Again + Again + Again = Got It!

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Dressing Busy Board
• Transferring
• Bead Stringing
• Sewing Cards

I'm definitely starting to see the value in repetition; that is to say, in not moving too fast through the Montessori preschool curriculum so as to allow my son to revisit activities over and over again. As the newness of an activity (and its materials) rubs off, Parker ceases playing with the materials and truly begins working with them. And though people often subconsciously apply a negative connotation to the word, in this context work is not onerous but both productive and satisfying (not to mention educational, of course!). Every time he practices the transferring activity, my son spills less rice. (Whereas, when he first attempted this activity, it almost seemed as though he derived a proportionate amount of joy from the quantity of rice that ended up on the tray.) This morning, after about 15 minutes of transferring rice (spilling only a few kernels), Parker took the materials back to the shelves. Just as he was about to put his favorite scoop back, he looked at the beads and said, "I want to try to scoop the ball beads." I said OK, and sat back to watch. The ball beads are round, and about half an inch in diameter. Now, smooth, hard, spherical objects have a tendency to roll around (a characteristic of which my son is quite fond), so transferring them in an open-ended scoop proved tricky. Parker stuck with it, carefully balancing as many of the beads as he could in his scoop before transferring the load to its receptacle. At first, ball beads kept dropping to the floor, skittering around and rolling under furniture, and I had to bite my tongue to keep from saying, "No more! You're making a mess!" Instead, I reminded him that if he made sure to hold the scoop over the tray, the beads would be less likely to fall overboard onto the floor. After a few minutes, though, it was a moot point because Parker had mastered the "art" of transferring ball beads using a small scoop.

I know I'm making a big deal about something not so earth-shattering--I mean, we're talking about scooping beads, right?--but that's because there's a bigger lesson in it for me. I recounted the above anecdote from school today because I think it speaks to the value of revisiting lessons, even those seemingly already learned. The way teachers in conventional schools design their curriculum, students are usually given one opportunity to learn a particular lesson; this is especially true in secondary schools (middle school and high school) and colleges. Once the lesson is taught (or lecture given), the teacher maybe assigns some relevant homework and then moves on, usually regardless of whether each and every student has really understood the object of the lesson in question. I know the pressures public school teachers are under to meet state standards, but this is not really education to me. This, to me, is akin to training a pet monkey. Just because a student can go through the motions doesn't mean he really understands what he's doing, not to mention why he's doing it. This morning, Parker used a skill he'd mastered over time (transferring rice) in a new and slightly different context (scooping beads). Maybe I'm making too much of it, but to me it was a sign that he had internalized the lesson; that he was no longer going through the motions. If I'd powered through the practical life activities and already moved us forward in the curriculum, my son wouldn't have had a chance to revisit transferring day after day after day. He'd have moved some spoonfuls of rice from one container to another, and that would have been that. Instead, he's seeking out new ways in which he can apply his transferring skills, outside of the context of rice and spoon.

I thumbed through the two books I'm using the most in this homeschooling adventure (Teaching Montessori in the Home and Teach Me to Do It Myself), and noticed a few practical life activities I'd yet to present to Parker, one of which is sewing cards. You know how I feel about sewing, but who's to say I shouldn't give my son a chance to take a stab at sewing just because I suck at it. My mom, the needlepoint aficionado, bought Parker some cute Cat in the Hat sewing cards a couple years ago, when Toddler Parker kept trying to play with (read: destroy) all of her needlepoint projects. Mom gave him the sewing cards, telling him they were his own "needlepoint." (This sort of worked. Sort of.) I pulled the cards out of the back of his toy cupboard this morning and asked Parker whether he wanted to do some "needlepointing" in school today. He did, and he enjoyed himself immensely. Can you see where he gets his sewing skills from?