly asking a friend for help with the button on the back of the smock: the community supporting the individual and vice-versa
• Two friends working with dressing frames.  Practicing with the button frame and the inside-out/right-side-out sleeve frame build fine motor skills, spatial awareness, as well as independence and confidence in an area of everyday life! 
• Watercolor paintings of skillfully-traced animal puzzles and a story on display next to the words of Maya Angelou
• Children holding the individual sticks that then became part of a larger bundle – when we “stick together” we are stronger.  A beautiful lesson in the Montessori area of peace education.

Moment for Lost and Found: This beautiful yellow mini Boden sweater has remained unclaimed for some weeks!  Could it be yours? 

• Ella, Savannah, Delaney, and Ever, soak in the satisfaction of finishing the giant solar system puzzle! 
• With Cards and Counters, Daniel arranges the counters in a special way that illustrates the concept of even and odd clearly.
• Stephen discovers multiples of 7 with the multiplication bead bars.
• Brody displays his button-sewing mastery.
• Practical life water work: putting the fun in funnel as Arya practices pouring!