Parent volunteers hand out oranges.

Our wonderful parent volunteers handed out oranges* on a cold Monday morning to help promote our exciting spring event — Success in the Conceptual Age: An Evening with Dan Pink. Dan is the best-selling author of A Whole New Mind and an engaging speaker and he will be at our spring event to discuss the future of education. Dan will talk about how a Montessori education is one of the best ways to prepare our children for their future and not our past. The night will be filled with enlightening discussions, a delicious dinner and cocktails, and dancing to a live band! You don’t want to miss this incredible evening, so be sure to SAVE-THE-DATE: 5.12.12! Visit our MIX Pages to learn more about this amazing evening!

*Why oranges? The cover of Dan’s book is a lovely orange color and everyone could use a little extra vitamin C!

Save-the-date 5.12.12!

Orange you glad I didn't say banana?

Even the little ones got into the handing out oranges.

SummerScape is now online! Join your friends for a whole lot of fun and learning. We always work hard to bring you new and exciting camps as well as maintaining some perennial favorites. As always, MSR strives to make SummerScape a continuation of the Montessori experience by providing a creative, safe and fun learning environment. Camps run for 7 weeks during the summer, except for the week of the Fourth of July. Visit our SummerScape page to learn more or visit the MSR Store to sign up today! If you have any questions please feel free to contact me anytime. Come join us at SummerScape — bring on the fun, baby!

Community Service starts at a very early age.

A Lower Elementary student turns can collection into a math lesson on unit conversion by converting ounces into pounds to see if his classroom has hit its goal of a certain number of pounds. Children’s House students and even Toddlers help collect and sort items for the Food Drive. A group of Upper Elementary students hone their presentation skills by giving persuasive speeches to other classrooms and administration to get them to participate in the food drive. Some students use design software to create flyers to promote donations. Another group of students learn about how hunger affects so many people around the globe and how their efforts can make a big difference locally.

Upper Elementary students hard at work collecting, sorting and counting.

If you are interested in making a donation to the food drive, you can send items in to your child’s classroom or drop it off in the Watson Center. Donations will be accepted through Friday, December 9. We need nonperishable items such as canned fruit or vegetables, rice, peanut butter, baby food or formula, cereal, etc. Please no candy, soda, eggs, bread, or glass containers.

As of last count, they had 1074 lbs. with a goal of 2,000! In the end, no matter how many pounds of food are collected, the children will walk away with a sense of pride and accomplishment for a collaborative project completed and a wonderful lesson learned.

The Bean Counter!

UPDATE: The Food Drive finished the week with some impressive numbers. Today’s donations came in at close to 1,000lbs. Students, faculty and administration helped load two buses with all the donations to be delivered to the Food Bank. Once there, they unloaded the items onto pallets that forklifts took to be weighed. When the gentleman working at the Food Bank called out the official total from the scale — the students cheered with excitement! The grand total was over 2,500lbs! They were very proud to have surpassed their goal of 2,000. Many thanks to all of those that helped to make this Food Drive a great success. Our community really understands the importance of giving back and that is truly Montessori!

Loading the buses.

Working at the Food Bank loading dock.

MSR weighs in at the Food Bank!

The Outer Banks group

We went on a tour of the Army Corps of Engineers Research Facility on Duck Island to see some of their equipment. Our tour guide, Bill Berkemeier, gave us anemometers to measure the wind speed. First, we tried it by the lab and since that did not work that well, we went out onto their pier. We all measured wind speeds of up to 15 miles an hour out there. He also talked about some of the research they do including measuring waves, temperatures and the depth of the ocean. The Coastal Research Amphibious Buggy, CRAB for short, is a three legged, very tall car-like vehicle with a VW buggy engine. They drive it into the ocean to get measurements and put instruments on the ocean floor. The wheels were almost as tall as I was. The research facility has ten people who work with over 100 computers. We learned a lot and had fun!
by CJ

Experiments in Flight

We had an amazing time at the Wright Brothers Memorial. The memorial itself is a huge rock with the Wright Brothers names. There are also buildings with information everywhere about Orville and Wilbur. They were born in Dayton, Ohio, and owned a bike shop. Tinkering with mechanical toys and contraptions was a passion of theirs. They constructed their own wind tunnel to help in their search for a machine that flew. In my opinion, the best part was when we got a presentation from a Park Ranger about the lift and yawl.
by Wyatt

Jockey’s Ridge State Park consists of gigantic preserved sand dunes. On Tuesday and Wednesday, we went and flew gliders that we had made of popsicle sticks, fabric, and paper. On Tuesday, we launched our first gliders down one of the dunes. Most of the gliders proved unsuccessful with about 100 feet as our longest distance. A student requested that we come back on Wednesday with redesigned gliders since we now know what doesn’t work. The second round of glider attempts was much better, although Rose did make us differentiate between a glider and a frisbee! We also hiked a nature trail and found animal tracks of snakes, dogs, foes, and the six lined racerunner! The unscientific things we did included doing some tricks on the hills, building sand sculptures, enjoying great views of the ocean and the sound, and spelling “MSR” on the dunes. We got a lot of sand in our shoes, but it was worth it.
by Luke V. & Sarah

Impressions in the sand

Today we visited the NC Aquarium. Upon arriving, we stopped briefly at the fossil pit where we reviewed a few fossil facts from our studies. Once we finished there, we entered the building and began our circuit of the exhibits. The first two displayed marsh and freshwater animals, like snakes and alligators, and were followed by an interactive exhibit on the process of sea turtle rehabilitation. The other half of the museum was composed of some large, saltwater fish and sea trout, gar, moray eels along with snapping turtles and box turtles. We saw a diver in the shark tank and he showed us the shark teeth he was finding in the sand. Concluding our visit was a room entirely devoted to a NOAA sponsored multimedia presentation on global weather patterns.
by Lilah, Alex & Alex

Gala Auction Item: Bone Detectives
Visit the NC State University Forensic Analysis Lab, named one of the most awesome college labs by Popular Science Magazine, for two hours of fun activities! Students will learn about the science of bones and engage in the identification of different animal species through hands-on exercises with x-rays, puzzles and bones.

Dr. Ann Ross answer questions from MSR students.

Dr. Ross and some of her graduate students gave a general presentation about the human skeleton and led the kids through several exercises. In one exercise they learned to tell the differences between human and animal skeletons and bones, and in another they practiced telling the gender of a human skeleton based on certain signs.

Looks like someone found their "funny bone!"

While the students got their first taste of a lab class at a college, they also had a fun relay race to assemble two skeletons, competing in two teams along the Anthropology lab corridor. The children and parents got a tour of the Forensic Analysis Lab, a state-of-the-art functioning forensic laboratory. The tour included a look into the secure Forensics lab where they were able to see a graduate student’s thesis project determining the cause of death for women and children who lived in NC before European arrivals.

For more information on the amazing things that Dr. Ross and the rest of the folks at the NC State University Forensic Analysis Lab are doing, check out the departments’ website: http://anthropology.chass.ncsu.edu/forensics/

An NC State grad student leads some MSR students through an exercise.