Hilltop Montessori School's mission is for students to practice responsible independence in a caring community of curious, critical learners and thoughtful citizens.
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Next Week:
Monday, January 28
- 5:00 pm, MS Girls Basketball Game @Twin Valley MHS*
- 6:15 pm, MS Boys Basketball @ Twin Valley MHS*
*No Transportation
Tuesday, January 29
- 9:00 - 11:00 am, Open House for Prospective Parents
- 3:15 - 4:30 pm, Baking and Language Electives
- 5:30pm-6:45pm, UE Basketball Game at Putney Central
Wednesday, January 30
- 4:00 pm, MS Boys Basketball Game @ Bement (no Girls practice)
Thursday, January 31
- Winter Sports! (No All School Gathering)
Friday, February 1
- 5:15, UE Basketball Game at Twin Valley (1 School St. Wilmington)
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Important Future Dates:
Wednesday, February 6
- 7:00 - 9:00 pm, MS Poetry Night
Friday, February 8
- 1:30 - 2:30 pm, UE Poetry Performance
Saturday, February 9
- 9:00 am - 12:00 pm, Curriculum Morning - Geography, Diversity, Anti-Bias - All parents are strongly encouraged to attend. Childcare provided. More details below
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Save the Date - February 9th
Curriculum Morning
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Please mark your calendars for the morning of
Saturday, February 9th
!
This is
our most extensive annual Montessori parent education program
. This year, we will focus on the Geography curriculum that has been a key component of the Montessori curriculum for over 100 years. We have materials and lessons at all levels that celebrate the commonalities and differences of people and places across the globe. We have further enhanced these areas recently through our lens of “anti-bias”.
The program will be from 9-12 with a pizza lunch and potluck salads afterwards. Please join us that Saturday for a journey through the Geography/Diversity/Anti-Bias work of our school.
All parents are strongly encouraged to attend.
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We have a special treat for the students this morning!
A hand puppet performance and creative workshop performed by Jana Zeller
will coincide with our Curriculum Morning.
We hope you join us for this special morning.
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Hello all!
We had a great time at KNO last week! Here’s a short recap.
The kids started off the evening in the gym or in the theater coloring. They built mat houses and threw footballs, colored puppies, and ate delicious snacks. Then, at six, we all ate dinner together. After that, we watched a movie. Once the movie was over, we went back to the gym and coloring until parents came. Some kids had so much fun they didn’t want to leave! If you’re interested, there will be another KNO on March 1st! We’d love to see your kids there!
To sign up or learn more, visit our
website
.
If you have any questions, just write us back. We have only 30 spots, so don’t wait. Sign up now!
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This week brought wonderful snow and a classroom humming with activity.
Outside the children each had their own response to the, in some cases, waist deep snow.
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And our soon to be toddler room graduate, Quentin, and friends swept it
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While inside the classroom, others concentrated on painting, repairing a broken frame and examining the newest contents of the mystery bag. What beauty and joy both inside and outside the classroom!
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Enjoy the weekend.
Ellie, Marco, Sarah and Amanda
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“Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.”
This is one of Dr. Montessori’s most famous quotes, and it speaks to an important underlying drive in all of us: to learn about the world through direct experience. Constructing one’s own knowledge about the world is actually a difficult task, and one that involves periods of frustration. Providing children with the opportunity to learn how to manage that frustration is one of the most important things we can do.
It can be tempting to try to shield children from the emotional pain of frustration, but children need to experience it in order to learn how to cope with it. Frustration, disappointment, and loss are essential components of life, and children prepare themselves for weathering those events by first struggling with putting on their socks or hearing that they can’t have their juice in their favorite red cup. They are building the foundation right now to be able to handle missing out on the lead role in a play, losing the championship game, or being unable to land a coveted internship or job. You are building a relationship in which they will know that the boundaries around curfew are just as solid as the ones they now have about bedtime. They may not like it anymore than they do now, but they will have the skills to manage their disappointment!
Here’s a great article with tips on how to support your child now in learning to tolerate frustration.
SAVE THE DATE: Our next Work Share will be on
Wednesday, March 27th
from 8:30 - 9:15.
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We've been busy with lots of work, particularly cultural work this week! Ask your child:
- What happened to the Clock of Eons in your lesson today?
- Where did all life on Earth begin?
- Was the formation of the Earth a peaceful activity?
- What life form appeared first on Earth?
- What is a biome?
- What are the names of all the biomes on Earth?
- What can be found in every biome?
Have a wonderful weekend!
Kerstin, Patrick, and Amelia
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Kerstin and the Youngers complete "A Week in the Life of..." charts.
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Layla and Claire focus on their math work.
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Hazel works on a platypus report.
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Icy conditions such as those experienced this week are just what might have challenged travellers along the Silk Road as they traversed high passes in the Pamir Mountains of Central Asia. This week the first and second year students used their physical maps of the region to make educated guesses of the route chosen by merchants travelling from Baghdad, all the way across to Chang’an (today Xi’an) -- the eastern end of the famous trade route, and home to the Zhou, Qin, Han and Tang dynasties. We had the big “reveal” on Friday to learn that most traders traveled across the Zagros Mountains, through steppe terrain, over the Pamirs, eventually along the northern or southern edges of the Taklamakan Desert (the largest sand desert in the world!), and more steppe land to reach Chang’an. Details of the actual trades, and map work on the current political geography of the area, await us in the coming weeks.
