Conference Week

It was wonderful to see so many parents at conferences this week.  While we are always assessing the children in their daily work, preparing for conferences forces us to return to our rubrics and make sure that everyone is progressing at a speed appropriate for them.  It takes about 1 week of instructional time, to assess all the children individually in our classroom.  It is a very intensive progress that does yield positive results, however, I so miss being out of the daily interaction with the kids, circulating about during work time and observing all of their hard work.  I was feeling much better Thursday morning after I had two 'normal' days with the children!

The pictures below show some of the work the children were up to.  We pulled out the hundreds board and had lessons in that.  This work is a real challenge for young children, but does such an excellent job teaching numeracy and concentration.

The children who are decoding words and reading are devouring our word drawers, matching words with similar spelling patterns to their appropriate pictures.  Once children have strong writing skills they start recording these words on list paper along with little drawing of each word.

Math work is in abundance right now.  Children are working on one to one correspondence while counting in a variety of ways, Montessori beads, calendars, blocks, and other manipulatives.

A new favorite this week involved making a little book of the Montessori beads.  Putting the book together and using the stapler is as much fun as learning about the beads!

This week a few of our old friends stopped by for a visit, and that brought the level of the whole group up.  Having older children in the mix is one of the best parts of multi-age instruction.