Baby's First Research Paper

It's been fun to see Willow progress as a kindergartner into a desire for more academic works. I also remember that last year, she focused intensely on academic work in the fall semester at school, but seemed to switch her primary intensity to motor skills later in the spring semester--I look forward to seeing if that pattern holds true this year, as well.

Montessori loves math, of course, and so does Willow, and nearly every day she brings home some examples of bank work, or calendar work, or number stamping work, or work using the number beads, like this one:
To do this work at school, she's had in front of her the actual beads from the bead cabinet, and you can see that she's colored them with the appropriate corresponding color, because each number unit through nine has its own color, and the tens are gold. Then she counted (although later she'll have this memorized) the beads and wrote their total in the box next to them. The addition problems are to help her figure out on her own the pattern that the teens make, and how they're constructed.

My favorite of Will's more recent work, however, is the research project. One shelf in the classroom has fact sheets on various subjects, which the children use to extrapolate the following kind of project:

Willow has chosen one fact to copy--"White-lined bats live in North America," in case you can't read kindergartner--and she's drawn a picture of the white-lined bats (Can you see the moon in her picture? Okay, but can you see the bats?). And up in the corner she's pasted a small map of the world, upon which she's colored in the exact location where white-lined bats live.

Okay, fine, here's the trick--Willow says that the bats are hiding, so she drew them in pencil and THEN colored their environment in on top of them. They are apparently a well camouflaged species.