Book Choices for Today:

Plants   Jonathan Bockman
What is a Plant?   Louise Spilsbury
What is a Plant?   Bobbie Kalman
When You Were a Baby   Ann Jonas
When You Were a Baby   Katherine Ross
My Two Feet   Alice Scharthe
Plants Andrea Rivera

Botany: (first circle)

Need for lesson – A basket or tray containing items we get from plants (medicine, clothes, food, paper, etc.) and Parts of a Plant Matching and/or Booklet.

Botany 1
Boys and girls, we are going to learning about plants. We call that a Botany Lesson. In our classroom we have a Botany shelf, so things found on that shelf will always have work that has something to do with plants. There are scientists who try to find out all about plants – they are called Botanists.
Plants do a lot for us. Let’s think about all the ways we need plants. Plants give us most of the food we eat. Fruits, vegetables, even things like bread are from plants, bread is made from wheat plants. Something else we get from plants is wood.
Wood is from trees. Most of our clothes are made from cotton plants. So plants are very important to us.
We will be talking more about things we get from plants on another day, especially the cotton plant, but for today, we want to think about the basic parts of a plant. Let’s look at the parts of a plant and then we will learn about how a plant starts to grow in our next Botany lesson.

Parts of a Plant Three-part Matching Cards (MontessoriPrintShop.com)

Parts of a Plant Booklet (MontessoriPrintShop.com)

Science: (second circle)

Need for lesson – Fetus Three-part Matching work (source unknown) and pictures of the children as babies. Read the book, What’s Inside? by Jean Ashbe

Science 3
Before you were born, you were growing inside of your mother. You were safe and warm inside her in a special place right beneath her stomach called a uterus. You started out smaller than a dot (show marker dot on piece of paper – very important visual to illustrate the size). You began to grow and grow inside your mother until you were big enough to be born. It takes about 9 months for a baby to ready to be born. That is when the calendar changes (show calendar) nine times! Everyone is born into a family. Families can have a mother and a father. Some families only have a mother. We have an immediate family, your parents and siblings or brothers and sisters would make up your immediate family. Then we also have an extended family. This would be your aunts, uncles, grandparents, and cousins. No matter what kind of family we have we start out the same way.
Demonstrate Fetus Three-part Matching work.
Now let’s look at our baby pictures. Do we look the same or different? What changes do you notice? You are all so special. There is no one else that looks exactly like you in the whole world! Isn’t that amazing to think about how special every person is? We like some of the same things, but we also do not like some of the same things. That’s okay because that is also what makes us different, our likes and dislikes. We are going to look in a mirror and draw how you look today.
Demonstrate self portrait work (found under Art). Hang portraits along with baby photos . Children will enjoy seeing each other’s baby photos.

My husband made a set of this work, with instructions to make your own set of the Fetus Work. It will be available very soon on this site. This photo shows the pages that will make up the little booklet. I took the photo before I made it into the little book. Children can then make their own booklets.

Additional Work:

Family Card Set
All About Me Booklets – Children can draw pictures in the booklet about themselves and their family.

Family Card Set (These can be used for a discussion on families.)

Practical Life:

Mirror Polishing/Cleaning – Provide one large mirror or a few different smaller ones for children to polish using a q-tip and cloth.

Art:

Self Portraits

Set up art table with mirror, colored pencils (include a set of those skin tone pencils) and white paper. Children look at themselves and make self portraits of how they look today. Hang up portraits and also put the baby photo next to them. I like to put a colored piece of construction paper behind the portraits that bring out the colors each child used. It just adds that little touch that makes it look beautiful, which the Montessori environment should always be!

Family Tree – Children can color pictures and glue them onto a tree of the people in their family. The family pictures to color can be found on various preschool websites.

My Favorite Things Banner – Make banner shapes and title them “My Favorite…” Have the children choose their favorite color, food, animal, and work they do at school. Write down each child’s answer and hang them up in classroom.

A teacher I worked with in Albuquerque had this idea. I do not have a picture of the particular ones she made. These are just a mock sample idea. Hers were really nice. Be creative with your kind of banners. Use them to talk about how sometimes we like the same things and sometimes we do not.