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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Talia, Lucas, Matai, and Skyler break out the skis for the first snowfall of the year.
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Next Week
Monday, November 25
Tuesday, November 26
Wednesday, November 27 - Friday, November 29
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Upcoming
Monday, December 2
- Mountain Days sign up forms due
- EL Knitting, 3:15-4:30
- MS Basketball begins,
3:15-4:30
Tuesday, December 3
- Open House for perspective families, 9-11am
- UE Basketball begins,
3:15-4:30
Wednesday, December 4
Thursday, December 5
- ASG, 8:45am
- K-LE Basketball, 3:15-4:15
Friday, December 6
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After many years of wanting to do something more for our “Winter Sports” days, we are ready to make the move. Hilltop has seen
the “mission” of Winter Sports being to expose/teach children who may not otherwise have an opportunity to do such sports (skating, cross-country skiing, downhill skiing/snowboarding) to have access to learn one or more of these Vermont winter culture sports that could turn into a lifelong activity.
We have wanted to teach and model a love for outdoor activities in the winter.
With a lens increasingly focused on equity, community, and environmental sustainability, many at Hilltop have wanted to make the change to celebrating and exploring nature and winter on our very own hill.
We are fortunate to have skating, cross-country trails, and even a downhill “mountain” right in our neighborhood. This year we are going to start a new tradition of making the most of all that winter brings here in our neighborhood. We plan to have activities from
12:30 - 2:45 p.m on Thursday afternoons
(with a possible move to a Friday, with advance notice) if the snow conditions and weather look spectacular for that day instead). If the weather cooperates, groups will divide by their chosen sport and will have 2 hours of concentrated skill building. We will offer students K-8 the options of skating, intro to skiing, cross-country skiing, and downhill at Living Memorial Park (or on campus) as their main choice of activity to focus on.
At no additional charge, we will equip students
with skates at the Nelson Withington Skating Facility, set students up with
“learn-to-ski”
hybrid skis, cross-country skis, or will arrange for students to have a set of downhill equipment for them to learn on at home as well as during Mountain Days during these six weeks of winter.
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The
Ski Hill at Living Memorial Park
will be opening their lift for us on Thursday afternoons.
They typically make snow and groom the hill on Wednesday night and Thursday morning in preparation for their Thursday night and weekend skiing. Our students will be the first on this fresh snow! If there is natural snow in January and February, the opportunities for snow sports will extend to be anywhere on our campus, through the trails, and on the ski hill.
With minimal travel time and maximum outdoor exercise opportunities, we will engage the students in:
- Skating lessons with an instructor at the Nelson Withington Skating Facility
- Cross-country skiing lessons with our own staff and additional instructors (paid and volunteer) on the trails around the school (or at the base of Living Memorial Park if that manufactured snow is the only snow on our hill)
- Downhill lessons and practice on the T-bar hill with instructors from our own staff and supplemented with outside instructors and volunteers
More advanced skiers/snowboarders will also have options of:
- Skiing / snowboarding from the school through the trails to the T-bar hill
- Learning ski racing techniques with an experienced racer
- Learning beginning ski jumping techniques with an expert instructor
- Working with a terrain “features” designer and builder to design and build jumps, rails, boxes, etc.!
If the weather is not at all cooperative for skiing, we are looking at other options that could be available for students on those days. Depending on weather and students interests, we might be able to provide:
- Wilderness survival skills
- Hiking and snowshoeing around the mountain and on school trails
- Bonfires, making snow forts and snow castles, sledding, animal tracking, etc.
- Circus Arts or indoor activities and more student, teacher, parent, and community member generated activities for completely inclimate weather
While this new program constitutes a change, especially for those who had been taking a bus to Mt. Snow and having lessons and free-ski on the big mountain, we feel it is an important change and improvement.
