Cobham Montessori School

Newsletter W/C 15th April 2024

Dear Parents and Carers,

Welcome back to the Summer term. The weather is improving, the evenings are nice and bright and we look forward to an exciting and busy term. In next week's newsletter we shall confirm all dates but you can start to look forward to a ballet show, a music recital, our whole school trip and of course, our sports day and picnic. Watch out for further details.

NOTICES

Surrey County Council Reception & Junior School Places

On Monday, Surrey County Council published its school place allocations for children going in to Reception or Junior school. If your child is leaving us at the end of this academic year and moving on to a state school in Surrey you will need to accept your place by no later than30th April 2024.

Please let us know which school your child will be transitioning to so we can reach out and ensure your child is well supported with their move.

School Trip

We have planned a whole School trip on the last day before half-term.On Friday 24th May 2024all the children are invited to come to Brooklands for a day of fun exploration outside of the classroom. More details to follow - just a "save the date" for now!

Maria Montessori in her own words

The beginning of a new term is always a good opportunity to refocus and set our intention for the weeks ahead. In the 1946 London Lectures Montessori reminds us:

"The child gives us a beautiful lesson - that in order to form and

maintain our intelligence, we must use our hands."

This is a key tenet in the Montessori approach and whilst it manifests differently at the various stages of life it remains true throughout life.

Humans are blessed with an opposable thumb - considered by many to be the turning point in the trajectory of human innovation. The ability to manipulate tools in combination with an imaginative brain has led (by degrees) to the extraordinary technology which surrounds us today. It is certainly worth taking a moment or two to consider the power of our hands and how important it is to continue to maintain and develop our dexterity throughout life.

For anyone who may have allowed an enjoyment of crafting, drawing, mechanical tinkering or pottering in the garden to fall by the wayside in your busy lives it might be time to revisit the joy and benefits of working with your hands! Your child will, no doubt, be pleased to join you.

THIS WEEK IN SCHOOL

Children's House

We hope you all had a lovely Easter break and the children have returned full of enthusiasm and ready to work! In addition, we welcomed a new member to our community.

Miss Hayley was absent this week (and will also be away next week) and so Miss Ashley read the yoga book 'Maria Explores the Ocean' whilst Miss Blanca modelled the yoga poses. Several children commented "that's not how Miss Hayley does it" whilst another child said "you need to put your hands like this". Whilst we definitely will not be putting Miss Hayley out of a job, it seemed the children enjoyed the class.

In ballet, the children practised their skips and hops and the older group were introduced to 'forward' gallops, no hand holding. Miss Lizi is motivating them all for the end of year show.

Jess, our piano and singing teacher, will now be joining us on a Thursday (instead of Wednesday) and this week we sang 'the nonsense song 'A Ram Sam Sam' singing five verses with each verse becoming faster and faster. At the end we were all laughing with some a little out of breath but all good fun.

In cooking this week, we made vegetable skewers, using a variety of coloured peppers, cucumber, cherry tomatoes and mushrooms. As always, some children chose to make just one but most made two or three, with them all looking very colourful and the children were rightly proud of their efforts. We decided to keep the seeds from the peppers to sow in the hope that we can grow our own pepper plants.

In sports this term, children are going to practise football. Children have practised keeping the football close to them while moving around in order to control their direction and the ball better.

There will be a new sign up sheet on the door next week for anyone who wishes to come in and share something with the children: read a story/poem, play a musical instrument or talk about your job etc. Do please look out for it on the kitchen window.

May we remind you please to send your child in with slippers as several children have forgotten them this week. Apart from two pairs left at school over the Easter holiday, the rest were sent home.

Elementary

It has been a short week back; however we have dived into our new term with refreshed energy.

We had to make some changes to the children's jobs rota to compensate for the absence of two members of the class who have moved away. The children discussed between themselves how equitable it would be to have people having two jobs or to share the remaining tasks between everyone; they also thought about what would happen when new members join us from the Children's House shortly. Eventually, they agreed on an efficient, workable solution. This all happened without the need for any adult intervention!

With no Forest School or Yoga this week, the children have had ample time to get their teeth back into projects and work that was started in the Spring Term. We were pleasantly surprised that the children picked up almost exactly where they'd left off, gathering up the strands of their different pieces of work and happily re-energising their ideas. Some work has been entirely new and with the benefit of a break, they have embraced (and even completed) some booklets to demonstrate their understanding.

This term, we are embracing the amazing world of plants, which offer so many opportunities for interesting work - honing our observation skills, scientific exploration, connecting with the earth and growing plants, exploring the evolution of plant life and the varied roles that plants have played in the lives of humans, botanical drawing, creative writing and finally, reading - plants and botanical terms have such interesting names and etymology which offer great opportunities to continue to use our decoding skills, making us more accurate and fluent readers.

Sports was undertaken with great enthusiasm by all this week. We have started a 6 week stint of Athletics and this week we began with sprinting. The children started by practising their sprint start positions before several individually timed 100 yards. We completed the session with a relay which ended with a nail-biting finish!

Next week we will need scooters for Wednesday and Friday and pickup with be at Painshill after Forest School on Wednesday.

We hope all the children manage to get some rest over the weekend, after a busy first week back.

Kind regards,

Yvonne