Montessori 3-6 Classroom: Throwback Thursday

I've spent a great part of my computer time this week searching through my execrably organized digital archives for a video that Will asked for, that of her 2011 Spring Ice Show performance. I've often waxed nostalgic about that particular performance--a cheerful number, with the children all dressed in yellow shirts and sunglasses, performing to "Walking on Sunshine"--and how its unanticipated beauty surprised me into tears, so much so that Will, who doesn't remember it, really wants to watch the video. It seems, however, that I neglected to videotape it for her, or that I've somehow accidentally deleted the video since then. Ah, well, these are what memories are for...

In searching for that video, however, I came across some photos from a particularly magical year in the kids' former Montessori school--Will was a kindergartner, and Syd was a youngest grouper, and they were both together in the same afternoon ages 3-6 classroom:

Here is the children's outdoor classroom. I didn't love it, because it wasn't large, and for a large area of it there was a "no fast running" rule, but Syd, at least, pretty much just always hung out in this truly excellent sandbox. I LOVE the tree stumps:

I was recently reminded of this further use of the Montessori map puzzles on Pinterest, and it's something that I'm absolutely going to reincorporate into out studies, because Will clearly loved it, if all the giant, traced maps of Australia that she brought home were any indication. This assistant teacher was another beloved element of the Montessori class--the existence of two assistant teachers brought the student:teacher ration down to 10:1, and since much Montessori work is done independently by the children, the teachers really could focus on whoever needed them:

Will's favorite spot was the classroom library, of COURSE. Naughty children were often asked to go to the library for some quiet, cooling-down time, and I suspect that Will, a VERY independent child whose major motivation when interacting with an authority figure is to specifically not do what that authority figure would like her to do, was egged on into further throes of pig-headedness by the thought that any defiant infraction would result in a stint in--ooh, darn!--the library!

The children all loooooooved the classroom guinea pigs, Cinnamon and Nutmeg, who, yes, were placed into a large bucket when a child wanted to pet them:

Although Will fights SO much with her sister, she's always done really well with kids exactly Syd's age, and I remember that she and this little youngest-grouper had a special connection. Older kids were always encouraged to do activities with the younger children, and here Will and this kid are completing a photo/object matching work. And yes, Will is wearing a velvet top, cargo shorts, green and black striped tights, and purple Dr. Martens:

One thing that I know I should have recreated in our homeschool, but never did, are these types of math sensory works--the pink tower, the red rods, and these graduate cylinders that grow in both height and diameter. Syd loved these works, and I can see now how useful and appealing they would have been to her in her early years homeschooling. She loves repetition, she loves manipulatives, and she requires a concrete grounding in whatever mathematics we're doing:

Here's a fun extension of those red rods that I just mentioned--you create a labyrinth by setting up the rods at right angles, leaving *just* enough room for a young child to walk:

I DID recreate this work at home, collecting enough Base Ten blocks of our own that the kids could concretely visualize big numbers by building them. Those Base Ten blocks may be the most used, and most useful, manipulative in our homeschool:

I've said before, many times, that this year was a sweet spot in the children's development--I loved having them in the same classroom, I loved the Montessori method, I loved having them gone for three hours each day and then having them come back to me. Frankly, if I could still do that--if I could still have my kids in the same classroom, if I could still have them immersed in a rich educational and child-led environment like Montessori, and ESPECIALLY if they could only be there for about three hours and then be free to spend the rest of their days as they pleased, I'd still be there, absolutely.

DIY Montessori Pin Flag Storage

As you probably guessed during my tutorial for setting up Montessori pin flags of all the Olympic nations, at some point or other Will and I have constructed ALL the pin flags.

Every flag.

Every nation.

Every state.

Every province.

Every continent.

It was a ton of work, spread out over many days, and I did not want to risk misplacing or flat-out losing any of these pin flags that we worked so hard on, so I created this manically organized storage system for them:

I store the pin flags in a three-ring binder, pinned into pieces of felt that I've cut to 8.5"x11" and hole punched to fit in the binder. The flags are alphabetized by continent and country, and before each set I've included a key, with each flag's name listed in order. The key is printed on cardstock, to give some structure for the felt pages.