We need to align our actions with our values
as we work to reduce our carbon footprint, build our community, and engage with the resources we all share that will reflect what nature and our community gives us in our neighborhood. At the start of the school year, staff read an article by David Sobel
“Climate Change Meets Ecophobia”
. (This article is also available in a
video version)
. He notes that schools often spend “way too much time focussing on conveying environmental knowledge and way too little time on developing environmental behaviors.” We are compelled by his arguments that “actions speak louder than words.” He also notes that “Nature experiences seem to be a necessary condition for any type of environmentally responsible behavior… In particular, nature experiences should be provided for the youngest generation.” Our goals for our new “Mountain Days” program is to provide these outdoor winter experiences right here at home.
We are excited to be adapting our outdoor winter sporting program to be equitable, have a low carbon footprint, community involvement, and keep our students together, safe, and well supervised while learning these traditional Vermont physical activities
.
As we grow our in-house winter sporting equipment supply and work to support our entire community, donations are highly encouraged and greatly appreciated. We are looking for more:
- Helmets!
- Downhill skis, snowboards, and boots
- X-Country skis and equipment
- Snowshoes
We are still working out a few of the details and will need to maintain flexibility as we strive to develop new community traditions. If you have any suggestions or questions, or if you would like to be a part of the group doing this redesign, please feel free to contact
Mace
or
Tamara
.
Each student will be sent home with a sign up packet for Mountain Days at the end of school today, but you can also download a
PDF version
.
Forms are due to the front desk on Monday, December 2.
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Tuesday, Dec 3rd, 9 - 11am.
Know a family who might be interested in Hilltop Montessori School?
Invite a family and feel free to come along as ambassadors of our school.
We would love to have current parents join us to show the school and join us for the Q & A with teachers and students at the end of the morning.
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Attention to all parents,
Toddler through Middle School
!
We are asking that you please help your student to
clean out their cubby by Thanksgiving break
, as well as taking the time to look through your classes' respective lost and found.
We would love to start out December with tidy hallways and cubby areas to make room for the inevitably boundless amounts winter gear, and ever accumulating projects.
Thank you!
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Thank you to all families who have contributed vegetables for the Stone Soup celebration. As a reminder, here are the items requested by program. If you are able to contribute, please drop off vegetables in the basket outside your child's classroom by Monday morning.
Middle School:
1 butternut squash per student
Upper Elementary:
4 potatoes and one head of garlic per student
Lower Elementary:
4 carrots per student
Birch Room:
4 onions per student
Willow Room:
1 bunch celery per student
Toddler Room:
1 head of broccoli or cauliflower per student
Happy Thanksgiving.
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Harrison and Keeshawn experiment
with the ball tracker.
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Maisie and Maple in the snow.
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Oatmeal and apples for a group snack.
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Tasting, shoveling and
walking through snow.
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Maisie and Maple look at a book together.
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Half-Day students in Children's House are invited to stay until 12:30 on Tuesday to participate in Stone Soup.
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“Work is inseparable from Movement” Maria Montessori (The Absorbent Mind)
Children need a diet of movement for optimal development and classroom readiness .
Movement primes the brain for learning. Moving fosters the neural circuitry that forms the foundations for all learning. When the body and brain work together children’s learning increases through greater focus, better problem solving skills, greater emotional confidence supporting resilience and healthier habits. Some of this movement can happen within the classroom using for example sensorial materials such the Red Rods. A child will make ten trips back and forth to their work rug to bring the material to the rug. This helps the child internalize the concept of “ten”. The child is learning using their whole body. However, some children require more movement in order to complete simple tasks before they enter the classroom.
If these needs are not met the child is unable to utilize the classroom for its intended purpose.
Here are some suggestions that you can implement to support your child in their movement work:
-Yoga
-Command cards (ie. hop like a frog, jump like a rabbit)
-Obstacle course
-Using various objects for stepping stones to balance on (ie. walk from one stone to the other)
-Wall push-ups: stand arms distance from wall. Place hands on the wall and lean into it with bent elbows. Push body away by extending elbows.
