Light a Candle for Peace - Hannah!

In this video you can actually see Hannah! She's just to the left of the post in the middle of the room (wearing white pants).

Montessori Sings Peace Around the World

Today is the UN's International Day of Peace, and many Montessori schools around the globe sang a special peace song today.


Elijah came home and sang it for me.


Here is the whole school singing. It's quite long, but let it load and then skip to minute 5. That's where the camera pans to Elijah, he lifts his shirt and rubs his belly... That's my boy! Hannah is standing right behind the post in the middle of the room, so you can't see her at all.



They were on the news tonight too, but I haven't seen any online clips of that.

Weekend Projects

Hannah wanted to make slime out of cornstarch and water, so we did.


Elijah, who really doesn't like to get his hands dirty, was fairly unimpressed (I don't blame him!)


Hannah, on the other hand, had a great time with it!


Just look at that delight in her eyes :)


Since the leaves are starting to fall, I decided it was time to create my new garden for next year. I'm doing a combination square-foot and lasagne garden. The lasagne garden is just layering leaves and grass clippings right on the bed to create compost to plant in. We have SO MANY LEAVES in the fall, this shouldn't be too hard for us. I'm going to plant it like a sqare foot garden, because that just makes the most sense to me. My container garden just didn't produce like I had hoped it would... Gardening is definitely a learning experience! Oh, I almost forgot... the supplies to build my garden bed were free! The previous owners of our house left the wood and bricks... though I did go and buy some peat moss to get started.
Next year, I think I'll fill the bigger pots with flowers and let the kids take care of them.

Recent Videos

Montessori Planet Walk

Hannah's class took a Planet Walk, and I'm pretty sure Mr R got the idea from here. It's a to scale walk of our solar system where 20 inches = one million miles. The walk is 1.2 km which is about .8 miles. Parents were invited, so I jumped at the chance to see Mr R in action. I even opted for the bus ride down to the river with the kids.



"Setting the stage out by the Kuiper belt. K demonstrates that at our scale, he can easily step a million miles."


"Can you just make out our grain of salt? That's poor, forsaken, little dwarf planet, Pluto. Had we wanted to be completists, we would have had to walk more than twice the distance to include the slightly larger Eris, the troublemaking newcomer who started all of the controversy."



"The outer planets are separated by immense distances, averaging 300 meters or more."

I'm the tallest person in a ball cap in this picture, and a miserably hot and thirsty Hannah is next to me.



"A mushroom fit the bill nicely for Saturn (minus the rings)."



"With each stop, we'd group together, pull the appropriate object from the picnic basket, and share what we knew about the planet at hand."



"More walking... more measuring..."



"...and still more..."



Jupiter


"Almost there..."


"A kernel of allspice was just the right size for Earth. Yes, it's a stretch for a picnic supply, except in the sense that it's edible. Sort of..."



"A few more million miles, and we made it to the sun."



"A great day for a picnic... "


"...and some air conditioning for our paper plate suns."

- I borrowed the captions from the class blog

Hannah got a haircut too!

Here Hannah is showing off her 'snaggle tooth'. We are both ready for that tooth to come OUT! You can see how long Hannah's hair was... After the 3 of us got our hair cut, and all of my comments on how tangle-free Leah's hair was now, Hannah decided to get hers cut as well.


She got about 8 1/2 inches cut off!!


This one shows her hair better, but the last one had a better smile :) We are donating her hair to Pantene's Beautiful Lengths (Locks of Love isn't as great as people think)


AND while Leah was at preschool, I was able to put together a bookcase (finally)!!!

Haircuts

Elijah got tired of his curls and asked for a "no hair" cut...

Here's Mr Curly Locks in his PJ's last night...


Here he is after his haircut this afternoon!


I can't decide if it makes him look older or younger... But it certainly makes him look different!