Behind each key the flags are pinned in the same order, and this makes it easy to remove some for a special project, such as a pin flag map of the Olympic nations:

I can easily see which flags are missing, and see where they belong when it's time to put them back.

After each project, I tediously reorganize the flags back into their felt places, repairing any that were damaged, and then double-checking that all were returned and remaking any that are lost forever. It's not a super fun activity, but I do appreciate the order the next time I need to prepare another pin flag project.

Which will be next week. The Olympic nations are going away, and I think I'll set the United States up.

This post was shared with Keep Calm Craft on over at Frontier Dreams.

Homeschool Geography: Montessori Pin Flag Map of the Olympic Nations

Our Olympics unit study has been a huge hit with the kids, and has led to so many enriching academic experiences so far, from looking up historical footage of Olympic games on Youtube, to Will choosing to research Iran and North Korea after listening to comments that Matt and I made about them during the Olympics Opening Ceremonies, to watching live coverage of all kinds of sports the kids had never before seen.

One of the most rewarding activities so far, and one of the most enjoyable for Will, especially, to complete, has been this Montessori pin flag map that I set up for the 2014 Winter Olympic nations:

The materials for this activity are, in my cheapskate opinion, pricey, but you can re-use these pin flags and maps over the entire course of your children's educations--we've already used them enough to make them money well-spent.

For the pin flags, I culled the appropriate flags from my complete collection of Montessori pin flags. When the flat-headed sewing pins got too expensive, I switched to using steel-head pins, instead. These are less desireable, because they're more difficult for the children to push into the cork or foam board, but they're easily replaced, and it's good for developing grace and focus (not to mention strengthening those handwriting muscles, something that Will, in particular, can always benefit from).

I also now use a different storage system than I planned for in that post, but I'll go on and on about that another time.

The map keys are another resource from Montessori Print Shop. I have them laminated, with the labeled map on one side and the blank map on the other, and keep them with our set of Montessori puzzle maps.

The multi-page world map is a print-out from Megamaps--I use them ALL the freakin' time (our US map in the kitchen is also a Megamaps print-out). I printed the world map in a two-by-two page format--although bigger would be better (you'll see, in a minute, how crowded Europe inevitably is, sigh), this is the largest size that fits the big piece of foamcore board that we use, now, instead of corkboard for these maps.

I was surprised that Syd wasn't more interested in this project, since she's usually our biggest puzzle lover, but Will ADORED placing these pin flags. Seriously, she loved it. She had to be manhandled away from it when we absolutely needed her attention elsewhere. Mind you, at least for a nine-year-old, this is not a project that can be completed by the kid while you're in another room, happily minding your own business, and for that, it's not very "Montessori," but since Will isn't in a three-year classroom with a 12-year-old to help her, I played reference librarian and helped her with the research, usually giving her the continent where a particular country could be found, but also looking up anything that she was curious about. We looked up a LOT of pronunciations! We also did a lot of looking up of places on Google Earth so Will could see them in real life (I am a big proponent of having Google Earth in one hand anytime you have a paper map in the other), and plenty of talking about country borders, the Soviet Union, what happened to Hong Kong and Taiwan, and how politics works in India and Russia.

Heady stuff! My nerd heart was practically bursting with happiness.

Will spread this pin flag map work out over several days, coming back to it and focusing in for a while, abandoning it, but then being inexorably drawn back to it a little later:

Often, while watching the Olympics, a kid would recognize a flag that had been placed and go fetch it.

This pin flag map was clearly such fun to put together that I have to say that it's just bonus points that the result is so gorgeous:

We'll leave the completed map out until the Olympics Closing Ceremonies so that the kids can refer to it as needed, but then I'll spend a tedious couple of hours putting the flags back into place in their storage binder, untape the map from the foamcore board and store it back behind the bookshelf, and that's everything ready for another day!

Although perhaps I should prepare another pin flag map invitation for Will right away, since she liked this one so much. A US pin flag map *would* fit in nicely with our geography studies...

