Decoupage So Easy, Even a Three-Year-Old Can Do It

Getting into a Montessori classroom is no easy feat. The Montessori classroom is the child's well-ordered, busy workspace, not the parent's, and while parents are free to observe their child's class at any time through a large two-way mirror, they are not welcome inside the classroom without an invitation.

Therefore, when I casually let it drop that I have spent not one, not two, but THREE entire afternoons in the girls' class, all the other Montessori parents look at me with shock and admiration and they say, "How? How did you manage that?"

It's all about the skillz, my friends. In my case, my skillz at gluing stuff to other stuff, as I spent an EXTREMELY busy three afternoons teaching 30 children, ages three to six, the fine art of decoupage.

The result? Awesomeness: In several previous class sessions, the children had the opportunity to do a pattern-making work using the metal insets. They drew on tracing paper with colored pencils, and could decorate their pattern however they liked. Later, one of the teachers cut around each pattern and set them aside for me.

Montessori lessons are basically taught one-on-one or one-on-thirty, so that children tend to either do things as a class, such as Spanish or music or community meetings, or with the sole attention of the teacher or a classmate. We set up my decoupage station as a work that children could choose one time, so that I stayed with the decoupage and when a child wanted to choose that work, she would go put on her smock and get in line. This was a little tiring for me, since I basically repeated the same three actions with 30 children in a row, but I still think it was the best way to give them the optimum process-oriented experience and still come away with a beautiful product to be auctioned off in a school fundraiser later this month.

Here Willow demonstrates the basic preschool decoupage technique:
On a table, I laid out every single decorated pattern that we had to work with. When it was a child's turn, I asked her to choose any pattern that she wanted. When she had one, I then asked her to choose any spot on the entire box to put her pattern, as long as it did not cover up another child's name (more on that later). Overlapping another pattern was fine:
When the child had a spot chosen, I handed her a sponge brush and let her dip it into a dish filled with Mod Podge. Then, I instructed her to paint the spot where she wanted to put her pattern all over with glue. After that, she laid down her pattern and I helped her smooth it out (not making a big deal about creases or bubbles--these are preschoolers here, and it was important to me that the project, while nice, authentically look like it had been created by preschoolers), and then I had her dip her brush back into the Mod Podge and paint over her pattern again. Decoupage is nice because you don't have to be neat or precise with the glue--as long as I kept drips and bubbles at bay, each overlapping layer of Mod Podge served only to strengthen the whole. In between kids during the three days, I painted the entire surface of the box several times with Mod Podge again, for a nice, durable surface.

Although I reserved the top of the box entirely for the decorated patterns, each child had also written her name on tracing paper, and a teacher had cut all of them out, so after each child had decoupaged her chosen pattern, I helped her find her name among all the other names, and then instructed her to find a spot on the sides of the box, not overlapping another child's name, to decoupage her own signature:You can see Sydney's signature just to the right of the big pattern in the middle there below:
And there's Willow's near the top on one side:This turned out to be a really excellent project to do with a large group of small children. Decoupage is simple enough, and forgiving enough, to really be done by a small child without being over-directed by an adult, and yet the result is quite sturdy and really pleasing.

AND it'll get you inside that Montessori Dutch door.

Baby's First Research Paper

It's been fun to see Willow progress as a kindergartner into a desire for more academic works. I also remember that last year, she focused intensely on academic work in the fall semester at school, but seemed to switch her primary intensity to motor skills later in the spring semester--I look forward to seeing if that pattern holds true this year, as well.

Montessori loves math, of course, and so does Willow, and nearly every day she brings home some examples of bank work, or calendar work, or number stamping work, or work using the number beads, like this one:
To do this work at school, she's had in front of her the actual beads from the bead cabinet, and you can see that she's colored them with the appropriate corresponding color, because each number unit through nine has its own color, and the tens are gold. Then she counted (although later she'll have this memorized) the beads and wrote their total in the box next to them. The addition problems are to help her figure out on her own the pattern that the teens make, and how they're constructed.

