Sammy received her end of year “report card,” such as it is from a Montessori program. Actually, they call it a “progress report.” There are a couple dozen categories in which the child is rated from 1-5 (“works with moveable alphabet,” “enjoys listening to music,” “demonstrates grace and courtesy,” etc.), but it’s really the teacher’s narrative that is meaningful. Last year, the theme of the report was that Sammy needed to be more independent. I was so concerned! This is why we were sending her to Montessori! She was independent at home. Why wasn’t she choosing work on her own and being so timid at school? Why were we paying all this money for her to sit around and peel carrots?

Well, I was wrong and I was right. Developing her independences is the primary reason we sent her to Montessori, but the fact that she wasn’t showing independence wasn’t the fault of her school or her character – it was no cause for alarm. It was just what she had to go through to get where she needed to be, and thank god she is in Montessori, because this year, she got there! And she did it on her own, the Montessori way, because she was ready, not because someone pushed her.

This year, Sammy flourished. She blossomed. She went from reticent, shy, clingy school-Sammy, to choosing her own friends, choosing her own work, working hard every day, acting with confidence, and really concentrating on her work. I couldn’t be more pleased. Of course, she has made excellent progress in the “academic” side of school as well. She is reading real books now – her language development is far ahead of the curve. She is also on-track with numbers and math, which she was completely uninterested in last year. She works with all the other materials in the classroom as well, from geography puzzles to the musical bells. But to me, those things are consequences. The important thing is that Sam is learning about the rewards of work and effort, about independence, and about values.

This year, her teacher mentions that Sammy still sometimes needs direction in choosing more challenging activities, and her underdeveloped fine-motor skills are still holding her back. (Isn’t it wonderful that in Montessori, a need for direction in choosing more challenging activities is not seen as normal, but something to be improved upon? The child is expected to learn to choose challenging activities for his own, selfish purposes.) I must have blossomed right along with Sam because now, I’m not worried. Instead of flipping out about how Sam must be lazy or fears failure, I just see this as part of the road that she needs to travel. Some kids struggle in other ways. Sammy struggles with self-confidence. There is no better place for her to learn it firsthand than in a Montessori classroom. I can’t wait to see how she develops next year! And maybe I’ll learn something again, too.

In the past week, Sam did more polishing and cutting, and did the metal insets one time.  (I’m shocked that she isn’t working with those more often.)  We added a few new activities.  Since she can’t use the hole punch yet, I punched a row of holes in a small piece of paper and showed her how to hold it on top of another piece of paper and fill in the holes with a felt-tip marker to make rows of holes.  She liked that, but only for about 5 minutes.

I also made my own version of the spindle box.  I wanted to do the number rods first, but I hadn’t figured out how to make them.  Luckily, Sam seems to be doing well with the spindle box, which in my case, is an egg carton and macaroni:

You just dump out all the macaroni and then put the right number of pieces back in each cup.  The first time Sam tried it she was all over the map, but today she got them all right except for 8 and 9.  It’s fun to watch her progress.

We also did some non-Montessori games that were fun and educational.  I had brought home some dice for her from Las Vegas, so we played “highest wins.”  We each rolled one die and then figured out who had the higher number.  Sam liked that a lot except that we had some bad luck and I won much too often for her taste.  (She is just beginning to want to win games.)

Then we played with a game called First Words Puzzle Set which is just a huge set of cardboard cards, each with a picture and a word, and each of which is split into two puzzles pieces.  If we only use about 5 cards, Sam can put the puzzle pieces together and she can read some of the words.  She likes to do that kind of game with me but occasionally she will play it by herself.  This video is from a few weeks ago, but it shows her playing Zingo by herself, and how pleased she is when she “wins:”

I had intended to start out in a formal, Montessori way: a dedicated time for school, starting with circle time; a separate space for the Montessori materials, away from toys and other distractions; and me 100% prepared to give proper demonstrations for everything.

Not!

I didn’t have time to do any work on this project at OCON as I had intended.  We got home and I was totally swamped but I knew that if I didn’t get started right away, the whole summer might pass us by.  I wanted to jump right in, but I only had a few things set up, and some were only half-ready, and I didn’t know the proper way to do anything much at all.  I guess “prepared environment” really means a lot of prep work, huh?    

I did have a few things ready, so I decided to just allow Sam to work on them during the normal course of the day.  This destroys any ambition of having her concentrate for long periods of time or being totally free to choose any work that she is interested in.  I’d like to move towards that goal, but for now, at least she spends some time doing structured activities independently. 

Here is what our little homeschool looks like:

I don’t have enough open shelving, so the drawers have to suffice.  Some of them contain Montessori work and some contain other toys.  Not ideal.  The colored bins on the right hold regular toys and you can see a doll-house on the floor right next to the table. 

I had to put the metal insets in a different room because they took up so much space:

We have two mostly unused bedrooms in this house, either of which could serve as a dedicated school room and solve these problems, but they are being used for storage now, so it would be an enormous effort to clean them out.  Also, they are not on the main level of the house where my computer is, and where the kitchen is.  I have a feeling that Sam would not take well to working in an isolated room like that, and I would have nothing to do.  I do plan to use one of those bedrooms for homeschooling when it’s a full-time thing, at which time I’ll move my office into the same room.

For our work, we started with polishing pennies, the metal insets, and cutting along a line.  For the pennies, I set up all the needed items on a tray:

I demonstrated how to place one penny on a napkin (which she has to get from her kitchen cabinet), to take a Q-Tip, dip it in the lemon juice and roll it on the side of the glass to avoid drips, and to rub the penny.  We had a few shiny, clean pennies, so I showed her what the penny should look like.  When she is satisfied (and I leave this up to her), she puts the shiny pennies in the other cup.  (For all of you die-hards out there, yes I do put the dirty pennies on the left and the clean ones on the right – always left-to-right!  This was how the tray looked after she finished.)  As soon as I can remember to buy actual lemons at the store, we’ll add squeezing the lemons as part of the process.  For now, I refill the little cup with bottled lemon juice every night.

I set up the metal insets for her and reviewed for myself how they are to be used.  So I’m prepared to demonstrate, but she hasn’t used them yet.  As part of the set-up, I had to cut a lot of paper into squares the same size as the metal insets, and I ended up with a lot of small pieces of paper.  I decided to use it for “cutting along the line.”  This is exactly what it sounds like: the child uses scissors to cut along a line drawn on paper.  I created a series of paper with lines and Sam spent about an hour working on this on Friday, so I suspect I’m going to have to make a new set of paper with lines every night for a while.  Here is a video of what I made for this exercise:

After I took the video I decided to eliminate the papers with more than one line.  I didn’t do that in the first go-around and now I’m thinking it was a bad idea.  Another part of this exercise that Sammy really likes is that when she cuts the squiggles, she ends up with two pieces of paper that look a bit like jigsaw puzzle pieces.  She enjoys putting them back together again.  The paper and a pair of scissors are on a tray just like the one for the pennies, and she can bring it to her table to work on any time she chooses.

I also tried to teach her how to use a hole-punch to make rows of holes, but she didn’t have the hand strength to use it.  I have another, similar exercise dealing with rows that I’ll set up this week, though.  I’m really glad that I wrote up my earlier blog post detailing all of the activities I wanted to do – I’ve been referring to it often.

So far, this is going really well!  It’s low-pressure and we both are having fun.  If it continues to work well, I might not ever make it more formal.  Thank god she has her real Montessori school nine months out of the year.  I think it would be really, really hard, if not impossible (without other children) to create the same kind of environment at home.  But I must say, this is an auspicious beginning for both of us!