My Latest over at Crafting a Green World: Record Album Covers into Things that are Not Record Album Covers

a tutorial for paper scrap business cards on a cardboard record album cover base

and a tutorial for greeting cards made by fussy cutting the awesome parts of record album covers

Right now, on this peaceful Wednesday morning, I'm sitting at the table with two kids who are freaking out because in our summer hiatus from work plans, they seem to have forgotten that work that is not completed on Monday or Tuesday does not disappear from one's life, but instead reappears at the table for Wednesday morning "schoolwork boot camp," (yes, I do call it this, because I'm tacky), not to be set aside for other, perhaps more pleasurable, pursuits until it is completed.

The kiddos don't have tons to finish up, actually, but it's clearly going to take longer than it should, since Will's throwing a fit because I won't let her write cursive "d" incorrectly, and Syd's throwing a fit because she doesn't want to turn her brain on and skip count by 2s. Through the grace of a BIG mug of coffee and my belief in the work plan, I am keeping my temper quite miraculously. I'm clearly going to have time at the table this morning to get a lot of blog pages edited, emails answered, summer vacation researched, Netflix queues filled up, DVDs ripped, photo prints ordered, library books requested...

Reading and Writing

Syd's still plugging away!

writing words in her speller's dictionary

reading a bit of an early chapter book at the library

Syd's still practicing every day, and getting a little better every day, but she still gets so frustrated and upset over unlocking unfamiliar words that I'm feeling like quite the troll mother for keeping her at it (although to be fair, five minutes ago she got so frustrated and upset over following the directions barked out by Willow's Bop It! that she shouted "I hate you!" at it).

I've got a couple of other strategies to try out soon, however. My friend Tina suggested having Syd choose board books to read, which is brilliant--each one is short, easy, completely do-able, and yet...a real BOOK!  It sounds like a great confidence builder, and great practice normalizing book reading. I also suddenly remembered reading on someone's blog once that they had a kiddo who, too, lacked the confidence to read a real book. This blogger--and I wish I could remember who it was!--wrote out every word on one page as a flash card, had the kid read those, then ordered them just as they were on the book page, had the kid read those, and only THEN presented the kid with the actual book and the actual page that she wanted him to read. This is also pretty brilliant, since we could spend days working through the actual words in the book, I could stagger the words that I know will be frustrating, and then, after having done all the hard decoding work already, Syd could have the satisfaction of reading an entire book smoothly and easily, just as she most wants (and expects she should be able to, sigh) to do.

This will likely wait until after our road trip, however, which is in just a week and a half. Until then, Syd's pretty happily working through the Montessori Green Series and a book of little reproducible easy reader mini-books (she copies them, fills in the blanks, illustrates them, staples them, and reads them over and over to anyone that I can force to listen to her--they've got some decoding to be done, some composition, some storytelling, and lots of great repetition and confidence-building in the reading). I might just hide the public library's reading form altogether until we're back home again (and she's forgotten that she pitched a fit and tried to throw it away), and then try my new strategies.

One day soon, this kid will be reading fluently, easily, and happily. One day soon, I'll find myself getting pissed off because she won't put her book down to empty the dishwasher, or put away her laundry. I'll gear up to chastise her, and then remember how short a time ago it was that reading was the most frustrating, most miserable thing I'd ever made her do.

And then instead of griping, I'll grab my own book, sit down next to her, and read beside her for the rest of the day.

Beginning the 50 States Project

We're off and away into our 50 States Project, even though I'm still not sure how we'll continue.

We'll call it a work in progress, then, I suppose!

I know that I want the girls to be able to pick out each state on a map of the U.S., and identify each state by its outline alone, so one day Willow and I printed out and assembled a giant United States map and duct taped it to a wall in the kitchen. When we begin a new state, the kiddos find that state on the big map and color it to match our Montessori map set:

When the girls have more states under their belts, we can add in weekly memory drills with flash cards, our Montessori puzzle map, our Montessori pin flag set, and Stack the States.

I want the girls to memorize the capital of each state, so they mark that on the map, as well, and add it to their weekly memory work. Willow LOVES the other assorted trivia of each state--state nickname, postal code, state flower, state bird, etc.--so they've been noting down that information, doing a couple of themed coloring pages, and adding that info to their memory work, as well, but I'm not really invested in all that extra info, so we can easily drop it if the girls tire of it.