Leah got her hair cut as well. I just had them cut it like mine :)




With her curls, it makes her hair look much thicker than it is! She looks really cute :)

Labor Day

Pete's school is in session on Labor Day and he has to teach, so we can never make any real plans for Labor Day. However, the kids and I still ended up having a pretty full day! I didn't take pictures of everything though...

First we went grocery shopping. That's always interesting with all three kids! We went to the new Walmart that's a few extra miles down the road because the kids hadn't been there, and that Walmart has fish (the kind that are still swimming!) and ours doesn't. I love the brand new BIG carts that fit 3 kids... the older ones at our store can be difficult to push. Imagine that, pushing almost 100 lbs of kids can be difficult! Elijah and Leah were LOUD, but everyone was fairly well behaved.

After I got the groceries put away and everyone had a snack we headed back out and went to PetSmart. We are toying with the idea of getting a small pet like fish or gerbils/hamsters so we went to scope out our options. The kids loved looking at the animals (there were dog and cat adoptions going on outside as well... those puppies and kittens were SOOOO cute!!) and were especially taken with the birds. I don't think we are ready for birds yet... I think we've settled on a couple of gerbils, but I don't know if we'll get them at PetSmart. Elijah's teacher rescued some from the humane society... so I'll see if there are any that need us :)

Then we got lunch at Sonic... yummy :)

Then I decided we need some sun after the nasty thunderstorm we had last night, so we headed out to the zoo. Now, I usually try to go to our zoo during the week when no one is there, so it was much more crowded that I'm used to. But it was still a nice hour plus walk and we absorbed plenty of vitamin D!!

When we got home Pete said that there was a picnic at his school (their lame attempt to make it up to everyone for having school on a holiday, I suppose), so we packed everyone up and had a free dinner along with many, MANY college students. It was moved indoors because of the mud, so we had an air conditioned picnic which was nice after a humid afternoon at the zoo.

Then to top off our night, we had our weekly FAMILY NIGHT!!!


Thanks to my friend, Barb, I had the great idea to make cupcake cones for our treat. They look kind of wonky, but they turn out fine.


A rousing game of Hungry Hungry Hippos (I believe Hannah was the champ!)


We each frosted and sprinkled our cone.


Yum!


Some people just ate the cake with no frosting...


Leah had me add more sprinkles SEVERAL times!!

It was a fabulous day, especially considering we had no plans...

It's time for Montessori pictures!!

Elijah is in his 2nd year of Montessori pre-primary. He REALLY wants to be in kindergarten, or even better, 1st grade with Hannah. He hates that she gets to do things before he does!

Elijah is counting spindles. He was not thrilled that he had to review all the old works from last year...


The school has a new nature trail, and Elijah's class took a nature walk.


Elijah is sewing an "M" sewing card.


Elijah practices writing his name. Not too many 2nd year students are interested in this, but Elijah is determined to get a writing journal like the kindergarteners!


Elijah snips tiny pieces of paper with scissors, and he brought home all those little pieces home to me... He really enjoys works that have a product.


Elijah is doing a 'land, water, air' activity. He's cutting the grass for his picture.


Elijah works with the ribbon calendar.


This was on a day where he told Hannah that he worked so long writing in his journal (YES! His teacher decided there was no reason a very interested 2nd year student couldn't have a journal... I'm pretty sure she's never had anyone interested in one. I'm not even sure all the kindergarteners WANT one.) Anyway, he spent "all morning" writing in his journal, and he hardly had any time to do any works... In this picture he's working on pin-punching, and on his right are the other works he's finished: weaving, one-drop, gluing w/ liquid glue, and gluing w/ glue stick. Hmm... so he brought home 5 works.


Now, we move on to Hannah's class...

The 1st graders are sitting inside the geodesic dome that the entire class constructed out of newspapers. Pretty cool!


Today was the elementary's first of many field trips. They went to a construction site to learn about shelter. The major focus of this year is the needs of man, and shelter is the first thing they are learning about.