My favorite of Will's more recent work, however, is the research project. One shelf in the classroom has fact sheets on various subjects, which the children use to extrapolate the following kind of project:

Willow has chosen one fact to copy--"White-lined bats live in North America," in case you can't read kindergartner--and she's drawn a picture of the white-lined bats (Can you see the moon in her picture? Okay, but can you see the bats?). And up in the corner she's pasted a small map of the world, upon which she's colored in the exact location where white-lined bats live.

Okay, fine, here's the trick--Willow says that the bats are hiding, so she drew them in pencil and THEN colored their environment in on top of them. They are apparently a well camouflaged species.

When Cursive Handwriting Comes to Play

Even before I had Montessori girls, I looooooved the Montessori garage sale that the school holds every spring--in the National Guard Armory, it's so big. At a garage sale hosted by a fancy-pants private school that's at the same time so child-centric and child-led, you can expect to find loads of not just once-expensive snowsuits and excellent books and all the other stuff wealthy parents provide for their kids, but wooden toys and dress-up clothes and well-cared-for board games and puzzles and craft kits and fabulous educational materials, as well.

Last year, among some of my random (and REALLY cheap purchases--another benefit to the sale is that parents work it, and some of them have NO IDEA how to price thing) purchases were a drill-operated lathe and a complete set of large cursive sandpaper letters, mounted nicely on wood. I had figured that I would either end up crafting or decorating with these letters, or that they'd come out to play only much later in my children's lives, after, you know, they both knew their print letters, for instance.

However, Willow found this alphabet during the massive study/studio reorganization and asked that they be put as a choice on the shelves in their bedroom. I complied, and there they sat for an additional long while, but this weekend I guess the urge finally hit (don't you know that feeling?), and Willow suddenly came up with a slew of activities that she wanted to do with the letters.

Since Willow doesn't know her cursive a from her cursive z, Momma got to help, and it was quite fun.

First, Willow wanted to make a "long line," so I gave her the letters, one by one in alphabetical order, showed her how to trace it with her finger (sandpaper letters are big in Montessori, so Will has this concept down cold), had her tell me what sound(s) the letter makes, and then she put it in its place in the line:
There were a few moments of angst when it was discovered that t was missing, but at last it was found, safe and sound, in the car (?).

Then Will wanted to play "games" with the letter line, so while I sat all nice and comfy down past z, I'd tell Willow what letter I wanted her to point to, then release her to run as fast as she could down the line, point to the letter, and run as fast as she could back to me, where I'd catch her:
After a while this transitioned to me spelling out a simple word (bed, say, or cat) and sending her running to point to all the letters in order, then after she ran back to me and I'd caught her she would sound out the word she'd just spelled.

And all I had to do was sit on my butt!

Will's next big plan was to draw all the letters on a really long piece of paper. The really long piece of paper we had (of course!), but I wasn't sure if Willow had yet seen in her classroom how you could do rubbings with the sandpaper letters, so I showed her how, and it was such a big hit, waaaaaay more satisfying than leaf rubbings for little hands, that drawing all the letters was immediately abandoned and instead each letter was traced in its place on the long letter line: Each in a different color, of course:

And after that I foisted off on Matt the next project, which was to write underneath the line, in handwriting "very pretty," the verse "Now I know my ABCs; next time won't you sing with me?".

And then Matt made us popcorn and margaritas (virgin for the littles, saucy for the bigs), and we all got into bed and watched the old-school Doctor Dolittle until half of us fell asleep--Willow and I, unfortunately, which was probably not exactly the half that Matt had planned on when he made me a nice margarita, but what can you do?

Tonight perhaps we'll try an early bedtime for the littles, and THEN margaritas.

Self-Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl

I am not enjoying teaching right now, or grading papers, or dealing with the idiot student who thought it would be a good idea to steal some other idiot student's paper and pass it off as his own and now I have to fill out paperwork and meet with the Director of Composition and THEN meet with this student to give him his big fat F in my class before I can give papers back to any of my other students, and if you think those students are happy to have their grades delayed then, boy, you don't know students these days.

