Monkey see, monkey do

Today I witnessed something that has weighed heavily on my heart.

A heavily pregnant mother was in the supermarket with her two children, both under 5 I would guess.

The younger one, was getting tired and wanting to be picked up, however, she had her shopping trolley and the hand of the other one too.
I was not able to help her, only observe from some distance as I was in the queue.
However, I was able to hear the protestations of the younger one which were getting gradually louder.
But, it wasn't this that made me turn my head as the sounds of cries of tired and bored toddlers are common in a large supermarket in the middle of the day.

What did make me turn and look was a sudden 'SHUSH' with a ferocity that made me think 'Wow! he's cross with his child!'
But no! He was not cross with HIS child, he was in the face of the pregnant woman's child!

'I come to do my shopping' he growled for us all to hear, 'not listen to a child crying'.

It is sad that he felt it necessary to criticise a mother who was probably tired herself, rather than offer a hand of friendship or help.

So why am I writing this here?

Because from this incident, this child has learned nothing about the world bar intolerance. When he turns around to his new sibling and yells at it to be quiet, he will be reprimanded, yet he is just mirroring the behaviour he himself experienced.

When we observe the child and the child's behaviour it is important to recall our own behaviours. What we are seeing is learned behaviour and will reflect what the child sees.

The child is born as a blank canvas, it is not born knowing how to 'push buttons' or 'misbehave'. What we may construe as inappropriate behaviour is learned, either by observations of the child's own from his/her care giver, or by the need to find way to receive attention when it needs help or assistance.

When the child cries, it is not to annoy or wind up, it is because it has not yet developed the capacity for speech or explanation. Helping the child to help themselves will lessen the tears, respecting times for sleep and appreciating the need for times to burn off energies will reduce tantrums or melt downs.

"It's amazing how we teach our children what we ourselves need to learn. We yearn for them to understand what we never did, to be the perfect, balanced people we always wanted to be. Yet our feelings are often contradictory. We want them to have it all, but not be greedy. We want them to be giving, but not to give it all away. We want them to have everything they want, but always to share..."

                                                                                                             - Rabbi Irwin Kula

I feel this quotation beautifully explains how, as adults, we can be so hypocritical with our children. We want them to listen to us, but do we really listen to them? We want them to be kind to others, but are we being kind to them when we shout at them because we're tired? We want them to be orderly, but are we being orderly when we leave the washing up or fling our shoes in a corner? When we utter an annoyance with a cursive thrown in, are we really that surprised when the child is heard saying the same word to his toys or friend?

It is hard to parent. It is hard to laugh when you are tired, it is hard to tickle when you want to smack, it is hard to respond calmly when you have responded three times already that night, it is hard to be fully present when you have an agenda to organise for tomorrow's meeting, it is hard to take time to prepare, sit and eat together when you have activities to run children to... but in order to have a tolerant society, we need to start with our children.

Folding

Gosh so much has happened again since I last posted, but, this blog is not about my life, but about Montessori, so as I am returning to the classroom via a Montessori diploma and am starting some Montessori inspired parent and infant classes, I'm going to get right back on top of blogging some great Montessori thoughts, tips and ideas for bringing Montessori right into the home.

My children are getting so much older now and the beautiful Montessori quotation

"Help me to do it by myself" 

could be seen to be less appropriate now, but how wrong that would be.

As with all things, we parents are always the directors, the guiders if you like, not the teachers, the children teach themselves and at any age that is true. My role now as they get older is to listen to their choices, suggest my thoughts but to not do it for them or inflict my ideas upon them. Of course, I can reflect on their choices and give them my reflections, but I hope (in the truest Montessori way) that they will be independent enough to come to their own well thought through decisions. That is the goal we are all striving for right...although, on days when they all fight and bicker, I do wonder whether we will get there!


However, today I want to share with you a really simple piece of equipment that can help them to fold things, it can start as simply as with a tea towel, but eventually you can show them how to fold a simple t shirt.

First you need a few squares of plain fabric. It has to be plain as any patterns will detract from the activity.

I hemmed around the edges and then you can make different fold lines on them by sewing in a coloured thread.

Then show the child how to match the edges so that you are folding on the coloured line.

Squares

Triangles





















You can then do ones with several folds.

If you have an older child, you might even consider using this activity to introduce them to a cool iron and ironing board. We did this today and at 7, she was more than capable. My feeling is that as long as you can have them (the child) standing with both feet on the floor rather than on a stool, so they can reach the board (mine goes to a really low height) you can show them how to iron.






I just had to show you this as well. This is a child sized cheese or lemon/nutmeg grater. It's amazing what you can find when you look around. Thank you TKMaax!













Over the next few months as I begin to prepare for the Parent and Infant classes and my own Montessori journey I will bring you more reflections and share further ideas.

