Thanksgiving 2010

McKenna and Tracie stopping for a picture during the 6th grade shopping trip to purchase Thanksgiving food for families in need.

This Thanksgiving season at CMA has been marked by the children’s generosity and enthusiasm for giving back to their community.

The pre-primary sponsored a food drive and collected over 173 pounds of canned goods and non-perishable items for families in our community. The Mt. Healthy Food Alliance, which served 376 families in this area in October, gratefully accepted the children’s gift on Friday of last week.

The Upper Elementary raised over $400.00 with a successful breakfast event last week. The Upper Elementary students and their families provided baked morning treats. Coffee was provided by the Blue Ash Starbucks and was served up by barista, Melody Cassada. These funds more than covered the expense of providing two very full and bountiful boxes of thanksgiving goods and fixings. The sixth graders accompanied their teachers to the North College Hill Kroger where they shopped for the best prices and nest produce to maximize the donations given at the breakfast event.

Our entire CMA community rallied around these events and supported our kids in making a difference in the world. Thanks to each of you for making our kids successful in giving back to their community.

Most of all, thanks to each of you for sharing yourselves and your children with us every day. Your children are the most precious of gifts and we count ourselves as blessed that they have entered our lives. Thanks to all of you who in small ways and large help in making CMA the wonderful school and community that it is.

An Integrated Curriculum

Classrooms at CMA are organized into several curriculum areas, which include language arts mathematics and geometry, practical life, sensorial development, geography, history, science, art, music, and movement. Each area is made up of one or more shelves with a wide variety of materials on display and ready for use. CMA’s curriculum is organized into a spiral of integrated studies, rather than a traditional model in which the curriculum is compartmentalized into separate subjects. Our course of study uses an integrated thematic approach that ties the separate disciplines of the curriculum together into studies of the physical universe, the world of nature, and the human experience. This integrated approach is one of Montessori’s great strengths. For instance, in the photo of the snack table above, you may notice that choosing snack at CMA offers an experience that contains nutrition education, development of independence and sequencing skills, social skills practice, one-to one correspondence, and recognizing one’s name in print. As a further example, please follow this link to see a video book about the life cycle of a rock created by one of our students. She even took it a step further and produced this video book in Spanish. This work allows her to further develop he scientific knowledge, story writing and telling, and Spanish skills. The bonus is that through her produced wok we can assess these areas and determine her next steps in learning.