When do you think I'll get a nationally-mandated minimum wage for being a committed stay-at-home parent who engages my children and exposes them to enrichment opportunities and cooks them nourishing meals and constantly strives to do better by them? Cause I'd really like to stop moonlighting with these college students--they'd rather be moonlighting somewhere else as well, anyway.

In other news, my own happy kids are rockin' their own school, as usual. One of the sweeter traditions, in a classroom full of sweet rituals and traditions (don't take my word for it--the Montessori birthday ritual is gorgeous everywhere), is to have each child draw a self-portrait twice a year, just before the fall and spring parent/teacher conferences. The work table has a mirror set up in front of it, and blank paper and colored pencils, and the older children (and even the youngest ones, by the spring self-portrait), add a sort of handwriting sampler at the bottom. It's a fascinating look at how a child sees herself, and fascinating how that perception evolves over the months and the years.

I posted Willow's self-portrait at four years and ten months, and so here is her self-portrait at five years and nearly four months: Such an evolution in that kid!

Now, it's possible that Sydney didn't quite understand the purpose of the self-portrait work, since this is her first time, but frankly, I think she understood it quite well, and thus I think that her self-portrait is a pretty clear reflection of who my kid is inside:Yep, that's my kid. Her sister is introspective, socially cautious, and very concerned with understanding the social script of any situation. Sydney, however, is an extrovert who craves attention, and is extremely socially clever, particularly in regards to manipulating situations to achieve an optimum outcome. At the parent/teacher conferences Matt discovered, through shrewd questioning, that the two sub-teachers in the girls' classroom have apparently been unwittingly letting Sydney basically do nothing in the classroom except wander around and hang out. One teacher tells Sydney to hang up her coat. Sydney looks at her blankly, so the teacher demonstrates the activity, in the process hanging up her coat for her. This happens every single day. The other teacher demonstrates a new work to Sydney, and then asks if she'd like to try it. She says no. This happens every single time.

"She's very observant," noted one teacher.

"Observant, my butt. A Montessori classroom is not a cocktail party. It's an experiential education lab, and it's very expensive. Get the kid playing with something."

They promised they would.

Fancy Hair, and the Children are Singing for Peace

One of the many things that I love about Montessori is that peace is actually a subject on the curriculum. In the girls' class they talk about it a lot, and one of the kindergarten works that I'm looking forward to for Will is this thing called "Our Peaceful Classroom." I'm also, in my role as Parents' Library librarian for the school, transferring all of these conference proceedings from cassette to CD (oh, what a pain in the butt!), and it's interesting to hear all kinds of conference talks about teaching peace and modeling peace and practicing peace for all the age levels of Montessori.

Anyway, there's usually at least one big ceremony for peace during each school year. Last year, the Peace Pole was dedicated (thankfully during the morning preschool, because this ceremony has also become famous as The Hornet Attack of 2008, In Which the School's Emergency Preparedness Plan was Put to Use and Many Small Children Were Traumatized), but this year the girls will be joining their classmates and 65, 807 other children in Montessori schools across the world in a chain that will sing a single song about peace for 24 continuous hours. The song is called "Light a Candle for Peace," written by a Montessori teacher in Canada, and it's a simple, benign little ditty, as sweet as a homemade cookie. I know this because the girls have been "practicing" nonstop:

Willow's got the words down pretty well when she's not being distracted, but I think it's funny how Sydney clearly knows less than a quarter of the words, and will just sort of sing "Peace, peace!" over and over in her own little tune, or join in with the lyrics about a half-beat behind her sister. Perfect little ambassadors to the world, don't you think?


In other news, the girls requested "fancy hair," for School Picture Day, with some exacting requirements, and me, ME, me the person who has actually buzz-cut my own head for years at a time just to avoid having to fix my hair, I listened to these exacting requirements, I bought BOBBY PINS, lord help me, and then I created this unto my children:
Here's a close-up so you can witness the wonder of my bobby pin action:
I was afraid the girls would get teased at school, bless their hearts--their tastes are so wonderful and so eccentric, and I dread the day that eccentricity gets beaten out of them--but of course they didn't get teased, they got loaded up with compliments, and now I fear that every day may be Fancy Hair Day around here.