Meanwhile, sixths are onto the travel and expansion of the early United States as populations moved westward. They all are researching independent projects for a timeline of US expansion.
The sixths were also involved in a measurement study. We will be finding the mean and median heights of each classrooms’ students. When we measure them at the end of the year, we’ll see how much each classroom has grown. Who will have grown the most as a percent of their original heights??
Our poetry studies took us to the Brattleboro Museum and Art Center on Tuesday. As we viewed works of Emily Mason, student generated words and phrases to form the backbone of their poems.
The poetry performance is now just two weeks away. Join us on Friday, February 8 at 1:30 p.m. in The Arts Barn for poetry, music, maybe even a bit of art to boot.
Upcoming dates:
UE Poetry Performance, Fri., Feb. 8 at 1:30 p.m.
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Shoshana and Parker measure Children’s House students for their data study.
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Students work with a docent at the BMAC to generate words and poems about a painting by Emily Mason.
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Finnegan measures Lower Ellers.
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Abby and Parker work on their art-inspired poetry.
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Finnegan works on his art-inspired poetry.
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It has been a short week of intensive project work. The poetic films are deep in production and original poems are going through multiple drafts in preparation for Poetry Night on Wednesday, February 6. The class is also setting the foundation work for our upcoming immersion into the Civil Rights Movement. They already have a solid grasp of slavery and we looked at Reconstruction earlier this term. Now students are presenting their “Early Topics” research projects. In each of these presentations students are teaching the class about some facet of our post Civil War racial history. Too often the Civil Rights Movement is presented without the context that is needed to fully understand the profound oppression that African Americans suffered following slavery and continue to be impacted by to this day. The Movement is portrayed as Rosa Parks sitting, Martin Luther King marching, and Barack Obama being elected. Some of the stories we heard on Friday and will continue to hear next week are often buried and preferred forgotten by many. Our attempt is to broaden and deepen our understanding of injustice and resistance.
Some of the topics presented this week include Minstrel Shows, Black Codes, Plessy v Ferguson, the Great Migration, and the massacres in Greenwood, Oklahoma, Rosewood, Florida, and Wilmington, North Carolina. On Monday the topics will include the Ku Klux Klan, Sundown Towns, and the negative portrayal of African Americans in films, cartoons, literature, and advertising. Next week we will jump into the powerful and affirming stories of change and resistance beginning with Brown v Board of Education.
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Students create terrain for poetic film.
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A shark's mouth for a poetic film.
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Poetic film making on green screen.
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Solomon gives a class on the Atlanta Compromise.
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Ben and Oliver teach us about convict labor.
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Start your day off right.
Proceeds will support the Middle School's Odyssey Fund.
Thank you!
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Girls On The Run and Heart and Sole
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Girls on the Run and Heart and Sole are coming to Hilltop Montessori School this Spring!
What is Girls on the Run?
Over a period of 10 weeks,
girls in 3rd through 5th grades
can participate in an after-school program like no other.
The Girls on the Run lessons encourage positive emotional, social, mental, and physical development. They develop important strategies and skills to help them navigate life experiences. We start with helping the girls get a better understanding of who they are and what is important to them. Then, we look at the importance of team work and healthy relationships. And, finally, the girls explore how they can positively connect with and shape the world by completing a community impact project they design together.
What is Heart & Sole?
Over a period of 10 weeks,
girls in 6th through 8th grades
can participate in an after-school program like no other. Throughout the season, the girls make new friends, build their confidence and celebrate all that makes them unique.
The Heart & Sole lessons encourage positive emotional, social, mental, and physical development. They explore and discuss their own beliefs around experiences and challenges girls face at this age. They also develop important strategies and skills to help them navigate life experiences. We focus on the importance of team work and healthy relationships. The girls explore how they can positively connect with and shape the world by completing an individual project called Extending the Girl Wheel, where they reach out in small meaningful ways to an individual or group in their community.
Physical activity is woven into our program to inspire an appreciation of fitness and to build habits that lead to a lifetime of health. At the end of the season, the girls participate in a Girls on the Run 5k event. This celebratory, non-competitive event is the culminating experience of the curriculum. Completing the 5k gives the girls a tangible understanding of the confidence that comes through accomplishment as well as a framework for setting and achieving life goals. Crossing the finish line is a defining moment when the girls realize that even the seemingly impossible IS possible.
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THANK YOU
to
Hazel Pizza
for providing delicious pizzas for the students and staff every week! Sccccrrrrumptious! We still and always will ♡ 🍕!!
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BIG THANKS
to
Brattleboro Tire
for donating our Hilltop van's winter snow tires and for rotating them each year!
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The 97th Annual Harris Hill Ski Jump is around the corner! The dates are February 16 and 17.
Tickets for the event are on sale at Zephyr’s Designs and Galanes Vermont Shop both downtown on Main Street. OR you could get in free by becoming a volunteer! There are many opportunities for mature teens and adults to help out for a few hours on either or both days! (2 or more shifts gets you a free Harris Hill tee shirt too!) For questions or to sign up, contact Kathryn Einig at
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