-Movement songs and games
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Individual student sharing will begin next week! We have created a sharing schedule, and will include the names of the upcoming week’s participants in each newsletter. We have been practicing how to be informative and brief in our presentations, as well as learning what makes a thoughtful comment or question about someone else’s sharing and how to speak in our “presenter’s voice.” Some ideas for sharing include items that are treasures from nature: shells, stones, fossils, etc.; something they constructed, whether from cardboard, paper, clay, or Legos; a favorite book; a dialogue share, in which a child might tell about a visit to relatives, a tradition they share with their family, or an exciting event (a successful swim meet! black bears in the backyard!) If they choose, every student will have an opportunity to share once a month. Participation is optional, but sharing is a nice way to tell the class more about yourself and what matters to you in your life outside of school.
For next Monday, November 26th, we invite Eleanor, Henry, and Oliver to share.
Have a great weekend!
Kerstin, Amelia, and Patrick
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LE visits the Bassett Planetarium today in Amherst, Mass.
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The Upper El has been busy this week wrapping up two projects and making progress on a third. The fifth years have been presenting their research on their ‘Hero’, a person whom they chose because they felt they had changed the way people looked at or felt about the world. Their heroes included Cezar Chavez, Jane Goodall, Joe Louis, Wayne Gretzky, Greta Thurnberg, John Kennedy, Luci’s Pirate, Marie Curie and Malala Yousafzai. Please check out the students’ papers and portraits in the hallway near Wendy’s room. Congrats to the fifth years.
The class have been examining the three branches of government as a part of our US history study. In small groups, students have been writing and producing skits to show the power and responsibility of each branch, as well as the way they limit and are limited by the other 2 branches. It is an interesting time to delve into this study.
Students have done an initial interview with a relative to uncover family stories about family migration on a large or small scale. The migration stories are developing. The students have chosen a moment of the often sweeping story as their focus. Part of their work this week was to identify any further questions they need answered to round out their writing. Perhaps they will be spending time over the break with this interviewee to solidify their story.
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All School Gathering Presentation
By Kaiya and Morgon
Morgon:
We played a game on the first day of school called ‘Find
Someone Who’, where everybody goes around the class asking people questions and if they say yes, you ask them to write their name on your paper. The goal is to mix people up - have them meet and learn something about each other. In this example, Tom found that Aiden has curlier hair than he does, so Aiden signed his name on Tom’s form.
Kaiya:
The sixth graders were wondering if we actually did mix ourselves up, or if fourth graders just talked to fourth graders, if boys only asked other boys, ETC.
Morgon:
First, the sixth graders looked at all of the ‘Find Someone Who’ sheets. On each sheet, we made a tally by 4ths, 5ths, 6ths, teachers, and boys and girls. So in this example, Tom got answers from 3 fourth graders, from 6 fifth graders and from 5 sixth graders for a total 14 answers. Of those 14, 5 were from girls and 9 were from boys. You can see the tally marks in the upper right-hand corner. Then we added together the results by age and gender to see the totals, for example, for all the answers from the fourth grade girls, fourth grade boys, etc.
Kaiya:
Then we put that data on another sheet and turned the data into fractions, decimals, and lastly, degrees. We did that all with a calculator. For example this sheet shows that the 5th grade boys all together had 41 answers: 12 were from 4th graders, so that means 12/41 of these answers, which equals 0.29, which we then turned into 104˚ sector of a 360˚ circle.
Morgon:
Then we took all the angles and turned them into a pie chart. Here are the pie charts for the 5th grade boys and girls. The charts on the left show data by grade and the ones on the right by gender.
Kaiya:
After we had done all of that, we compared the graphs to see how different groups did. For example, we noticed that the fifth grade girls and the fifth grade boys asked around the same number of 4th 5th and 6th graders but the girls asked mostly girls and some boys, but the boys asked around half girls and half boys.
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Students work on their Three Branches of Government skits.
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Serving beans and rice for our Monday Simple Meal.
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Moving picnic benches to prep for winter...
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Morgon and Oona work on their Three Branches of Government skits.