School Girls

Yesterday's big event:

Will gloried in the status of kindergartner, but I have to say that for me, at least, the major milestone was my big girl Sydney's first day of school ever. Montessori starts at three, and so yesterday Sydney officially earned the status of youngest grouper in the girls' classroom.

With Will, Matt and I were two stressed-out parents worried about how our three-year-old would react in a new environment without us, and among a peer group that included children over two years older than her and with teachers with whom our own personalities did not mesh. Will, herself, had a difficult transition and was almost expelled because she spent two-thirds of each three-hour day for that first week throwing a two-hour unholy tantrum.

With Syd, we just get to enjoy the experience. Sydney is thrilled to go to school, thrilled to get picked up and see me again, and thrilled, in general, to be on the ride that she's on. I don't know if it's the second kid or this kid that changes the experience so much for everyone, but for the most part, this kid?

It's just a joy to be in her world.

To Remember Her By

Willow's favorite teacher won't be returning to Montessori next year. In a school in which classrooms encompass three "grades", transitions out of the class are a big deal. Graduating kindergarteners will be honored in an intimate ceremony on the last day of class (Montessori is big into ceremonies, I think you might have gathered), and I think the students are also preparing a different sort of celebration to honor their departing teacher.

As part of that, we parents were given a 12"x12" piece of scrapbook paper and asked to make a page with our child to present to the teacher at the ceremony. So in between breakfast (peanut butter sandwiches and watermelon, prepared and eaten and cleaned up after completely by delighted little girls, who think that being in charge of their own breakfast is the height of grown-up luxury) and laundry and goofing around (the girls with bubbles and Dinosaur Bingo; me with Awkward Family Photos--I'm totally going to submit some from my own childhood) and lunch (me this time, maximizing the usage of the peanut butter and bread demolished in the making of breakfast) and drawing out on the back deck and bullying Willow through getting ready for school (only two more days, I told her, and then yes, you can wear your shorts without panties), the girls and I made this scrapbook page for Willow's sweet teacher:
It looks a little funky where I awkwardly stitched two separate scans together in Photoshop (whenever my scanner finally craps out--and it has lasted FOREVER--I am buying the scanner with the largest scanning bed that will fit in my house), and the color scheme scanned a little strange (Is the scanner starting to crap out, I wonder?), but it's a pretty accurate estimation overall.

The photo mats are some pieces of upholstery remnant that I had cut and sewn to be coasters, but I didn't like them and threw them in the scrap pile. The photos themselves, and Willow's name, are printed on a sheet of printable fabric--I didn't use my Bubble Jet Set because it takes some time to soak and air-dry, and I was, of course, over deadline with this page. Nifty little trick--super-saturate your print job when you print on fabric, because the fabric sucks up so much ink that otherwise your photos will come out a lot lighter than you'd intended.

Willow drew and decorated the hearts with Sharpies on brown paper bag, and then I cut them out (oh, the tragic cutting of lefties! While the girls were drawing on the brown paper, I actually drew and cut out some practice cutting pages for them--I'll show you those some other time, because they're neat-o) and hand-stitched them on with buttons and red thread. Will also put her handprint, done in brown acrylic paint, on the bottom right upholstery mat, and then I machine-stitched the upholstery mats to the scrapbook page and the fabric photo prints to the upholstery mats. Done and done.

Now for end-of-the-year gifts for all three teachers...

Self-Portrait at Four Years and Ten Months

One of the works at Will's Montessori preschool is Self-Portrait--at its own little table, the teachers have set up a mirror, large papers, and art supplies. At four years and ten months, here is Willow's self-portrait:


I've mentioned before how touched I am by how Willow sees and how she tends to make so beautiful the things that she's seen, but this is the first time, I think, that she's turned that focused sight upon herself.

I have been increasingly interested, though, in how Willow does see herself, because the heart of her latest growth stage has manifested in an hysterical shyness. It's hard to watch, both because I'm miserably shy myself and so I know how small and shameful that often makes me feel, but also because I'm so freakin' proud of my kids, and I can hardly stand it that Will's increasingly unwilling not just to show herself off, but also simply to participate.

