Notes From the Couch

Hurricane Sandy has cancelled school for the next two days, much to the (supposed) delight of student and teacher alike.  While everyone loves a little unexpected holiday, I don't believe that the adult readers in our midst really enjoy the idea of massive power outages.  Unless you are one of those bright people with abundant foresight and you have a generator.  Yeah.  I'm not one of those bright people.

Here at home, Mattie, Tessa and I have been holding our own primitive form of Montessori.  I never appreciate Mrs. Gerber and her amazing crew properly until I attempt to instruct my children in their methods.  It's tough.  Tessa keeps babbling in her baby language about string theory.  I can't keep up.  I'm trying my best with crayons, copious paper, tissue paper, and more than one glue stick.

We're waxing lyrical around these parts.

So, I started thinking.  How can my second graders stay creative during a storm?  You can pick one of these ideas written in crayon format (Sorry; I'm in Montessori mode, remember)

Perfect example of why you should always write in pencil first!

Also, you could try the following:

• Act out those ACTION verbs!  Pick a verb like jump, run, tiptoe, waddle, skip and make your family members guess the action verb.

• Play Categories with a group of 3 (or more)

• Check out the website multiplication.com - lots of fun and challenging multiplication games!

• Start researching the nocturnal animal of your choice - you'll have a head start on our next science unit.

Just some quick ideas from a teacher who is counting down the hours until she herself loses power.  When that happens, we'll get creative over here at Hall Montessori - even in a big storm there is learning to do.

I look forward to hearing all of our stories about riding out the storm!

Tessa says Happy Learning!