Where I'm sticking a little bit is in the fact that I REALLY like to include "living" sources for our studies--books, videos, music, etc.--and enrichment activities, but studying a different state each week makes for a lot of prep work if I want to include those things, and a lot of kid work, considering that we're only actively studying our state one day each week. I got around it the other week by having the girls make these Philly cheesesteak sandwiches with Matt over the weekend (yum!)--

--but I may have to resign myself to spending TWO weeks on each state, one week for the facts and one week for an enrichment activity. But even then, we didn't even get into the Pennsylvania Dutch, or Crayolas or Hershey bars, or the Liberty Bell or Ben Franklin.

A month on each state, spending almost four years to get through the country?

Or maybe I'll just plan according to what interests us? A month on Pennsylvania, a day on Nebraska? More time on states that we're visiting, less time on states that we're not? Skip around from Pennsylvania to Connecticut and back to Pennsylvania to revisit Hershey bars and Crayolas?

Maybe one day for the basics, and then if anything intrigues us we'll stay with that state, and if nothing strikes our fancy we'll move on.

And don't even get me started about how I SO want to take a field trip to each state, because I also love field trips, and also I'm crazy.

A DIY Moveable Alphabet

When the girls are first learning something, I really like to separate out the various skills involved, especially with writing, which both girls, and Willow in particular, still often find challenging in regards to letter formation and positioning.

So although I want Sydney to be able to physically form words, because it helps her read and memorize them, I don't necessarily want her to have to write them--she'll be reading and memorizing with part of her brain, yes, but only the part that's not already focused on which way the "b" goes and which part of "p" sits on the line and how to make "a" so that I don't erase it and ask her to do it again.

Instead, when Syd has a new phonogram to learn, she "builds" her words using a DIY moveable alphabet that we put together. It's mostly made up of Scrabble tiles--

--but we've got some FIMO letters in the mix, and some letters punched out of cardstock and pressed in my pinback button machine, and some that the girls made by sticking alphabet stickers on 1" graph paper and then cutting it out.

I set the alphabet out for Sydney along with a stack of words that practice a particular phonogram, and she sprawls out on our (unvacuumed) carpet to build and read the words:

Handwriting is a separate subject, but one that we do every day, so don't worry--she still gets to write her words out!

The test of a successfully written exercise, for Sydney, is that the letters are all correctly formed AND she can read it to me, so I deviously sneak in a little more practice reading those brand-new phonograms there.

Full Circle

First Day of School:

Last Day of School:

Now, let's go on a road trip!

A Montessori Family

We are going to be a Montessori family even as we homeschool. To that end, at our last family night together at this school, I asked the girls to show me their very favorite works, so that we can be sure to recreate them together at home.

Here we have the geo board with rubber bands:
I've been wanting to make one of those forever, anyway, and I also have instructions from a recent issue of for turning it into a small marble maze.

LOTS of scooping and transferring works:Sydney loves her sensory experiences, so I see lots of sand tables and rice tables and dried bean tables and river rock tables in our future.

Willow loves her photography, especially catching her sister:Sydney likes to smile for Willow just until Willow is a second away from clicking the shutter button, and then she'll hide her face as quick as she can, but Willow caught her this time.

Neither of the girls bring home these labelling works very often, but aren't they wonderful?

I'd like to have a large assortment of these kinds of activities at the ready to bring out whenever a child shows an interest in a relevant topic.

Willow loves the scrubbing station, which changes often--sometimes a gourd, sometimes a pumpkin, sometimes a big piece of driftwood, and sometimes this wonderful, large conch shell:

Sometimes Willow has the responsibility for washing some dishes at the kitchen sink, but one of the first things that I'd like to accomplish when we homeschool full-time is to rearrange the kitchen so that each child can be responsible for (and successful at) washing her own cups and plates after every use.