School birthday, then, was pretty sad for me inside of my own head. You might remember that last year I cried to watch my kid participate in her class' beautiful ceremony--carrying the globe around the ellipse as many times as the Earth has circled the sun since she was born, listening with her teachers and schoolmates as her dad and I read her biography, standing in the middle of the ellipse while the rest of the class sings the "Tall Tree" song to her. Will did want, desperately, to carry the globe around the ellipse, but she just couldn't hack it. Heck, she could barely stand to even exist in this world while Matt read her biography:
(Excuse my inelegant removal of little faces that don't belong to me. I should have just painted the entire background black, perhaps?)

Thank gawd that school birthday includes a feast of healthy party food, or she probably would have insisted on skipping school altogether that day: I did, however, with no apologies, boot her into the circle with the other birthday honorees so that we could sing the "Tall Tree" song to her. That song is my favorite part of her entire birthday experience, including her real birthday and family party and party with friends, etc. (the walk around the ellipse holding the globe being my second favorite part of her entire birthday experience, OF COURSE). And if I'm going to struggle, in a mere two months, through the making of an ice cream cake with cookies on top, as the birthday child is currently demanding (is it just me, or are the birthday cake requests getting increasingly elaborate each year?), then I am going to have my favorite moment.

I figure you're allowed to tell compassionate parenting to suck it once every few months. Am I right or am I right?

Our New Bible

I am totally wiped after spending the day working on the marketing section of my book proposal (I have one more project tutorial to photograph, but the rain! The rain! It thwarts me!), but Matt was at the library with the girls this afternoon (See? THIRD time this week!)--this was after he had to rush over to Montessori because I, hunched over my computer tapping away about speaker engagements and family-friendly workshops, suddenly had the heart-rending revelation that Willow! We missed her parent/teacher conference! It was half an hour ago!...

...anyway, AFTER the parent/teacher conference (don't worry friends, we have a strategy for Music Day, and the teachers are considering changing the entire format of Speaker's Rug just to slyly trick Willow, who is the only child in the history of the program to have gone two years without speaking once, because she is my baby and she is stubborn, into feeling comfortable enough to speak. It's like Baby Toastmasters in that class), Matt took the girls to the library so I could miserably tap away some more (Writers don't actually like to write, you know. Writers only like to have written), and as he was scanning a shelf of new non-fiction titles, Will pulled a random book off of a nearby shelf and said, "Daddy, I really want you to check this out."

"Oh, yeah?" said Matt, and turned around to see:
Smart kid. They probably have a whole chapter in there about how you aren't supposed to ditch your kid's parent/teacher conferences.

Two Very Different Schools of Thought

So Matt says that he fixed my computer, but since he also said that three days ago after turning it off and back on again, and then again after rebooting the wi-fi router, and then again after running an anti-virus program, and then again after reinstalling Windows (causing me to have to reinstall all my programs), and then again after rebooting Windows to a previous installation, I'm trying to blog really, really quickly.

Which is ridiculous, since I have a LOT to say.

There was an interesting juxtaposition of activities this week--on the one hand, the spring Parents' Evening at Will's Montessori preschool, and on the other hand, a forum for parents of prospective kindergarteners at our local public elementary school.

I'll do Montessori first, because I think there are going to be some friends who are going to be unhappy with what I say about the public school, so I'll let you get your happy vibes on before that.

So you probably know by now that Montessori classrooms do not welcome parents in on a drop-in basis--the classroom is the child's space, with important work for the child to do, and parents basically just get in the way of all the happy little elf-work. But one night a semester, Will's school has a shortened session to which parents are invited.

