Montessori Radmoor

Happy New Year!

I hope you enjoyed your break for the holidays.  It’s always a joyful time for us to relax, but we look forward to seeing everyone in January, and hearing the stories of vacations and family time.  For those who contributed to our classroom community gifts, thank you for your generosity.   We appreciate all our families so much.

We are looking toward the rest of our year and approaching plans for the coming year.  Our Looking Ahead meetings occur Thursday, January 19th, and we have evening activities designed to highlight specific communities, including the opportunities of kindergarten and completing the third year of the primary cycle and transitions toward elementary.  (Child care is available — reservations required).  Watch your family mailboxes and email for more information.

The last week of school prior to break, our classroom decorated a mural for the elementary music program.  It’s just another way we beautify our community, and for those who attended the elementary program in December, it was a special event.  Kelly Herald is the music teacher and the performance is always one of the great events of the year and offers a glimpse into our elementary community.

Montessori Learning Styles

One of the central areas of focus in Montessori education is language development and in our primary community we have many different abilities and skills with regard to language, from beginning sounds and talking to phonogram books and reading.

Learning to read is one of the great accomplishments in life, and preparation for this begins early in Montessori education.  Children begin matching objects to sounds and tracing sandpaper letters early in their three (sometimes four) year primary cycle and continue with phonetic sound exploration and tracing letters as children get older.

By the time a child is ready to sit and read a book, so much sound identification has occurred, and even simple habits like moving from left to right across the page have been established by non-reading works like table scrubbing.

There are two separate skills needed to read – the first skill is decoding or the ability to decipher words.  Students learn to decode by constructing phonograms (putting together sounds that create new sounds together- like the “t” and the “h” to create a “th” sound) and  practicing sight words (words that students learn to recognize and remember).  It does not happen overnight, and students spend time throughout the school year perfecting skills and building a vocabulary.

Marie Montessori recognized that children can truly understand the world around them and all it offers as they grow, develop reading skills, and understand the written word and the written expectations and guidelines around them.

In other matters –

 Please make sure that your child has snow pants and boots and mittens or gloves (waterproof ones work the best) each day.  Children enjoy their time so much more when they are warm and comfortable.

Wishing you a peaceful day,

Trish Murphy

 

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