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.
She made a sewn matching game with hand-drawn illustrations:
She made a beach bag out of beautiful fabric:
And she made the most amazing, most elaborate, themed roll-up felt playset that I've ever seen:
...we painted it.
Since it continued to snow all day, most of our designs were eventually covered up, but it did turn us, for a while, once again into the yard that people stop and stare at (nude Jackson Pollack painting and 
There was ample snow stomping--
--and shopping at the nearby Goodwill Outlet Store (ask Sydney sometime about her brand-new-to-her two-foot-tall realistic-looking plastic pony), and miniature golfing, and a family screening of Dinotopia (we have gotten WAY into Dinotopia), and picnic lunches--
--because we can't afford Caribbean Cove and anything other than peanut butter all at the same time, and, of course, bucket-dumping:
Since last year I posted a photo of 
Trust me, she's in that photo, riding in the front of the inner tube that's also holding her father, but the splash is so big that you can't even see her.
--and Happy Girl #2--
--you felted the leggings. They are very small now. They are no longer Willow-sized. They're not even Sydney-sized. In fact, they might now fit Sugar and Nutmeg, the guinea pigs in the girls' classroom, and that's fun, because I was meaning to spend all weekend sewing those guinea pigs something nice anyway.