This is the animal stamping work. You use the animal stamps to stamp the appropriate number of times under each number--this is one of the first works that the three-year-olds are taught, which is why there are boxes to show you how many goes where. Children are always welcome, however, to do any work that they've been taught whenever they want, and repetition of easier works is something that kids find comforting, and that gives them a sense of how far they've progressed, and helps them internalize certain concepts, sort of like muscle memory for the mind. Will still does this animal stamping work about once a week.
This is a work in which you scoop different objects out of the fishbowl, sort them into separate porcelain bowls, then dump them back in the bowl and sponge up the water. It's a sorting work and a motor skills work to practice the spoon grip.
One of the things that I've found really interesting this year is that in the fall semester Parents' Night, Willow was almost entirely interested in the works that practiced pretty abstract and sometimes complicated mental skills--arithmetic, literacy, a lot of handwriting practice, some geography, calendars, stuff like that. But lately she's been almost entirely interested in the motor skills works--dipping, gripping, squeezing stuff. I've actually noticed this at home, too, in that she's far less interested in thing like mazes and math worksheets and dinosaur identification and the art that she usually loves, and she's been happiest just running around and jumping and digging and messing stuff up and helping me do housework. It's a different stage of development that she's in at the moment, I guess, and I'm very pleased that her school also supports this type of development and allows her to practice satisfying works that challenge her motor skills as well as her academic skills.

In this work you use the tool to move the little balls from the bowl to the platter and then back again. It's terrific for the scissors grip, which lefties often find a lot more challenging to learn, only I've just noticed that my own little lefty is using her right hand here. Sigh.

One of my other many favorite things about the classroom environment is that there are no pictures of kittens hanging from tree limbs or motivational posters (have you seen the site where you can make your own de-motivational posters? Rawk), but there are, instead, hanging quilts on the walls and African drums and these really lovely Japanese prints:This one is a partner work. One child wears the blindfold, and the other child hands her two swatches of cloth--velvet, burlap, cotton, etc. The blindfolded child says if they're the same or different. I think that older children might do an ordering work with this, as well--Montessori young child work is very big on teaching them to order gradations of things, like sounds from highest pitch to lowest, textures from roughest to smoothest, colors from darkest tone to lightest tone. I don't remember the exact philosophy, but it's something about heightened sensory development and deep concentration, or something: This is another sorting work, and I think might be another three-year-old work, as well. It also involves categorization, since you put the insects together, and the plants together, and animals together. Everything you need for a particular work is all together on a little child-sized tray, remember, and you can get it off the shelf and put it back as you like. There are purposefully not enough tables in the room for every single child to do a table work, however, and purposefully not enough floor space for every child to do a floor work, either, because living in a community involves recognizing that the rights of other people are as important as yours and that prior involvement takes precedence. The new thing in the middle group is that you get your first work plan. It helps give the child a well-rounded experience by asking them to, at first, complete a small number of activities in various curriculum categories chosen by themselves and by the teacher. It lets a teacher unobtrusively set a child extra time with a skill with which they might be struggling, and lets children learn goal-setting and the feeling of accomplishment. Older children get increasingly more detailed work plans and are increasingly more in charge of creating and fulfilling them, until in just a couple of years a child's work plan becomes not just a goal chart, but a daily, often hourly, sometimes more frequently-updated record of exactly what that child is doing and what they are learning and have learned at any given time--this, by the way, is a far more complete and accurate record than standardized testing, although our Montessori still participates in some standardized testing, mostly so that the children are comfortable with it after they've left the program.Practical life is also big fun. The girls both have their own brooms and dustpans and spray bottles at home, but sweeping the classroom is still awesome, apparently. Although after Will swept some dirt into the dustpan, she forgot a step and just hung the dustpan up without emptying it, spilling all the dirt right back onto the floor. Oh, well--it's one way to ensure that 30 kids all have some dust to sweep up.You can pet the class gerbils whenever you want and feed them, too, if you see that they need it, but you must ask a teacher to supervise you.For the spring Parents' Night, the children do Speaker's Rug, which is something they do weekly. A small square of carpet is passed around the circle, and when it comes to you, you may stand on the carpet and say something, or you may pass it. Will is the only kid who ALWAYS passes, because she's very uncomfortable with situations in which she isn't sure exactly what the social script is, but she sits respectfully and listens to the other children speak, and she sees that all the other kids do, too, and Speaker's Rug happens every single week like clockwork so it's something that's inevitably going to become familiar and comfortable enough that one day she WILL feel the confidence to get up and speak to her schoolmates.

