Happy Teacher's Day

Teachers are generous people. Throughout the school year, they spend countless hours preparing teaching materials, decorating classrooms and volunteering their personal time to attend parent-teacher meetings and special events - not to mention digging into their own pockets for special stationeries, stickers and goodies for children. Does this sound like you ? If yes, give yourself a big clap and that of all the things that you do...you deserve a day specially dedicated to you!!

Parents, sending your appreciation shows that you and your child appreciate the little things she does to make school enjoyable. Here’s a shout out to teachers everywhere including my terrific teachers ! You are the best and enjoy the week. HAPPY TEACHER'S DAY!!

I know Mother's Day is around the corner but I'm just getting a little bit over too excited over here that really makes me want to post this banner up for you to see....

May News

The Early Years and Preschoolers children had great fun when they visited Paya Terubong Fire Station on 28th Apr. The firefighters showed them what they have always wanted to see, how they slide down the pole, the fire engines and all the equipment that they use. The children held the long hose and pretended to put out a fire. What a fantastic experience when all children and teachers had a chance to ride on a fire engine. The children sang a song as an appreciation to the firefighters. Going on a field trip also taught the children how to behave on outings, care for themselves and friends.

Learning about other jobs was fun too! Not to forget our recycling bins, we managed to collect three bags full of trash for recycle. The children were shown how much of trash we have collected and that we care for the earth.

We have children previously from Toddlers Group (2-3 year olds) promoted to Early Years Group (3-4 year olds) that are developing well into reading and writing. They work on letter recognition, initial sounds and sight words. They are developing their pencil grips steadily and they are doing their handwriting without ‘tears’ and with more confidence now.

In May, we will be teaching Colours and Shapes. We will be telling the story of Brown Bear, Brown Bear by Eric Carle. The toddlers will be learning about colours of the rainbow, sorting out shapes, sequencing patterns. The Early Years will be learning Primary and Secondary colours, reinforce comparative language for dark and light, working on Geometric Solids and lastly the Preschoolers will be working on Colour Box III to create colour wheel and observing architectures of famous buildings. With the help of Montessori materials, the children find abstract concepts and language skills easy to understand and remember.

On 19th May (Wed), we would like to invite children to wear anything colourful to school or they can come in polka-dots, stripes, checked, etc for show and tell.

This month, we will also be talking about a very important person in children’s lives that is mum. Besides that, 16th May is Teacher’s Day. We will be having a week long Teacher Appreciation Week from 10th – 14th May. Children are invited to send their appreciation to their teachers on these days.

Field Trip - Fire Station, Paya Terubong, Penang

The Early Years and Preschoolers were able to visit the fire station on 28Apr for our Community Helpers theme. They had a fun bus ride there and when we reached there, we were greeted by the Fire Station chief. He assigned one of the firefighters on duty to tour us around. The children listened very carefully to the talk about the station, fire work and most of all safety. The Firefighters reminded us all how to call in case of Emergencies only. They showed us how to do that. They talked about how to stay low in a fire.and they took us all around the fire engine.

The ketua balai bomba gave cakes and drinks and we thank them with a Firefighter's song. That was the highlight for the firefighers. The chief was so great with these children and all of our children behaved excellently, it was a wonderful trip. Thank you Fire Station for having us, thank you Firemen for the tour and thank you teachers for taking good care of the children.

The kids Go Green

Earth Day is celebrated on April 22 of every year. It is our children who will someday be responsible for taking care of our planet. We have to start educating them from young!

Here was one activity we did in class to help them love the earth and get involved in making it a better place.

Do you know the pastry man ?

There's nothing quite like the smell of freshly baked pastries in the morning..now, where's my tea ?



Our little chef brought some puff pastries to share with the teachers and friends. Mind you, this was not any ordinary puff pastry, this was homemade puff pastry by this cute little chef and his lovely mum. We love how the mum brought him into the process of learning. He could actually tell you how this was made, what ingredients he used and bla bla bla...After the show and tell, our little chef cut the pastry and served to his friends..lovely!

