Contents:
Yearbooks
Red Balloon Field Trip
Girls on the Run
FAST and HMH testing continue
Montessori Materials: How do we teach reading?
Year Books!
Want a J.J. Hill Year Book? Click here to Order Now!
Field Trip to Red Balloon Bookstore!
Many of our E1 classrooms have been taking 1st - 3rd graders on a walking field trip to Red Balloon for many years now. We will be taking a walking field in February as a class. More information coming soon.
Girls on the Run

Girls on the Run is planning for a Spring 2025 season! Girls on the Run is an afterschool program that uses the power of running to prepare 3rd - 5th grade girls for a lifetime of self-respect and healthy living. Over the course of the 10-week, 20-lesson season, girls learn life-changing lessons about healthy friendships, teamwork, decision-making, self-respect and more, all while preparing to run a 5k. Open to all 3rd - 5th grade girls and non-binary/gender expansive youth; no previous running experience required, and generous financial aid is available. Registration will open on February 1st and stay open through February 7th. Applications done during that week will be a part of the lottery that will run on February 8th. Our JJ Hill team will be capped at 20 participants. Register at www.gotrmn.org. Our season will be each Tuesday & Thursday 2:00 - 3:45 p.m. from April 7th- May 29th, culminating with the Girls on the Run 5K the weekend of May 31/June 1. We are looking for a couple more parent coaches to join us! If interested, contact Jenelle at Jenelle.Hill@spps.org for more information.
FAST and HMH testing continue
We plan to wrap up our FAST (reading) and HMH (math) assessments by the end of this week. At spps we do these assessments every fall, winter, and spring. If have any questions, please reach out.
Montessori Materials: How do we teach reading the Montessori classroom?
This is a huge question ! Montessori Materials will be a monthly section of the Newsletter that will focus on a materials and how it is used in the Montessori classroom at J.J. Hill.
The material pictured below is a systematic and fun material developed by a company called Waseca. Most of our Children's House (3-5 year olds) and our E1 classrooms (age 6-9) classrooms use this material. For the student not writing yet, they can sound out and spell the word using the Moveable Alphabet pictured below.

Once the child is reading and writing a little bit, the child can match the cards:

Whether teachers call the material "Waseca Drawers" or "Rainbow Drawers" it's an excellent material! Feel free to read more here: https://wasecabiomes.org/products/waseca-reading-program
A final practice step is for the child to write the words repeatedly or apply the spelling / phonics pattern in writing. In Maria Montessori's time, all the original materials were often in cursive. It is still the case in many Montessori schools that cursive is introduced to the young child as young as age 4. At J.J. Hill most classroom materials feature print and students learn to write cursive during their journey from grade 1 to grade 3.

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