I love Willow's school. And I hope that will help you see why, exactly, I hated hated HATED the forum at our local elementary school. Mind you, it's supposed to be a good school, and I've thought about that forum, and I'm thinking that (hoping that) perhaps it was just the presentation that went really wrong. Perhaps the teachers and principal COULD have said some things that I would have really liked.

Only they didn't.

What they did do...they went on and on and on about the bus schedule, randomly, in my opinion, since I'm only a PROSPECTIVE parent, and I don't yet give a flip about the bus except to know that there is one and they haven't lost a kid yet. They briefly went over the daily schedule, but it was like "We walk the circle at 8:45, then at 9:00 we have open choice, then we meet in the circle, then we go to an activity, then recess, then lunch, then nap, then reading, then science, then home." Okay...

My friend Noel asked if the kindergarteners ever interacted with the older children (hoping that they DID, you know), and all the kindergarten teachers fell all over each other reassuring all the parents that they watched their kids so closely and they only had recess and lunch with older children but there were assigned seats at lunch and five teachers at recess, etc. etc.

I asked what the teaching philosophy was regarding media exposure, particularly computer and videos, and how did that translate into classroom practice, and one (older) teacher apologized before she said that she didn't approve of five-year-olds using the computer, and then when I assured her that I perfectly agreed, some other teacher jumped in to say that every teacher's classroom was different and that SHE taught her children to properly utilize the computer right from the beginning.

One teacher made a joke that a five-year-old's attention span is about five minutes long.

Another teacher made a joke that when a parent complained to her about all-day kindergarten, she said to that parent, "Well, you can see your kid at night."

You see what I'm getting at here? A lot of this stuff is just normal for teachers to think--hell, the things I think about my students quite often is not printable in a family blog--but very little of this is what, as a prospective parent, I needed to here about the program. I needed to hear what their teaching philosophies are, what their views are on student learning styles and ranges of development, how they handle discipline and teach the kids to handle conflict, how the children are encouraged to socialize and form a community, etc.

Except that then they cut off the presentation portion so that people could fill out forms. I did manage to commandeer one last teacher to ask one last question (No, there's no foreign language curriculum, but sometimes they have a club), but then I admit that I ditched before the school tour. I used to go there a lot for a preschool playgroup, so I've seen the place.

But seriously, it could have just been a bad presentation for a good school. For instance, one of the teachers talked about how at first, the kindergarteners would spend most of their time learning that they had to wait their turn and let 20 kids go ahead of them and that they had to sit quietly and not touch each other. I was telling Matt that this pissed me off, that I did NOT think it necessary that a five-year-old have to learn these particular lessons, but Matt was all, "Of course you do. They do that same stuff at Montessori, only they tell you that it teaches community-building and respect for all people and manners. It just sounds like junk here because they're doing that stuff just to keep order, but it's still the same stuff."

And there was also this really long speech in which this one teacher talked on and on and ON about how we were all going to be so mad at her for the first couple of weeks because she would not let "her kids" leave her from the front of the school at the end of the day until they'd given her a high five and she'd made eye contact with us, because they were "her kids" and she needed to say goodbye to them and we'd just have to wait. I actually replayed this speech in my head for her, something like, "I take my role in loco parentis very seriously. My students must learn that they cannot leave my side without my permission, even to go to another trusted adult. I teach them that they must high-five me before they go to you because this keeps them from running off without supervision and because it gives me time to see you and know that they are going to an appropriate caregiver." See? That sounds way better. And if you could refer to her as your "student" and not your "kid," I'd like that, too, thanks.

I wasn't disappointed in the school, though, really, because I clearly remember the time I've spent in public schools as a student and as a teacher, and so it was never my intent to enroll my girls--when we can no longer afford Montessori, I will joyfully transition the girls to homeschooling--but I was happy that Matt, who's more ambivalent about homeschooling and who has pleasant memories of public school, got to go to this meeting. It's not quite what he remembers, I think, and he knows that we can do better without it.