I have the making of lots of these types of geometry puzzles and manipulatives in mind:

There's a space in the living room that seems as if it would be a pretty good spot for temporary installations of a week or so. The electric football game hung out there for a while, for instance, before I got sick of it and it had to go live back in the playroom. Sometimes, instead of electric football, I imagine that a little science experiment could hang out there, such as this "Will It Float?" work that so absorbs the girls:And the math manipulatives!!!I don't think that I'll be doing number beads exactly the way Montessori does them, but I will be doing them, and yep, we'll be going all the way up to 9,000, too, because I find the visualization of this simple concept to be both amazing, and one of the foundations that makes the Montessori program itself so amazing.

Sydney also loves this little game:You each have a little basket of things, and there is a stack of cards in front of you. Taking turns, you draw a number, not letting your playmates see it, and count out the appropriate number of things in front of you. Then your playmates have to count those things and tell you what number you have. The kids LOVE it.

As they love dancing. Here they're all doing one of my favorites, Jump Jim Joe: The dance begins with one pair of children. After every verse, each child who danced must find a new partner, and then they dance again. So two children become four, who become eight, who become sixteen. By the fifth verse all the children in the class are dancing, and then they still do several more verses, because it's equally fun to mill around in the circle to procure your new partner as it is to Jump Jim Joe.

Since you're not under-the-rock dwellers, I'm sure you can imagine that we have taken a lot of heat for our decision to homeschool the girls after this year. And it's good to have these conversations, because our children's education is something that we should always participate in thoughtfully. But the one argument, and perhaps the only one that I've heard so far, that I find actually offensive is that I should send my children to public school in order to support public school. If everyone just pulled their kids out, public school would crash. Instead, parents should work to make a difference in their schools.

It is my responsibility not as a parent, but as a citizen, to support public school, and I do. It is my responsibility not as a parent, but as a citizen, to work to make a difference in my community's public schools, and I try. All citizens, whether or not they are parents, should do the same.

It is my responsibility as a parent to choose the best method of schooling for my own children. I firmly believe in a child's right to a free education, but I won't sacrifice my own children to that political ideal if I don't believe that the free education that they will receive will be the best education for them. Yes, I'll work for a better educational system, but I won't submit my own children to education that isn't already the best.

My children adore their Montessori school, and it is, for them, a terrific method of schooling. If we could afford to send them back next year, we would. If our public schools worked exactly like that Montessori school, we'd be even happier to send them there. But you know what? The girls are also going to ADORE homeschooling, and it is going to be, for them, also terrific.

But oh, we have been very happy in this place, too.

A Parent Library for Your School?

This was the last thing that I had to do:
Because of course the Parent Library that I set up at the girls' school this year must have a crafty sign. My contributions to the sign are the letters, cut from scrapbook paper and cardstock using the Winter Wonderland Cricut cartridge (during which time I also made the girls approximately one thousand dancing reindeer and stylized bunnies, and also several 3D stand-up trees). Willow's contributions include a background of Do-a-Dot marker; button, rhinestone, and googly eye embellishments--

--and her name in pencil, which I TOLD her not to do, but the kid just can't seem to help herself. After three years in school, she writes her name on everything that she does.

I highly recommend the installation of a parent library in your kid's school. The library, which in our case is a very large bookshelf in the school office, consists of parenting books, books about schooling and child development, and books in enrichment areas, but the key is that all of these books are endorsed by the school. Can't figure out which book touting which discipline method you should read? If you trust your kid's teachers, why not check out the one that they like? Without this library, I would have never known that the Montessori teachers at this school, as a group, are ADDICTED to the Positive Discipline series. Between all the head teachers, I think that they own every title. And it's a good series. I like it.

It wasn't as difficult as I thought it would be to come up with a pretty large collection of titles for the library. One month, I attended the early morning head teachers meeting, during which time I explained the concept of what I wanted this parent library to be. I told the teachers that I imagined that they likely found themselves talking about the same issues with parents over and over--ADD, perhaps, or sleep discipline, or cliques. With a Parent Library in the building, the teachers could request that books be added on those issues, particularly their favorite books to recommend, and then whenever they speak to a parent, they can send them over to the library to read a particular book. The teachers were pretty excited, and had LOTS of suggestions for books to include.

