Call Us: 410-321-8555 ignite@greenspringmontessori.org
January and February 2022 Capital Project Update

January and February 2022 Capital Project Update

Initial construction of the Elementary Village began in late January. The construction team has been hard at work on campus and our students are eagerly learning more about the building process. 

First, the perimeter was set up and the trees were cleared from the Grove in order to set the stage for the project. Construction began on the water retention pond and the leveling of the ground for the new building. 

During these initial stages, children in our Redbud Lower Elementary classroom became very interested in the construction process. A group of students began a newspaper thoroughly outlining the entire process. They have interviewed the foreman and other construction workers throughout the process, and they even had an opportunity to review the blueprints!

Footers, plumbing, and electrical have all been run to the building and now we are waiting for the concrete slab to be poured. In the month of March, we will see the progress more clearly. Stay tuned for future updates. 

Adolescent Igniting Voice on Social Justice Topics

Adolescent Igniting Voice on Social Justice Topics

In December, students in the Adolescent Community began their research by asking adults in their lives about social justice topics. They then participated in a speaker series, hearing from Greenspring parents Michelle Siri, Jen Brock-Cancellieri, and Jay Roy as well as Ximena Reyes Torres and Juliana Glassco, on social justice issues including the wage gap, ban the box (employment access for the formerly incarcerated), human trafficking, and national and global initiatives to fight hunger.

After that, the Adolescents selected a topic that is important to them, researched it, and created a presentation about what they’ve learned. Take a moment to watch their final presentations on environmental justice, the opioid crisis, fast food impacts, neurodiversity in schools, the gender pay gap, and police brutality. This work integrates data analysis, research, thesis-building, using supporting evidence, and presentation skills. 

The Montessori Puzzle Maps

The Montessori Puzzle Maps

Creating globally minded citizens is a fundamental value of Montessori education. Puzzle Maps are a key component of the Cultural curriculum and are found in both the Children’s House and Lower Elementary classrooms. They are arranged intentionally, starting with the top shelf and working downward:

  • The planisphere: two blue circles with removable colored continents
  • A map of the child’s continent: puzzle pieces indicate countries
  • A map of the child’s country: puzzle pieces indicate states or provinces
  • Maps of the other continents of the world: pieces indicating countries

There is also a set of “control maps,” which are corresponding laminated paper maps that have the pieces drawn to scale and labeled.

A Children’s House student works with the Puzzle Map of South America.

The initial introduction to the work in Children’s House is presented as a puzzle. Children become aware of the relative position, size, and shape of the continents of the world and the countries of those continents. Because the 3 to 6-year-old is learning with an absorbent mind, the names, locations, and orientation of the continents and countries are easily learned and remembered. When they are ready, students begin labeling the countries. Students also have the option of tracing and coloring a paper map of the world or country they are studying.

Sra. Emily works with a Children’s House student to learn more about the flag of China.

The Puzzle Maps help students memorize continents and countries, but memorization is only one benefit. Montessori students use these maps to gain a deeper, more rich understanding of how countries relate to one another. The pegged puzzle pieces have indirect purposes as well. The knob itself is placed at the location of the capital city, subtly reinforcing this concept. In addition, when a child grips the pegs, their hand muscles are strengthened and the pincer grip developed, preparing the hand to use a pencil. When a child later begins tracing and labeling the puzzle pieces, this work also builds dexterity and writing skills. Work with the Puzzle Maps often inspires children to read and write about various continents or countries, serving as a launching pad for exploration of biomes, animals, culture, and more.

In Elementary, the child moves to the reasoning mind and wants to understand why countries have these shapes and differences, as well as additional details about the areas. This leads to the knowledge that landforms often create borders, that there are political and cultural differences in adjacent countries, and an awareness of how the geography and resources of an area played a significant role in the settling of that region. We encourage Elementary students to use an atlas alongside the puzzle maps. They are now building the skills to find answers for themselves.

Adolescent Engineering Inspired by Campus Construction

Adolescent Engineering Inspired by Campus Construction

The campus is abuzz with construction activity and our classrooms are eagerly joining the excitement with lessons at all levels. In our Adolescent Community, the students are beginning a unit on engineering and design to coincide with the construction. Continuing on their studies of fundamental human needs, students are exploring how humans meet the need for shelter and transportation through engineering. Students began by learning how forces interact to support a structure and how energy can be transformed to power a model car.

They are also taking this as an opportunity to reenvision the land for microeconomy projects. Later in the unit, they will be building a grow light stand to nurture seedlings in the classroom and a greenhouse to shelter them outside once they get a bit stronger. The seedlings will be available to purchase later this spring as part of our microeconomy work!

The Peaceful Gift of our Montessori Classrooms

The Peaceful Gift of our Montessori Classrooms

When walking around campus and observing our classrooms, it is striking how the children are driven by purposeful work and relationships in their small community, peacefully unphased by the trials of the world around them. While our children will all grow up knowing the impact of the COVID-19 pandemic, it is heartening to see their resilience and adaptability, as well as the ways that a Montessori classroom intentionally makes space for peace, calm, and a sense of normalcy – what a gift!

