George Washington and the Cherry Tree

Tomorrow is Election Day, of course, so our Circle Time theme for this week is the President of the United States. Miss K couldn't be with us today, which left me in charge of Circle Time (eek!).

We read the story of George Washington and the Cherry Tree from The Children's Book of Virtues. I'm not all that crazy about this book, but it has an extremely compelling version of this story (when we got to the part where George Washington's father discovers that his beloved cherry tree has been chopped down and confronts young George about it, Miss D's son's eyes were very wide and he was covering his mouth with his hands - so sweet!). We talked about how this honest young man grew up to be our very first president, that there have been 43 presidents in our country's history, and that tomorrow we will elect a new president. We talked about the candidates, and we discussed voting (I reminded the kids about Miss K's lesson in which we all voted for our favorite apple, either red or green, and that the apple with the most votes won).

During Independent Work time, my daughter and Miss D's son spent a lot of time with the geometric solids and matching cards (I made these myself and will try to upload them tonight):


Miss C's son worked with the constructive blue triangles, and he and Miss C played "I Spy" with the phonetic objects:



Miss D's son did the entire color box 3:


Color box 3 is a nice bridge between color box 2 (in which you pair 11 different colors) and color box 4 (in which you grade 7 different shades of the same color from darkest to lightest). Color box 3 is made up of 8 different colors broken into 4 pairs that are graded from darkest to lightest. Today Miss D's son and I worked together one color at a time to grade one of each pair from darkest to lightest, and then he matched them:



As for the 2-year-olds, surprisingly, they haven't been all that eager to get back into the Montessori classroom. Today my daughter wandered over and asked to do the pink tower. She got the whole thing out but wouldn't actually build it. As with all things Montessori - so amazing in their simplicity - at least she had to build it to put it away :)


For PE, we headed outside, and Miss D led the kids with the parachute and kicking soccer balls through cones.

We closed with the "J" verse and story from My ABC Bible Verses: "Jesus said to him, 'I am the way, the truth, and the life,'" John 14:6.