To squeeze some extra books into my very small library budget, I also asked the teachers for any books they'd be willing to move from their private collections in their own workrooms to the parent library bookshelf. Each of the teachers, based on their own classroom experiences, had collected a large assortment of books, everything from books on bipolar children to the bullying of girls, and depending, of course, on what ages they taught. If they moved a book from their private shelf to the parent library, they would still have access to that book (although not necessarily immediately, because it could be checked out, but could also easily be recalled), and it would free up some space in their work areas. I received stacks upon stacks of books this way, including that entire Positive Discipline series. And then I didn't have to go back to the teachers to double-check that they endorsed any of these particular books, as I did with the independent purchases--if a teacher has a book in her own collection, it's endorsed.

Here's an example of what the Parent Library now contains:

ABOUT MONTESSORI

• · The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori.
• · The Essential Montessori by Elizabeth Hainstock. 1986
• · Maria Montessori: Methods, Schools, Materials. 1978
• · Montessori: A Modern Approach by Paula Polk Lillard. 1972 (2 copies)
• · The Montessori Revolution in Education by E.M. Standing. 1969
• · Our Peaceful Classroom by Aline D. Wolf.
• · The Secret of Childhood by Maria Montessori. 1966
• · To Educate the Human Potential by Maria Montessori. 1985

CHILD DEVELOPMENT

• · All About Attention Deficit Disorder: Symptoms, Diagnosis and Treatment by Thomas W. Phelan. 2000
• · Asperger’s Syndrome: A Guide for Parents and Professionals by Tony Attwood. 2003
• · Awakening Your Child’s Natural Genius by Thomas Armstrong. 1991
• · Baby and Child Care by Benjamin Spock. 1968
• · The Bipolar Child: The Definitive and Reassuring Guide to Childhood’s Most Misunderstood Disorder by Demitri Papolos and Janice Papolos. 2002
• · The Child Under Six by James L. Hymes, Jr. 1963
• · The Difficult Child by Stanley Turecki. 2000
• · The Emotional Life of the Toddler by Alicia F. Lieberman. 1993
• · The First Three Years of Life by Burton L. White. 1975
• · How to Parent by Fitzhugh Dodson.
• · How to Parent so Children will Learn by Sylvia B. Rimm. 1990
• · Living with the Active Alert Child by Linda S. Budd. 1993
• · Odd Girl Out: The Hidden Culture of Aggression in Girls by Rachel Simmons. 2002
• · Odd Girl Speaks Out by Rachel Simmons. 2004
• · Please Understand Me: Character and Temperament Types by David Keirsey and Marilyn Bates. 1984
• · Raising Self-Reliant Children in a Self-Indulgent World by H. Stephen Glenn and Jane Nelson. 2000
• · Sexual Development in Childhood. 2003
• · Tics and Tourette Syndrome: A Handbook for Parents and Professionals by Uttom Chowdhury. 2004
• · Understanding the Human Being by Silvana Quattrocchi Montanaro. 1991
• · The Wonder of Boys by Michael Gurian. 1997
• · Your Eight-Year-Old: Lively and Outgoing by Ames and Haber. 1990
• · Your Four-Year-Old: Wild and Wonderful by Louise Bates Ames, PhD, and Frances L. Ilg. 1976
• · Your Six-Year-Old: Loving and Defiant by Ames and Ilg. 1976
• · Your Two-Year-Old: Terrible or Tender by Ames and Ilg. 1976

EDUCATION AND SCHOOLING

• · A.D.D. and Creativity by Lynn Weiss. 1997
• · Beyond A.D.D by Thom Hartmann. 1996
• · Fundamentals of Early Childhood Education by Melodie A. McCarthy and John P. Houston. 1980
• · Marching to Different Drummers by Pat Burke Guild and Stephen Garger. 1985
• · Montessori in the Home: The Preschool Years by Elizabeth G. Hainstock. 1968
• · Positive Discipline: A Teacher’s A-Z Guide by Jane Nelsen. 2001
• · Ready to Learn: A Mandate for the Nation by Ernest L. Boyer. 1992
• · Setting Limits in the Classroom: How to Move Beyond the Dance of Discipline in Today’s Classroom by Robert J. MacKenzie. 2003
• · Skill Streaming the Elementary School Child by McGinnis and Goldstein. 1984
• · Teaching Children with Autism: Strategies to Enhance Communication and Socialization by Kathleen Ann Quill. 1995
• · Wishes, Lies, and Dreams: Teaching Children to Write Poetry by Kenneth Koch. 1971