I'm lying, though, because really I am disappointed. Most people can't afford the money for a fancy-pants private school or the time for full-on homeschooling, and I don't like to think about how it would have felt to have gone to that meeting and come away thinking as negatively about it as I do now, but know that my kids were going to go there, anyway.

Her Tuition is $317 a Month

You've seen me wax poetic on many occasions about my daughter's Montessori school (the birthday celebrations, in particular, are touching; the head teacher's penchant for folk-song group singing is pretty righteous in my book; and on Parents' Night the display of the children's abilities is astonishing)...


Well, one of the works children can choose is the calendar work. There's a preprinted sheet for each month, with the appropriate number of squares for the dates, and holidays and birthdays already marked in. The children may label the calendar for the appropriate month, write in the dates, and decorate the holidays. If they're not confident writers yet, they may ask an older child to put dots down as writing guides for them.


Will works much more slowly along the math concept works than she does the language arts or practical life works, for instance, so yesterday was the first time she chose to do the calendar work for December. Today's a snow day, but tomorrow when I take her to school I'm going to have to speak to her teacher about it. Can you see why?Did you see it? If not, here's a close-up:Merry Chirstmas, friends.

Parents' Night is Alright

I cancelled my office hours last night so that I could attend Parents' Night at Will's Montessori. Sure, my students have a big project coming up, but Parents' Night is the kind of event that you ignore labor pains and a ruptured appendix to attend. It's one of the very few times--Open House, two Parents' Nights, two parent/teacher conferences, the Halloween party, and your kid's birthday party--that you, as a parent, are allowed past the two-way mirror and into your kid's actual classroom. Mind you, I'm a firm believer that letting parents tromp all through the Montessori classroom with their big feet and loud voices, trying to "engage" kids or just whatever, would totally ruin the busy little elf dynamic these kids have, happily going from work to work, but I'm still as eager as the next mom to get on in there and get my hands on all the stuff!

So on Parents' Night, your kid has a 45-minute work period (as opposed to the ordinary 2-ish hours) in which to show you their favorite works, and then we circle up (or, as the teacher says, "form the ellipse") and do some singing.

This is chalk work. It's a free-draw with little artist's chalks on paper, and Will says, "Momma, this is my most favorite work!"We spent a long time on this one--I'm all, "Ooh, an art project!" You choose an animal silhouette to stencil with your choice of colored pencil onto a little piece of paper, and you can color your animal. Then you look for the card that has your animal on it, and you copy the name of that animal, written in lower-case letters, onto your paper. When you have several animals done, you can put a piece of wallpaper sample on top, staple them all into a book, and stamp the date on the back.I kept spreading all my stuff all over the table, and Will kept cleaning up after me, gently insisting, "It's important to keep a clear work area, Momma." Huh.

All the materials needed for your work are stored together on a tray, which you put back on the shelf where it goes.
In this numbers work, which is done on the floor and requires the laying out of a work mat, you put the big wooden numbers in order, then put the felt numbers on top of the wooden numbers, then arrange the appropriate number of wooden blocks in front of each number. As soon as Will and Syd had finished laying down the last wooden block, I started to say, "Wow, that's--", but Will was already starting to put everything away again.
This is a seasonal work, in which you basically arrange everything in numerical order again and lay out the appropriate number labels.This is the counting penguins work. There are a lot of them, and the number changes slightly every day--Willow claims this is due to magic.This is the handwriting work, done on a little desk that you can get from under a shelf and put on the carpet instead of a work mat. This work, the stencils work, and the chalk work are three that Willow brings home to us almost every day.

Then the teacher rang the bell for clean-up time and played classical music at us until we'd finished and circled up on the ellipse. We sang the community song, which requires hand-holding, and then we played the "Little Bird" game. Each age group had a turn, so first the kindergartners stood up in a circle, held hands, and raised their hands high to be the windows. Then, while the teacher and I lustily sang (I have this sort of savant-thing in that I know every song, ever) "Little bird, little bird, come through my window," etc., the middle groupers, who were the birds, ran in and out of the circle. Ultimate joy ensued.

The school that I went to as a kid, it sucked.

P.S. I have a tutorial for my denim buntings up on Crafting a Green World today.