2022 Newsletter Term 04 | Issue 04

— Corinne, Nina & Rachel.

During the term Burbangana has learned about a variety of celebrations from many cultures within our community. In our class, each child’s birthday is celebrated with a special ceremony. The birthday celebration, commonly held in many Montessori schools, affirms the child’s place in space, time and cosmic reality. Everyone wants to be remembered and cherished on the special day that they were born. The Montessori Celebration of Life is a lovely way to celebrate a child’s birthday in a school setting. The birthday child stands beside the label that has their birth month on it. The parent or teacher lights the candle to signify the moment the child was born. They then begin reading the life story up until the age of one. At which point, the birthday child begins the journey walking (slowly) around the sun 1 time, with the globe in their hands – stopping when they reach their birth month again.

— Helen, Teresa & Claire

As we head towards our summer holidays children have continued to be helpful, kind and caring towards each other, their environment and the creatures we share it with.  Throughout the year we reinforce these traits by giving children opportunities and acknowledging when these traits are displayed.  We want the child to know they have a kind heart and helpful hands and to feel a sense of pride with no other reward than a personal sense of satisfaction in their achievements.

Wishing you and your kind-hearted, helpful and caring children a beautiful time together. For those leaving us I wish you adventures, challenges, fun and laughter.  Everyone else I’ll see you next year, have a lovely time together!  Take care of each other.

– Dawn

— Elizabeth & Fiona

For our final newsletter for the term and the year, we would like to thank all the students, parents, grandparents, friends, volunteers, fellow Montessori directors and assistants for such a fulfilling year. As we reflect, we couldn’t be more grateful for what we have achieved collectively as a community, continuously striving to create an environment for the children to discover their learning journeys through the Montessori approach to education.

Initiatives such as the Ride2School group, Chess Club, Afterschool Band, The Primary Campus Open Day, The Poetry Evening, our Parent Montessori Education Nights, various incursions, excursions, tree planting workshops, guided bushwalks, big work exhibitions, mothers, fathers & grandparent days, the athletics carnival plus events I’m sure we have forgotten to mention, have all played a massive part in supporting our little Aikya community.

This year, the Ride2school initiative has succeeded with a peloton of up to 13 and rides weekly. For those that would like to join, the group rides Fridays and meets at the Manly SLSC at 8:15 am with other collection points from different directions towards Manly.

Recently, we welcomed the community grandparents and other special friends into the classroom. As always, it’s a joy to see the children proud to share their learning environment for a morning with those they love. Thank you to all that were able to make the event.

Also, we would like to congratulate the graduating children of Farmhouse Montessori Primary. We at Aikya look forward to celebrating your journey at the graduation ceremony and contributing our work to the School Art Exhibition that evening.

Merry Christmas and Happy Holidays to all from Aikya!

— Toby, Harshitha and Sarah

It has been an interesting and engaging week for Yani students. From dissecting cow eyes to architectural design to going out and purchasing books with the funds raised – it has been a productive few weeks.

The students of Yani have been learning about scale and proportions for maths using ratios and fractions to find equivalence in proportion. The students then used this knowledge in the context of architectural floor plans using scale rulers and yellow trace for space planning. We look forward to seeing the final designs.

In other news our Bake Sale Boys ventured out to several stores to purchase the new books for our library. In preparation for this the students collected favourite book data from the class and used this information to contact several stores to attain stock lists. This was handy when it came to filling our trolley with books. A big thank you to the boys involved as the class are loving the new reads!

Some students have been working hard on the studies of Australian native plants, focusing on one in particular plant called Kangaroo Grass. Students learnt how Aboriginal and Torres Strait islander people used this plant to make damper. So of course we had to give it a go! Students were successful in their cooking and created 3 different types of dampers.

The older students of our class continued on their unit of work – the senses of animals and took part in dissecting a cow eye! Students were excited to dissect and see the different parts of the eye close up.

— Thomas, Nick, Amy & Ella Lee

This term we have spent some time learning about space ( l’espace ). We studied the 8 planets closely , their order from the sun and size. We also looked at some French videos of the International space station ISS with the French astronaut Thomas Pesquet.

North Head Campus

We’ve had a great term of in class music and are looking forward to wrapping up the year with a little performance at the picnic day next Thursday afternoon

Mixed Ensemble in 2023: For those returning or interested in joining the Tuesday afternoon mixed ensemble, please complete the following google form:

https://forms.gle/3whU7y7C7bPfjNFL6

North Balgowlah Campus

We’ve had a ball this term covering percussion beats and the drums, and our extended day/Kindy students even wrote their own song! We’re wrapping up the term with a little mini concert and all in singing session this week and next week.

From all of the team at Evergreen we wish you a safe and happy festive season and look forward to being back for more music in 2023.

— Ben, Deb, James & Angie.