Our Toddlers are learning how to be in community with one another – some for the very first time! They are absorbing language through early conversations, storytelling, and songs, as well as beginning to understand Grace and Courtesy when interacting with one another. In our Children’s House classrooms, the students are eager to make sense of the world around them, learning about everything from the traditions of Chinese New Year to the different types of leaves on trees native to Maryland. Lessons tie back to childrens’ identities and give them an understanding of their place in the world. In our Elementary communities, creative writing has been a special focus over the past month, with children eagerly thinking up new stories to write and share with one another. Our Adolescents boldly explore the current events in the world with a social justice lens and a passion to change things for the better.

We are inspired by each of them every day!

2022 Winter Enrichment Update

2022 Winter Enrichment Update

January was a busy month for our enrichment classes. At the beginning of the month, several of our enrichment classes moved to a virtual model in order to avoid cross-contamination between classes as the COVID rates went up nationwide. We are excited to be returning to our in-person learning in February.

Scroll through this post to see what our students have been up to in our Enrichment classes this winter.

Art Enrichment

Mr. Beven Barnhart

This semester all students in the art enrichment program have begun to work with acrylic paint.

Our Lower Elementary cohort has explored mixing colors, using different brush strokes, and they have started to experiment with what it means to compose a painting of their own.

The Upper Elementary community has been exploring the use of different brush strokes in order to make landscapes with their acrylic compositions, with the caveat of only using the color’s white and blue in an effort to add shades of value to their pieces.

The Adolescent Community has also been composing acrylic landscapes, and while they are using only two colors to do so, they are experimenting with white and an additional color of their choosing.

Physical Education

Mr. Jeff Arenberg

All students begin PE class with age-appropriate yoga and calisthenics-inspired warmups.

The Children’s House students enjoy playing traditional games such as Simon Says, Red Light/Green Light, and Duck Duck Goose, as well as target games with bean bags/balls, soccer, basketball, jump rope, and scooters. We always take time at the end of class for a meditation-inspired cool down.
 
Elementary students are currently taking part in jump rope challenges. They have been playing freeze tag and move the cheese as well. We will be exploring basketball skill-building as our next unit.
 
Adolescents have been participating in activities including jump rope, capture the flag, and a variety of basketball-inspired games. We will be exploring basketball skill-building as our next unit.

Music Enrichment

Ms. Jasmine Mays Robinson

Lower Elementary students have been learning to observe, describe, create, and respond to music using body percussion and classroom instruments, and to use familiar words and concepts as tools for understanding varied rhythms. The students have enjoyed using tonic sofa syllables to learn melodies and using rhythm sticks and shakers to practice reading quarter and eighth notes from the staff. Each class is currently in the process of putting together a wintery piece entitled “January, January” for Glockenspiel, Orff, Percussion, and Sandblock. We are also visiting virtually with Maestro Karl from the Calgary Philharmonic Orchestra (a school-wide community favorite) to learn about instrument families.

 
Having previously studied the basics of music notation, dynamics, and instrument families, our 4th and 5th graders are diving deep into the impact music has on our world. How can we use music to tell a story, change hearts and minds, or make a difference? This class has studied the tenets of Rossini and Prokofiev, both historically renowned masters of storytelling through music. Now, they are making connections between these 19th and early 20th century principles and the way music influences our perception of character and the way we interpret action in film. They are then using this information to create their own storylines and their own musical backdrops in order to learn to influence others through music.
 
6th graders, along with the Adolescent Community, are gaining the skills necessary to attain independent musicianship. Our first quarter was focused on learning to play the piano/keyboard and the guitar, read music from the staff and recognize a guitar chord chart. Students enjoyed earning badges for completing levels of their “Piano Bootcamp.” We are now in phase two of our long-term songwriting initiative, which started with utilizing parodies in order to begin writing lyrics using rhythmic patterns and maintaining rhyme schemes. As a closing activity to this portion of our unit, students are given the task of writing out a portion of a song in musical notation on the staff and assigning their own (parodied) lyrics. Our next step is to analyze music in order to understand the parts of a song and understand the purpose and benefit of using literary tools when writing lyrics and deciding on song structure. By the end of this project, students will be able to write their own songs with musical notation.
 
Spanish Enrichment

Sra. Marcela Daley

During the first semester of the year, the younger Children’s House students have been mastering greetings, colors, and numbers. In the following weeks, children will be working with vocabulary to name objects in the house. The older Children’s House students are starting to identify the vowel sounds and reading words with just one vowel on them. Once this work is completed, new key sounds will be presented together with words that have more than one vowel on them. At that point, they will start reading basic sentences in Spanish.
 
In Lower Elementary, students are met where they are in their Spanish proficiency. Some students are working on combining sounds in Spanish and have started to write and read short sentences. Other students have been working hard with numbers. Per their request, we have been working on counting over one hundred and they want to start doing some math in Spanish. There is a third group that has been really engaged in reading and writing short stories in Spanish. 
 
Upper Elementary students are also working at different levels. All students have been engaged in working on their Spanish language through short stories. These stories are all written in the third person and use the seven most used verb conjugation in Spanish (es, está, va, le gusta, tiene, hay, and quiere). A group of students is using the stories to identify basic grammar points like the congruence between article, noun, and adjectives. Other students are starting to put the stories in the first person. These students are also working with the verb “To Be” in Spanish identifying the two equivalent verbs in Spanish (Ser and Estar).
 
Our Adolescents are working on a magazine in Spanish. They have been working on their creative process, conceptualizing the entire publication to include aspects about their classroom, community involvement,  favorite activities, games, advertisement, and comic strips. Their design and editing process has been in both Spanish and English. We look forward to sharing the magazine upon completion – stay tuned!