Great blogs

While I was searching for some printables sheets for our theme next month, I found these blogs :

A great place to get more ideas on extension for Montessori materials. I especially love her creativeness on EPL.
http://mymontessorijourney.typepad.com/

A blog by a mum sharing her fabulous ideas about homeschool and crafts
http://mama-jenn.blogspot.com/

April News

We had a great time learning all about dinosaurs during the past two weeks. The children have learned about the different kinds of dinosaurs, what they ate and how big they were. They can easily name dinosaurs in our classroom collection as well as in the numerous classroom books and know exactly what their names are. Pretending to be Paleontologists has been a lot of fun too. The children especially enjoyed looking for fossils in our garden.

Our fun and fantastic theme for April is about Community Helpers. The children will be learning a wide variety of job. Ask questions like “What does he do?” “Where does he work?” Name all the tools a community helper needs to complete the job. Talking about what your children want to be when they grow up. Play dress up as Doctor and Firefighter.

Some of the activities that we have planned for the children :
o In conjunction with Earth Day on 22nd Apr, we will teach the children what we can do as part of the community and what we can do to take care of the Earth. Children are invited to bring trash from home daily to throw away into the correct recycling bin that we prepared.
o We would like to extend our understanding on jobs by taking a further look at the job that you do. Children are invited to bring a photo or two on Wed, 14th Mar for show and tell to the class of their parents at work.
o As we close our unit on Community Helpers, we will have our field trip to the Fire Station onWed, 28th April. Info and permission slip will be sent out soon.

Paleontologists at work

On 24th Mar, we brought the children out to our backyard on a fossil hunting.

Mar News

I hope everyone enjoyed the festivities of Chinese New Year. Thank you for your lovely comments on the teachers’ Chinese New Year window decorations. We talked about the meaning of the celebration and twelve animals in the Chinese Zodiac, We also talked about Friendship and Valentines.

We have been practicing being nice to our friends by saying please and thank you, waiting for our turn and using a soft indoor voice. For art, we did activities related to our themes: making art using sunflower seeds, Chinese fans, dragons, paintings in the lucky colours and made heart shaped cards. We then wrapped up our celebration by having a Chinese New year snack.

In Feb the children learned about Garden and our children were involved with gardening and it was rewarding to watch their interest and self-esteem grow as their gardening efforts yielded good results. Some children insisted their mums to cook the onions that they brought home.

Our exciting theme in Mar will be Dinasours which is sure going to spark children’s interest in these fascinating prehistoric creatures. We will be teaching some of the different features of dinosaurs.
o Some had bony plates on their backs or heads.
o Some dinosaurs had spikes or horns.
o Some had very long necks and tails.
o Some dinosaurs had big teeth and claws.
o Some walked on two legs, while others walked on four legs.
0 Some ate meat; others ate plants.

We will have children create their own dinosaurs using paints. When the artwork is complete, we will encourage children to name their dinosaurs after themselves (such as Gabrielosaurus or Megan rex) and introduce their creations. We will cut out paper dinosaur footprints of various sizes and let the children put them in order from smallest to largest.

We will also be going on a dinasour hunt. We are going to have a special Paleontologist Day on Wed, March 24th. Your child may dress up as Paleontologist to school that day as well as bring in other tools that a Paleontologist needs such as binoculars, hat or toy camera. On this day, we will dig up dinasour fossils from the ground and fit them together to make dinasour skeletons.

Feb News

We had a great first month of school! Our focus for the first month was for the children to become familiar with school, including meeting new friends, learning routines and transitioning. They did a really nice job.

We also introduce some basic rules to the children. In Montessori environment, there are some basic expectations we have for the children such as we tell the children “walking feet” means walk safely and calmly in the environment, “indoor voices” means use gentle voices, no yelling across the environment. We constantly remind the children not to disturb others who are working and return materials in good order to shelves. In Feb, we will continue to focus on children’s care of environment and self like rolling mat, rolling socks, put shoes/bags on the correct places and grace and courtesy.

We will start our second theme with the study of Botany by introducing the topic about Garden. Some of the learning experiences planned for the children related to gardens include :
o acting out the story of The Enormous Turnip
o preparing a section of our play yard for a garden.
o planting onions and carrots
o smelling activity of different types of herbs that could be grown in the garden
o learning that worms in soil will make it better for plants

The week of Feb 8-Feb12, we will be talking about Valentine’s Day and Chinese New Year. We will also have a Chinese New Year celebration on Feb 22 when the children come back to school after the Chinese New Year break. Children are invited to wear their Chinese costumes or wear something red. Children are invited to bring in food to share too.