New Beginnings

It has been a very long time since I last posted anything on this blog. Things have changed in our life but Montessori still prevails.
On a schooling front, all three are back in various schools now for a variety of individual reasons, some of which were mine, many were theirs, however, one reason is that I decided to go back to school myself and this, in itself, is proving an adventure with many paths that are converging.

It's incredibly exciting but over the next year or three I shall be studying to become a midwife and working on a project with a team of Montessorians in Brighton to prepare a Montessori antenatal curriculum. This is to realise a vision that they and I have that Montessori education is less encased in the parameters set out by the word education and more a way of life.

As this blog has already demonstrated, there is so much of Montessori's learnings and observations that need to exist in the home in order for there to be continuity and security in a child's life if that Montessori education is the family choice. However, perhaps there is more still.

Montessori talks in her book "The Absorbent Mind" about the newborn having a mental life that must exist embryonically, therefore, if this is the case, how much do babies remember about their birth or life in the womb and what is the connection between babies who are perhaps upset in this existence womb side and their early life during the extrogestational period. It is easy to observe a baby earthside and take responsibility for their development and stimulation, but how many people, honestly and truly, take as much responsibility as to their birth experience from their baby's perspective? How many women, hand on heart, irrevocably trust their bodies and their babies the first time they have a baby? Well, the statistics are not in favour and I for one, was a number within those stats.

It is not just Montessori who speaks of this; similar writings on this subject can be found in work by Rudolph Steiner and Emi Pikler.  I think we would be arrogant to say that we understand how life really starts and what external sources or choices are made, cosmically even, to define our destinies. If a child initiates birth, perhaps the spirit of the child initiates conception, why did that particular gamete reach that particular egg? All through life we have the opportunity to initiate events that may seem mysterious to us.

We trust our bodies to tell us when we are hungry, when we need to urinate or defecate, when we need to rest or drink water and we trust our hearts to beat every day. Amazingly, we put our trust into the organs that work these systems in our bodies, yet we don't trust our bodies to birth and put all our faith into technology and hospitals (92% of babies are currently born in hospital in the UK). Through doing this, are we setting up the perfect environments for our babies to be born? I could talk about this for hours and for fear of sounding like a homebirth radical with a disregard for hospital as being a safe place for babies to be born (which I am not), or an anti-c-section nutcase (which equally, I am not) I will not digress further.

So, the idea of Montessori style prenatal education is a logical beginning in my opinion. Perhaps the idea of the prepared prenatal period should bear as much relevance as the prepared environment?

So, I hope that this blog will become more active again over the next few months as we start to develop this programme. I hope that we can create and inspiring and helpful programme that will encourage more families to make the same conscious decisions they make postnatally, in the antenatal and maybe even conception period.

So please, bear with me and stick around.

Yours in the Montessori spirit x

Baby steps

Where are we now? Week five perhaps? I'm not sure. However, it's beginning to settle. We're finding a natural rhythm to our day and I'm even finding the odd pocket of time to do my own bits.

It's interesting to have the three of them at such different stages of their natural development. Master Beehive the elder is a bookish character, quite self motivated and with a love for maths and reading. He'll happily soak up various worksheets or projects, however, he hates to get anything "wrong" and finds it hard to inspire himself to do stuff outside what he's given to do. Master Beehive the younger, however, prefers to work with manipulatives. He's more tactile and a kinaesthetic learner. He likes to be actively doing things, so the montessori materials are coming in wonderfully here for helping him with his Th, H, T and U addition at the moment and animal classification.

Little Miss Beehive, on the other hand, loves to do the work, but being younger, needs more attention. She really could do with more time on the manipulatives, but needs me sat beside her.

I'm sure that time will help this division of my time.

Last night, much to Mr Beehive's horror, I sat and made a load of bead chains. LMB and I discovered a great Hobbycraft whilst the boys were at Spanish class and we bought several bags of coloured beads and some wire. We need to go back as my bead chains are only up to 8 beads so far, but there are 10 chains of each, so hopefully we'll move on to using these fairly soon. The History timeline.

LMB learning to number values by using the addition strips from WHSmiths!!

Tomorrow we are off to the sea bird centre all being well, which ties in nicely with our animals topic and on Saturday LMB is going to make some gingerbread men. Next week we are hoping to go to the Botanic gardens for a class on "Plants we use" with a some folks from the Home Ed group.

Hit the ground running!

Well, we're closing our first *official* week of home educating and I have to say, I feel we've really hit the ground running. The myth that home educated children miss out on socialising has been well and truly squashed, albeit, quite where my social life will fit in on this may depend on the appointment of a regular babysitter for an afternoon a week! They are currently (between them) doing swimming lessons, Spanish lessons, music classes, ballet and cub scouts!

