This week’s classroom showcase comes to you from Audrey Morrison of The Walden School in Pennsylvania. Audrey shared these photos with us in the Trillium {Community} Facebook group and graciously answered lots of questions! If you’re wondering about something you see on the shelves, you can find more details in this thread. (You will need to request to join the group if you are not already a member.)
Audrey has been in Montessori education for over 30 years and she has spent 25 of those years at The Walden School. She holds an Early Childhood credential from the American Montessori Society. Audrey feels that the social well being of the children and the nature of the classroom culture lead to academic success. She is a learner and is constantly on the lookout for new ways to enrich the classroom culture.
It is an honor to feature Audrey’s classroom on the Trillium Montessori blog!
The Sensorial area
This corner of the classroom houses some of the Language and Cultural shelves. Isn’t that an amazing floor calendar? So many treasures to see here!
The beautiful drawers from the Waseca Reading Program are often a focal point in Montessori classrooms!
Some of the word lists were designed using the Language Works Spelling Program.
Wondering about the color coding? This is how Waseca codes their reading program:
Red– basic three-letter phonetic words isolating each short vowel sound
Orange– blends grouped with common letters to make beginning blends, ending blends, then both.
Yellow– consonant digraphs like sh, ch, th, tch
Green– endings with –ng and –nk
Aqua– silent e rule as applied to each vowel
Blue– different phonograms used to make each long vowel sounds
Purple– various dipthongs such as r-controlled, oy, ow, aw
Pink– silent letters
Gold– less common rules such as soft consonants
The top shelf has some sound work and rest of the shelves have introductory grammar materials.
The contents of some of the sound drawers
And a peek inside the grammar boxes! Audrey hunted down the boxes at craft stores, but you can order some of the contents from Montessori Services.
It looks like they are learning about Asia these days! (By the way, those biome maps and flags are from Waseca too)
I really like how she has placed her science shelves at an angle. A trapezoid table behind the plant makes up the third side of the triangle.
This is one of her science shelves. What a great idea to use jars for the pencil collection needed for each set of puzzles!
The other science shelf has the Botany materials at the top. It looks like they are learning about space and astronomy these days!
Here are the beginning Math shelves
And plenty of advanced math materials too!
Related Products
Click the images for details. (Affiliate links may be included in this post. See full disclosures here.)
