November was a month filled with fun art projects and cooking activities. Thank you to all of the parents who provided food for the Thanksgiving Feast. Thank you to Andy, Lindsay, Dalton and Caroline for buying our For Small Hands wishlist materials. We are so glad to have those for classroom use!

During the month of December we will learn about religious celebrations all over the world. To emphasize the idea of sharing during the holiday season, our children will exchange books among themselves. We will let you know more details about the book exchange soon. We will also study the seven continents and winter weather.

Once again, thank you for doing so much for our classroom. Special thanks to Hey Young (Amy's mom) for helping with cooking class and George LeVert (Caroline's dad) for helping us set our Thanksgiving table.

We wish all of you happy holidays. If you have any questions regarding your child, please let us know!

As 2012 comes to a close we naturally take time to reflect on the course of the year.  We would like to thank our MSH families for participating in the Parent Satisfaction Survey.  Your helpful responses have given us food for thought.  We look forward to having the rest of our academic year to continually improve our program here at MSH.

We were happy to see that you feel our teachers have a strong relationship with your children.  Teaching children brings so much joy to us each day. Your responses also indicate that you feel the classrooms are a rich learning environment filled with great materials for stimulating learning.  Here in the office Tinsley, Yolanda and I were pleased to see that you find us welcoming and accessible.  We want you to feel free to drop in, have a cup of coffee, and let us know how things are going.

According to you, we have some room to grow in a few areas.  You would like to see better communication from teachers and more organization in the office.  Consider yourselves heard! All teachers now have an easy to remember email address.  Each staff member’s unique email address consists of their first name@montessorihuntsville.org.  Feel free to email them with questions or concerns.  We know that mornings can be a hectic time and many families using extended care don’t have access to their son or daughter’s teacher in the evenings.  Hopefully, this will offer families an easier way to communicate directly with a teacher.

In the office, we are streamlining procedures and trying to find ways to make information available without drowning you in a sea of messages.  Some ways you can stay informed include logging on to www.montessorihuntsville.org and syncing your calendar with our google calendar or find out about upcoming events in the monthly newsletter and our school blog.  Don’t forget to check out the video monitor in the lobby for upcoming events.  We will continue to send evites when we need to get an accurate count of attendees for special events.  We hope you will join the school’s facebook group, Montessori Huntsville.  This is a closed group so it’s a safe way to share photos or connect with other MSH families.

As the holiday season swings into high gear remember that we at the Montessori School of Huntsville believe that being part of such a great school is a gift.  We are so grateful we get to share this gift with you and your child all year long.

As we enter December, it is hard to believe that we are already hitting the half-way mark
of our school year. We have made great progress this semester, and we are all thankful
for Alicia’s return. This December we will continue our unit on outer space, especially
space exploration, and the unit will culminate with the children building their very own
space shuttle. Since it is the holiday season, we will also be looking at holiday traditions
from around the world. If you and your family have a special holiday tradition
particular to your religion or your culture, please contact one of the teachers, as we
would love to share your traditions with the children. I would like to thank everyone who
contributed to the Thanksgiving dinner. It was a great success and I think the
children really enjoyed it. I would also like to invite parents and friends to our Holiday
Celebration on December 21st at 10 am. We wish you happy holidays!

We've had a beautiful beginning to the school year in music with all the classes. Toddlers and Pre-Primary classes have learned dozens of new songs, poems, and movement activities. Plus, they have learned how to use sticks, bells, scarves, and chickitas. Kindergartener students participate in the Pre-Primary classes and also have their own separate classes; Kindergarten students have had their glockenspiels several months now and are getting very proficient at using the mallets and reading the notes to all their songs. We also sing as we play the songs; sometimes we sing the note names, sometimes how the notes move from one to the next, and then we'll sing the words to the songs. We also study the Note Tree to learn more about rhythm, how the notes look, how long they last, etc.

Lower Elementary students are halfway through their recorder books, are making beautiful sounds, know the fingerings and how to read the notes from middle C up 9 notes to high D. We always sing the songs before we play them, so they're learning to sing the songs, the note names, the rhythm, etc., before they learn to play the songs. Upper Elementary has just started our newest music adventure: They are learning how to play the dulcimer! We got the kits several weeks ago, I put them together and glued on the fretboards, and then the students decorated their own dulcimer w/ markers and stickers. I tuned the dulcimers, and we've just started learning how to use the pick to strum the strings, and how to use the wooden noter to make melodies on the melody string, leaving the drone string open.

This year I'm using Musikgarten curricula for Toddlers and Pre-Primaries, and the public domain materials of Kindermusik for the glockenspiel (pre-keyboard) and dulcimer (pre-string), and the Suzuki book for the recorder (pre-winds, pre-brass.) My focus for Toddlers is to reinforce rhythm so the children keep their sense of rhythm and the steady beat that are innate in newborns and start to deteriorate at about the age of 2 (unless there is reinforcement at that age). For Pre-Primaries and Kindergarten students, the focus is on tonal memory, since these ages are right in the window of opportunity to learn how to match their voices to the pitches, and remember those sounds. Both levels of Elementary students are ready for the cognitive work of reading music, and we work on that as we're playing recorder and dulcimer.

All levels also are doing a rounded program of body awareness, stationary and traveling movement, vocal development, rhythmic development, and using various rhythm instruments. All senses--except smell!--and all areas of the brain are used in our music classes.

When I completed the inventory of the music program instruments and materials, we all were amazed that the total actual cost of the music inventory of the school is above $10,000. That speaks volumes to me about the value this school places on the music program, and it's to the credit of the parents and leadership that we've built such an inventory over the years!

I presented a program to the staff at the October staff meeting, with emphasis on music in the Montessori classroom; the first goal is to establish a listening center for each classroom, w/ a CD player or iPod and headphones, and to start putting together the 45 recommended musical selections, the instrument cards, the composer cards, the music history timeline, and the orchestra seating chart for use at the listening center. The second goal is to have musical instruments on the shelves along w/ the previously mentioned cards or sheets. The third goal is to have music at the circle once a month, with a lesson presented by the classroom teacher. All these ideas come from the bookMusic in the Montessori Classroomby Shelley Murley, which was presented to the school several years ago by Carol Howie. NOTE: All classes are desperate for good musical CDs, either instrumental or with good children's singing. We would especially love donations of classical music CDs!

All students are working on our holiday program, which will be December 21. There will be 3 separate programs to which parents and guests are invited, and 1 program which will be taped for later presentation to the parents. Parents are invited to the two programs by the Pre-Primary classes, and also to the program by Elementary students. The Toddler program will be taped for the parents. (Since there is no early dismissal that day, it would be too disruptive to the children to have parents come to their morning program and then leave. Thank you for understanding!) The Pre-Primary classes of Ms. Dola and Ms. Kelly and Ms. Shree will be combined for a 9:00 program; we will start at the stroke of 9 o'clock, so please be in place and ready to go by 8:45 that morning. We will tape the Toddler program at 9:30. The Pre-Primary classes of Ms. Agnes and Ms. Janaki will be at 10:00, and both levels of Elementary students will be at 11:00. Again, I start right on time, so parents who come to the Pre-Primary and Elementary programs should be in the classroom a few minutes before the time listed.

Thank you so much for your interest, feedback and support!

Gratitude grows and grows here at MSH.  We love watching our "thousand thank yous" come in each day.  We hope that it has prompted good conversation at home about the tangible and intangible gifts in our lives.  In the office we enjoy watching your children share their leaves of thanks with you and your conversations as you discover what your children have shared with their teachers.  Thank you so much for all the ways you give to the school.  Spending each day with such amazing children and families is something for which we are truly grateful.