There are many approaches to home ed from my understanding, but ours is a more traditional *school* approach and we're aiming to continue using some of the Montessori methods that we've learned in the last five years.

The room has been set up in a pretty prepared way with low shelving and areas for each curriculum subject (or the main ones at least)

The lowest shelving has the more practical life type activities with mathematics on the top shelf of this unit.

There are dvds and cdroms of various things and a box of growing National Geographics and History magazines as we pick them up if they have interesting things in them.

Our rugs for laying out work stations and the magazine rack holds their various workbooks for different things.

The arts and crafts stuff is all in the wicker baskets with language and physical geography on the top shelf - and our massive pine cones from California, that all arrived uninjured!

Obviously if we bought a whole raft of Montessori equipment I'd currently be teaching them out of cardboard boxes on a street corner somewhere, so our materials are a mix of bought ones and home made ones. I invested in sandpaper letters (as I don't have the time or patience to make them), but made a moveable alphabet (well it wasn't what I called it then!) when I was teaching in Newcastle many moons ago, all beautifully laminated etc, so.....that works! Our countries work extends to two decent wooden puzzles and then a great magnetic Tesco kit that has countries, capitals and flags - there isn't quite the control of error, but for Will, he doesn't need that quite so much, so he does it with an atlas instead.

This is normally the table we use to snack at, but today it's become the drying table for the start of our iron age diorama. The children decided they wanted to make an iron age village after our visit to Flag Fen when we were back in East Anglia a few weeks back, so we've begun to make round houses, a river and fort. This week we hope to visit the remains of an iron age fort on the outskirts of Edinburgh.

With Elementary age, they naturally need a table to work at, so this is it. Each child's got their own work journal that we're working through daily at the moment, when they get in the swing of it and get a little older, they'll be able to pace their own days and get through their timetables to suit by the end of a week, hopefully instilling some sense of responsiblity for getting things done.

Books - lots of books - I need more shelves!


So this is LMB doing number bonds to 5 and making patterns - she's been doing this all week and seems to be pretty engrossed.


Master Beehive the younger doing some fraction reinforcement using a great game from the High Street.

The diorama beginnings in close up and appalling photography.

We have lots of plans lined up such as an intergrated project week in October to present to their grandparents, visits to the zoo to research a chosen animal in depth and also a visit to the Royal Botanical gardens to attend a plant classification class. There's also golf and tennis on the horizon, trips to the Edinburgh dungeons, setting up email accounts and working da interweb as well as.....just living!!!

Art Lessons

I just wanted to share this new blog that has been created by the Beehive's art teacher at the Montessori School. She promises to update this with lots of videos and how-to's so I am predicting we'll be taking many ideas from here for our art time.

www.leonasartclass.blogspot.com

Roll up your sleeves and enjoy!

Education for Life and integrated projects

It's March - supposedly the first day of the new season. Unfortunately there isn't much sign of new life here just yet. No daffs or snowdrops pushing through, however, there is up to 8 inches of snow forecasted for tomorrow *sigh* which is not a good concept when we're expecting movers to start packing and they're driving in from NY State.

We've not officially started Home Edding yet, but Master Beehive the elder is entering a geography competition which requires him to do a project on planning a trip to the North Pole, so he's quite caught up in that right now and ... well, monkey see, monkey do, Mr Beehive the younger is keen to do a research project too, so has decided to do one on "Elictisity". He wanted to know how electricity worked and inspired by the integrated projects that the Middle School at the Montessori did this week, he wants to do similar. He made a list of 10 items in the home today that use electricity.

We'll probably go to the library this week sometime to get out some books on the topic and he has already learned to build a circuit with Daddy, so when we get to Edinburgh we'll just reinforce this by getting the electricity kit out again.

I am envisaging a lot of work of this nature, the boys choosing something that grabs their interest and then we incorporate other subjects within it. It's true to life education i think. Education that happens as a natural extension to curiosity of the world. We may have to be a little more specific with maths and english, particularly for Master Beehive the elder, primarily because I feel there are things that "ought" to be known in english and things that will come up in exams in the future in maths that, even if they are never used in daily life, are necessary if he wants to sit an exam or return to school at some point. His dad is an accountant, so I am definitely expecting some form of natural mathematical tendencies to show through in one of the children, but then saying that, they have me, the maths dud, as their mother, so it may balance itself out :-)

Master Beehive the elder is supposed to be in the school Spelling Bee this Monday (weather permitting of course). We've had a lot of fun looking at the origins of words and then breaking them down. This is more my cup of tea!! Hopefully he'll get the chance to give it a bash before we leave, but the snow is not in his favour right now.

Okay, back to my real cup of tea!