Category Archives: Practicum experiences

04/1/16

Language materials – the farm

We have been trying to implement the farm Montessori material for a couple of months now but it hasn’t really taken off so it was such a surprise to watch the children engage in the activity today!

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The children started by building the farm by adding in props and animals. Then they laid out all the words on the carpet beside it. They then chose from the nouns, verbs, conjunctions, prepositions, articles, pronouns, etc to form their own sentences to describe their farm!

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The younger students took longer to form their sentences because they were unable to decide upon what to write but after a while, they began to create their sentences quickly. Although the students did not necessarily know what an “article” or “preposition” was, they were able to find the words accordingly.

I do not think that the children will learn the grammatical structures right away but I think that after a few more independent work sessions, they will be able to identify that the nouns are black, the adjectives are blue, the verbs are red, etc.

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The students enjoyed the farm activity so much that they did not want to clean up and get ready for recess. They each took their time writing their carefully created sentences into their language arts books afterwards which allows them to look back on all the wonderful work they did later on.

03/14/16

Engaging nature

In my practicum classroom, we are encouraging students to engage with the natural surroundings. They seem to be enjoying the activities that we have been doing. The other day the class created Aboriginal talking sticks using found materials. We went outside and the students gathered rocks and sticks. Then we returned to the classroom where the students put their talking sticks together by using corn husks and rope. Afterwards they painted them and we had a discussion about the significance and symbolic meanings behind a variety of colours.

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The students planted pumpkin seeds into the class’ germination station last week and since then, they have already grown 8 inches! Later this week, they will be moving them into the school garden so that they can grow further. The students are all anticipating to see how much growth will occur during the next two weeks while they are away on Spring Break.

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03/14/16

100 day!

Hurray for 100 day! Each primary classroom had a different station and the students were able to rotate through them during the day. The students appeared to enjoy all the activities and were reluctant to move from one station to the next because they were very immersed in their activities.

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Here are a few ideas that you can bring into the classroom for 100 day.

100 day collages

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100 day bingo

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Fruit Loop necklakes using 100 fruit loops

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What can you build with 100 geoblocks?

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01/31/16

Weekly school visits (Jan 28, 15)

It is good to be back in the classroom after not being here last week. The classroom layout has changed significantly changed since the last time I was visiting the class.

Instead of the round tables being at the front of the room, the rectangle table was placed in front instead. Throughout the months I have been in this classroom, there has been numerous changes in the format. This is because there is an emphasis on the importance of the prepared environment in the Montessori philosophy.

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01/31/16

Language materials

Today I had the opportunity to watch the children in my class work with language materials. Many of them had not used them before so they were all quite excited to be able to use them for the first time.

There were a variety of boxes to choose from and the children work from left to right starting with the pink ones. With each box, they learn new grammatical structures.

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01/31/16

Peace lesson

For Remembrance day, I decided to teach a lesson on peace.

I began by asking the class what peace means to them and I wrote the definitions on the board. This allowed them to see the words visually and helped those who may be visual learners absorb the material better.

Afterwards, I read the book “Paulie Pastrami brings world peace” to the class. The book gave the class ideas for bringing about peace in their communities.

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01/21/16

Weekly school visits: week 3

Today we ran our animal kingdom inquiry first thing. I showed the class how to use a mind-map to organize what they already know about their animal kingdom into categories. They answered my questions and looked interested in creating their own. After my demonstration, we put them into the revised groups we made at the end of the day last week and I drew their assigned animal kingdoms out of a basket because then it would be randomized.

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01/21/16

Weekly school visits: week 2

Today is my first full day of my classroom visit. We started the day with language arts where the students were able to work on independent Montessori materials after they finished their journals. Some students used the entire time to work on their journals while others finished quickly and started on their independent Montessori work.

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01/21/16

Weekly school visits: week 1

Today was my first day in the Grade 1-3 classroom. I arrived to the school early but my SA was running late so I had to wait by myself in her classroom for a while. I wasn’t exactly nervous coming into the classroom but the anticipation of meeting her started to build up my anxiety a little bit. When she got to the classroom, she put me to work right away! She told me to take the children’s artwork off the bulletin board outside and replace it with a new art project they made.

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