Newsletters 2024/25

 

Welcome and welcome back to Children’s House Jade Room!

We are so happy to be back in the classroom and beginning to get our environment ready so that children feel safe to explore and make discoveries through the classroom experience!

 

Our Back To School Night is on Tuesday, August 13 from 4:30 to 5:30 here in the Jade Room on the Golden Campus. We will have lots of important information to go over, please come if you are able. There is no child care provided, so please make plans accordingly. If you are unable to attend, we will make our Google Slides available to look through.

 

We will be talking at back to school night about what items will be needed when coming in on your first day. If possible, please order a nap roll (link here) for your 3 or 4 year old to lay on at nap time (Ks do not need one). This year we are also asking parents to order a wet bag (link here). If your child gets water or paint on their clothes and needs to change, we would like to be as sustainable as possible and avoid any more plastic bags. 

 

Please take a moment to look through our class page. You will notice the tabs on the right side of this page. They each contain information about our classroom or take you to a school link. We have updated our bios as well.

 

If you have any questions, please email us at [email protected] as we will be using the class email for all email correspondence moving forward.

 

Reminders

• The Back to School Hub for the 2024-25 school year is LIVE and ready for your review! Visit www.compassmontessori.org/backtoschool to browse the checklist for your child's level. There are some very important tasks for each family to complete prior to the first day of school, so ALL COMPASS FAMILIES SHOULD REVIEW THE BACK TO SCHOOL HUB BEFORE THE FIRST DAY OF SCHOOL! 
• Welcome Back Work Day is this Saturday, Aug 10th from 8AM - 12PM on both campuses. We have plenty of work to complete before our first days on campus, so come help us spruce up the place! While there are many jobs available and no sign up is required, we do have some specific needs (jobs and materials), and you can sign up for those HERE. 
• Back to School Picnic - Friday Aug 23rd from 4PM - 6PM at Anderson Park - Taco truck and snow cones! 

 

See you soon!

- Miho, Danielle, Matthew, and Jeannette

 

We are thrilled to have the children back in the classroom and are enjoying getting to know new students as we build a loving, trusting community where children feel safe to explore and make discoveries through the classroom experience.

We were also amazed to see just how much returning students grew socially and emotionally over the summer. Students were eager to share their summer experiences and adventures during our gathering time. We hope that the transition is going well for your child and we look forward to working with you! 

Gathering

Our daily gathering time is when we get together as a whole group either first thing in the morning or after our morning work cycle (before our lunch time). Gathering time provides many learning opportunities for students such as oral language skills, counting practice, time awareness, mindfulness activities,

rhythm and music, social emotional skills, geography, self expression, etc. This week we went over:

• Grace and Courtesy: how to greet people, how to use inside voices, how to use walking feet
• Orientation to our classroom 
• Our classroom rules (Treat ourselves nicely, Treat others nicely and Treat environment nicely) and examples of each rule
• How to express our emotions/needs 

 

Kindergarten Schedule

While Younger students rest, our kindergarteners engage in their literacy and math skills in the afternoon. Each afternoon, we start with a chapter book, then phonemic awareness exercise, then dive into the content area (reading, math or handwriting). 

Upcoming Dates

Please check out the Compass Calendar on the main website, or click here!

Farm Visit

We had our first visit to our school farm for this school year! We were lucky and able to harvest tomatoes, zucchinis anda few peppers. We will continue to visit our farm every Friday that we can.

Monthly Theme of the Jade Classroom (Aug/Sep)

Geography - The World

Science - Basic Elements of Earth: Air, Land, Water 

Celebration - Maria Montessori Birthday 8/31

                         International Day of Peace 9/21

Zoology/Botany - Living/Non Living, Care of Plants, Farm Orientation

Math (Ks only)- Linear Counting

Language Arts - Things around us, Introduction to books

Creative Arts - Intro to Art materials, Self Portrait, Inspirational Artist: Wassily Kandinsky

Music appreciation - woodwind, flute, clarinet, Jazz

New this year

To make our age grouping easier and clearer for students, we started to use names associated with colors of Jades. 

First year students (3s)  are lavender jades

Second year students (4s)  are yellow jades

Kindergarteners are green jades

Friday Folders

On Fridays, you will see a work folder come home with your child - this is their Friday Folder. The expectation is that you and your child will take out the folder on the weekend so your child can share some of their work with you. Keep these works at home, but please send the folder back in their backpacks on Monday. We will be using these folders all year long. If you are only seeing art, cutting scraps, or coloring pages, this is typical! The majority of the work done by the children is with concrete works that remain at school, and the skills they are working on cannot be measured in the number of papers taken home. Somewhere in the PreK 4/Kindergarten years you will notice an uptick in works on paper that come home, as the children move more towards abstraction with numbers and letters (more on that later!)

Volunteering

Volunteering is vital to our classroom running as smoothly as possible. Here is a link to our Sign Up Genius for help with laundry, making playdough, and bringing in flowers. Thanks in advance for your participation - we could not do it without your help!

A couple of Reminders

• Be sure to have all your child’s items labeled when coming to school. We are helping them be as independent as possible, and labels are important in that process.
• We have PE every Tuesday, and Kindergarteners have an extra movement class (Movin and Groovin) on Thursdays. Please help your child remember to wear appropriate shoes on those days. 

Look for our next Newsletter on Friday, Sept. 6!