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Max present his research on Joe Louis and accompanying portrait.
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...and having a little fun before covering them with a tarp.
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Find Someone calculations.
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The Middle School students are currently engaged in the Elderly Companion/Younger Mentoring project. In this five week activity the eighth graders build relationships with an elderly companion at Holton Home, Bradley House, The Gathering Place, or Pine Heights and the seventh grade students help out in the Toddler, Children’s House, and Lower El classrooms. After every visit students write a reflection of their experience. Here are some excerpts from their most recent visit.
“At first, it was a bit awkward for me in the class (the Birch Room). I felt tall and like I was towering over everyone. But, as I observed and adapted to the classroom, I found that I was in touch with my limbs and that I do have a good sense of place. I learned to crouch down when I was talking to a child and that it is crucial to speak in a quiet clear voice.”
~Parker
“I then talked to a man who used to preach at St. Michael’s Church. He taught me a lot about listening and patience, which I hope I will be able to use some day. We observed together and puzzled over how to play dominoes and different interpretations of Christianity.”
~Annelise
On Friday I spent time with the Lower El students and their teachers….I left there super tired: How do kids have so much energy?”
~Keeshawn
“The time really seemed to fly by. We sat there, sometimes in silence, with small snowflakes trickling down outside, unnoticed by our eyes. There was something beautiful about the tranquility of it. We interacted with one another, and we talked, and we learned about ourselves. Time went by fleetingly, and each quick-passing moment held so much in itself. Each moment was special.”
~Marian
“I enjoyed hanging out with the little kids on Friday. It helps me remember what I was like when I was younger. It also gives me a chance to reunite with Kolya, my peace buddy last year. It is exciting to see the children learn and I always meet a new child who impresses me with their knowledge. These children are very smart and funny when you get to know them. They are very nice and are quick to warm up to you. It is like having twenty peace buddies.”
~Finnegan
“After a certain age people just seem old, but while talking with my elderly companion he became a full, alive person, with regrets from the past and dreams for the future. The fact that at 90 someone still believes he can have hopes, dreams, and goals is inspiring.”
~Ellie
“I had a very good time with the kids. They mostly listened and when they didn’t it wasn’t hard to bring them back. They were not annoying.”
~Lana
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Reminder for Ordering Pictures
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Schoolhouse Pictures is nearing the end of the season, and with that, comes the deadline for families to place orders.
Don't forget to place your order by Saturday, November 30 for guaranteed holiday delivery! Schoolhouse Pictures offers lots of great holiday gift options. Items include, but not are limited to, magnets, tumblers, pillows, blankets, canvases, and much more.
How to shop:
Sign into your account.
Click on Decor and Gifts.
Start designing your holiday treasures!
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The Brattleboro Women’s Chorus will present their 24
th
annual fall concert titled
Love Changes Everything
on Saturday, November 23 at 3:00 pm and 7:30 pm at the newly named Epsilon Spires, formerly the First Baptist Church, on Main Street.
Director Becky Graber and the 100-plus member chorus will be joined by guest musicians Lisa McCormick with her ukulele orchestra and Cathy Martin on piano.
The theme of the concert music is love in its many forms. By happenstance or by grace, many of the songs are by women composers: the concert title song
Love Changes Everything
by Lisa McCormick; two by Ali Burns of Scotland;
Lullabye
by Cris Williamson; the irreverent
If You Love Me
by Malvina Reynolds; and Holly Near’s
Change of Heart,
which says, among other things, “There’s a change of heart any time you join the choir.”
Baby Boomer favorites include
Ain’t No Mountain High Enough, All I Have to Do Is Dream,
Billy Joel’s
Lullabye,
and a medley of Beatles tunes. And for the younger crowd, there is
One Day
by Matisyahu.
Tickets are $12 adult, $20 generous, and $10 student and senior and will be available at BrownPaperTickets.com or at the door. For more information, see
www.BrattleboroWomensChorus.org
or call 802-254-8994.
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