MONTESSORI LIFESTYLE

• · Chicken Soup for the Kid’s Soul. 1998
• · Children: The Challenge by Rudolf Dreikurs. 1964
• · The Discipline Book by William Sears and Martha Sears. 1995
• · Girl Wars: 12 Strategies that Will End Female Bullying by Cheryl Dellasega. 2003
• · Growing Up Again by Jean Illsley Clarke and Connie Dawson. 1998
• · The New York Times Parents’ Guide to the Best Books for Children by Eden Ross Lipson. 1988
• · P.E.T.: Parent Effectiveness Training by Dr. Thomas Gordon. 1975
• · Peaceful Children, Peaceful World by Aline D. Wolf. 1989
• · Playful Parenting by Lawrence J. Cohen. 2001
• · Positive Discipline A-Z by Jane Nelsen, Lynn Lott, and H. Stephen Glenn. 2007
• · Positive Discipline: The First Three Years by Jane Nelsen, Cheryl Erwin, and Roslyn Ann Duffy. 2007
• · Positive Discipline for Preschoolers by Jane Nelsen, Cheryl Erwin, and Roslyn Ann Duffy. 2007
• · Positive Time-Out: And Over 50 Ways to Avoid Power Struggles in the Home and Classroom by Jane Nelsen. 1999
• Reviving Ophelia: Saving the Selves of Adolescent Girls by Mary Pipher. 2001

The library still needs some books about tween boys and the rest of the works of Maria Montessori, but for this year, at least, its budget is tapped out.

The gold standard check-out procedure for a library this small is to write the title/author of each book on its own index card, and alphabetize it in a card file. When parents want to check out a book, they print their first and last name and the date they took the book on the card. When they return the book, they note that date, as well. If the school needs a particular book back for any reason, they have all the parent telephone numbers on file, so they can call the parents, or just grab them at pick-up. And I rubber-stamped the school name and address on the inside cover of each book, just in case somebody forgets where their book came from.

Over the long-term (which I won't be around for), I would have liked to have provided a few take-home Montessori materials for the library, and a collection of Montessori-endorsed children's books (they're real big on peace, you know). But for this project for this year, I'm afraid that I'm just going to have to stick a fork in it, and hope that next year's librarian will have some bigger and better ideas.

And perhaps I'll write my name in pencil somewhere, too.

Little Kids Make Awesome Valentines

After the girls did their time making Valentines----their reward was to receive an ample supply of Valentines in return.

Montessori is probably a little different from many other schools, in that handmade Valentines are strongly encouraged (one is subject to militancy on many fronts when one's child is attending a fancy-pants private school--I also have to bring in homemade treats on the girls' birthday party days, and they can't have sugar, and if you try to send your kid to school in mittens that are too thin, you WILL get chastised). People are still allowed to be busy, so the girls always do get a store-bought Valentine or two in their bags (and one Valentine came with a piece of candy! I bet my life that the head teacher and at LEAST two sets of parents had a total fit about that one), but the beauty of the average preschooler's handmade Valentine really is a sight to behold.

Since this is Syd's first, and last, Montessori Valentine's Day, here are HER favorite handmade Valentines:

I also don't know if every little kid does this, or if the handmade factor makes them extra-special, but my girls TREASURE their Valentines. They carry them around, they pore over them, they painstakingly read/memorize each signature and greeting. For the last two years, Willow has literally loved her Valentines to death, and after some inevitable milk spill or bathtub accident I was left with absolutely zero momentos to hold onto for her.

This year, then, I'm afraid that in a few more days, before we've pushed our luck too far, the bags of Valentines will mysteriously disappear. They'll be rediscovered several years later in the girls' keepsake boxes, but I'll go to my grave denying any and all responsibility for the theft. The mystery, like the Valentines, will endure.