Upper Elementary Montessori Work Options Week 1

These are some suggestions of work you might want to work on while you are at home. Feel free to complete other works; these ideas are just meant as jumping off points for you to begin this journey at home. We will be sending you some additional ideas every week over the coming weeks.

Creative Arts/Construction ▪ Knit (or finger-knit), crochet, weave rope, sew, embroider, tie-dye, beadwork, paint, sculpt (go to the clay wall at Seahurst for some clay!). ▪ Learn a new song to teach the class when we come back to school. Bring a copy of the words when you teach it to us. ▪ Build a fort in your house or yard. Make a fort or create an amusement park for the slugs or snails in your yard. Draw and label a sketch of what you created. ▪ Make a flipbook that shows some action – a ball rolling down a hill, a flower growing, someone throwing a ball etc.

Reading/Writing/Language ▪ Plan out a story using the story arch (see Google Drive) and write it into a short story, comic or skit. See story ideas if you need inspiration. ▪ Form a book group with your family or virtually with your friends. Read/listen to the same works and discuss. ▪ Read and write poetry. Memorize your favorite poems and have a poetry evening with your family – reading or reciting. ▪ Write down a conversation between two objects at your house and what they might say to each other about their experiences. What does your lamp say to the lightswitch? What kind of conversation does a stuffed animal have with the moon? What might a sock say to a mitten? Practice using quotation marks for dialogue. ▪ Choose a story to read aloud on your own and then virtually with a friend. Try giving each character a different voice when you read. Try to use your voice to make the story more interesting to your audience. ▪ Play word related board games such as Scrabble, UpWords, Boggle, or Word Thief. ▪ Write letters to your friends. Tell them about a small moment in your day that was fun!

Math/Numbers/Geometry ▪ Learn more about money. Count money that you have, find out about the people depicted on the notes and coins. Find out about money from other countries. ▪ Practice skip counting while jumping rope or playing hopscotch. ▪ Make your own “store” of items around the house, price them and add them together. ▪ Practice division by dividing things equally between you and your family members, place the remainders aside (beans, candy, beads, etc.!). ▪ Look for advertisements and coupons in the mail, create a shopping list and add prices together. ▪ Measure your height, find out your shoe size. Compare these figures with those in your family. Form this into a chart or graph. Compare it with friends. ▪ Play good “thinking” games such as Chess and Go. Learn how to notate Chess games. Play chess by mail with your friends (that’s where you mail your moves back and forth on postcards or in letters). Nature/Plants/Animals ▪ Head into the woods and try to find or identify as many types of fungus as you can (turkey tail, shelf, blue, etc.). ▪ Learn the names of local evergreens or find ten trees that live near your house. Draw or write descriptions of their bark, leaves and cones. ▪ Make a botany map of your backyard or a nearby natural space (parking strip, median, park, etc.). Place each plant in its place on the map and label each plant with its common name and scientific name. (You might need some help from a library book or a knowledgeable adult gardener). ▪ Dissect fruit, seeds or flowers. Draw and label their parts. Try many different kinds. ▪ Spend 15 minutes a day silently in nature and record your observations in writing and sketching. ▪ Make a diorama inside a shoebox or larger cardboard box using materials you find in your home. Consider a scene from the Timeline of Life or an ecosystem that you know about.

Science ▪ Chart the phases of the moon and observe it through binoculars or a telescope. ▪ Research facts about the planets in our solar system. See if you can find the difference between stars and planets in the night sky. Make models of the planets or moon. ▪ Study the types of clouds. Make models of them with cotton balls, roving or pillow filling. Take pictures of them, draw them and label the different types. ▪ Track how much daytime there is in our days versus nighttime. Begin a graph of the daylight and nighttime hours. Mark the time of sunrise and sunset and track how this changes over the course of a month. ▪ Research high and low tides and observe how the same place changes between the two.

History/Geography ▪ Learn your address and important phone numbers by heart. ▪ Plan a future trip around town or around your neighborhood by making a map and writing down the directions. Trace the route from your home to school and learn it as if you were walking. ▪ Pick a continent you’d like to know more about. Using an atlas or map, make flash cards of all the countries in that continent. On one side of the card have the country’s name; on the other side, the country’s capital city. Memorize all the countries and capitals in that continent, then do the same for another continent. ▪ Interview a family member in your house or over the phone and write about or make a timeline of their life. ▪ Learn about people with different abilities, learn proper terminology and gain a new perspective. Find out about the lives of famous people living with disabilities such as Helen Keller, Daniel Radcliffe, Steven Hawking, Ludwig van Beethoven and others. Sports/Exercise ▪ Learn how to juggle and practice with one ball, 2 balls, and then 3. ▪ Outdoor time: spend as much time outdoors as possible. Set a goal to do something outside everyday. ▪ Graph Water Intake: Work on developing the habit of drinking enough water each. To find the minimum amount of water your body needs to avoid dehydration, use the following formula: (your body weight in pounds ​ ÷ 10) x 2 = minimum ounces of water you need each day. You’ll need to ​ ​ drink more than that if you are exercising in the heat. Graph a couple weeks. ▪ Monitor your heart rate as you try different activities. You can also graph ​ your heart rate and see how it changes at the beginning, middle and end of an activity, over a few days or weeks. ▪ Hiking: Go on a hike at a nearby park like Seahurst or Lincoln Park. You can ​ also check out the Washington Trails Association for ideas or look through a ​ ​ guide book. Hiking Washington’s Geology is a good one. ​ ​ Service/Activism ▪ Read about an issue in society that you feel strongly about. Learn how young people can be involved in social change. Visit https://freechild.org ​ for information. ▪ Write a thank you letter to people in the community who are working and there for others, such as healthcare workers, garbage collectors, postal workers, etc. ▪ See if you can go an entire day without making any garbage.

Household Service ▪ Help out more with the household tasks. Learn to do some new things such as washing clothes, ironing, folding laundry, polishing furniture, vacuuming, mowing the lawn (if your parents agree). Find out one or two that you can start to do independently. ▪ Learn about foods from another culture and try to cook them. ▪ Be responsible for one or two meals per week. Plan the menu with your parent(s). Make a shopping list. Do the shopping. Cook the meal with your parent(s). Try not to use a microwave oven when you cook!