Montessori Curriculum – Cultural & Language

Book choices for today:

North America   Allan Fowler
North America   Katie Bagley
The Scarecrow’s Hat   Ken Brown
The Little Scarecrow Boy   Margaret Brown
Scarecrow  Cynthia Rylant

Geography: (first circle)

Need for lesson – North America Continent Map (Montessori Materials), passports (each child should have a pretend passport that stays at school for the remainder of the year), a real passport, and items from North America-set up on a table or tray, continent or other globe.

If you are from Asia or any other continent, I would start your continent lessons with that one. It is okay to switch them up and introduce them as you would like to the children, or even as you gather materials for each one, they could be introduced that way as well. The important thing is to begin with your own continent.

Geography 7

Let’s look at our globe. We live here in North America. This is the flat map of North America. When we look at it, we see different parts to this map. Every continent has special parts called countries. North America has some large countries. This is the country called United States, where we live. This country is Canada (continue with some other countries). This month we are going to visit some of these countries in North America. We can’t really go to all of them, so how can we visit them? We will be visiting them through books, music, art, food, and also by having some items or objects in our classroom from different countries. Now if we were really going to go to, let’s say, the country of Canada, we would need what is called a passport. This is a real one (hold up real passport). When you visit another country, even the ones far away on the continent of Africa, you take your passport with you and it will get a special stamp from that country.

We all have a pretend passport in our classroom that we will need to get stamped when we visit other continents. Every time the calendar changes, we will learn about a different continent and some of the countries that are in them. This month is North America. Our continent table has items that you can look at from North America. Remember to stamp your passports whenever you see the table change to another continent. Let me show you how to do that.

Songs/Poems:

Read a Book (tune- Row Your Boat)
Read, read, read a book, travel anywhere.
Worldwide, you decide, a book will take you there.
Read, read, read a book beginning to the end.
What a way to spend the day, a books a special friend.

Botany: (second circle)

Need for lesson – The book, The Scarecrow’s Hat and work to go with it. (reminder – fiction and non-fiction books need to be explained)

Botany 7

Boys and girls it is now the season of Fall. This time of the year is often the last part of the harvest season. Farmers and others who have a garden will be picking the last of their crop. The weather is getting cooler and most foods will not grow as good as they do in the Spring and Summer. So the growing time is ending and the harvest time is finishing. It is especially time for pumpkins, apples, and corn to be harvested. Let’s think about a large garden that a farmer may have. There is something we may see inside the garden besides the food growing. Can you think what that might be? Scarecrows! What do scarecrows do?

Scarecrows are used by farmers or gardeners who want to try and keep birds away from the food they are growing. Crows and blackbirds like to get into the gardens and eat some of the vegetables that are growing. So a long time ago, farmers made these human-like objects using sticks, hay, and old clothing. They wanted to make them look like real people to the birds so they would stay away from the vegetables. Do you think they work? Scarecrows are still used today by some farmers, but most of the time people like to use scarecrows for decoration during the season of Autumn.

Book on the Shelf: The Scarecrow’s Hat – The pictures are from mymontessorijourney.com. I gathered the objects to go with each character in the story. The glasses for owl are from a craft store in the area where they have things for doll making. This ‘Book on the Shelf’ will be a work choice after reading the story.

Additional Works:

Scarecrows – I found this great scarecrow idea from kidssoup.com. Children look at the pictures and try to make the same scarecrows. They can also come up with their own ideas. I like to put a mini-easel on the tray for the scarecrow they are trying to copy.

Fall Sequence Card – I found these through the Scholastic Book Club.

Harvest Shapes – Provide each child with shape cutouts from the story. As you read the story, children find that shape read about, and glue them onto a paper. You could also have them glue shapes after you read the book, and try to recall the sequence of the shapes from the story.

Practical Life:

Corn Kernels – Children use tweezers or tongs to  remove corn kernels from cobs. Use later for art or other projects.

Art:

Scarecrows – Children can make scarecrows. Have an outline of a scarecrow body, small pieces of cut straw material, markers, and glue. Children can decorate their scarecrows and glue some of straw at the hands and feet of their scarecrow. These scarecrow patterns from kidssoup.com

Corn – Children can dot paint corn kernels onto a corn cob.

Songs/Poems:

Scarecrow (tune – Teddy Bear)
Scarecrow, scarecrow turn around
Scarecrow , scarecrow touch the ground
Scarecrow, scarecrow stretch up high
Scarecrow, scarecrow blink your eyes
Scarecrow, scarecrow tap your feet
Scarecrow, scarecrow flap like a sheet
Scarecrow, scarecrow bend so low
Scarecrow, scarecrow touch your toe
Scarecrow, scarecrow nod your head
Scarecrow, scarecrow go to bed

The Scarecrow
The old scarecrow is such a funny man,
He flops in the wind as hard as he can.
He flops to the right,
He flops to the left,
He flops back and forth
‘Til he’s almost out of breath.
His arms swing out; his legs swing too.
He nods his head, “How do you do?”
See him flip-pity flop when the wind blows hard,
The funny scarecrow in our backyard.

Five Tall Scarecrows (Erin Lassiter)
The children take turns using the scarecrows to act out the poem – with the children saying the part of the scarecrow number they have.

Five tall scarecrows standing in a field,
The first one said, “I think I see a crow.”
The second one said, “The corn won’t grow.”
The third one said, “Let’s scare the crow away.”
The fourth one said, “We cannot let it stay.”
The fifth one said, “Let’s flap our arms and legs.”
So they flapped their straw-filled bodies all around,
And the crow flew away when he heard that sound.