Sur la Table!

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Using a Dropper
• Transferring
• Using Chopsticks
• Bead Stringing
• Dusting

My son and I are three weeks into our homeschooling adventure, and we finally have a table upon which he can do schoolwork. It's not the beautiful, well-crafted, small wooden table (with matching chair!) I'd been envisioning, but it'll do. One of the lesser known precepts of the Montessori method is that children should be surrounded by objects that are not only aesthetically pleasing but also finely made. Needless to say, there's not a lot of plastic furniture in most Montessori schools. Of course, I could have paid an arm and a leg to get lovely wooden shelves and a beautiful wooden table and chairs set shipped here to St. John, but I balked at the thought of such exorbitant spending. (I did order a cute Little Tikes plastic table and chairs set from Amazon a month ago; when I called customer service several days ago to ask why the set had yet to be shipped, the Amazon agent informed me that they wouldn't be sending it until mid-July at the earliest. I cancelled the order. At that rate, we most likely wouldn't have received the table set until September.) My husband, my son and I went to St. Thomas to see the new Toy Story movie this past Saturday, and quickly stopped by the Home Depot there on our way back to the car ferry. You can always count on a box store, even in the Virgin Islands: I found a little red plastic table (I think intended as patio furniture) for $8.09. It's not aesthetically pleasing or well-crafted, but it'll do.

I'm feeling a wee bit ho hum about having to spend another week (or more) repeating practical life activities with Parker. I know that he's getting a lot out of the repetition--mastering the materials and becoming more comfortable with the homeschool concept--but doing things like transferring rice and stringing beads doesn't exactly make me fall out of my chair from sheer excitement. As we progress through the Montessori curriculum, school will most definitely stimulate me more and more. Up next are the sensorial set of activities; we'll be experimenting with varying temperatures and textures and sounds. After that, we'll begin working with numbers, then letters. The awesome part about embarking on this education journey with my son is that the sky--no, the universe!--is the limit. Eventually, we'll be learning about physics and biology and geography and geology and cosmology and all sorts of stuff. But we have to start somewhere; Parker needs to figure out the intricacies of daily life before he can tackle the big, abstract concepts. So we'll stick with activities like pouring water for now. We're in no rush.

I was hoping to have completed the dressing busy board (buttoning, buckling, lacing, tying, etc.) by now, but that thing is taking me forever to finish. Since I couldn't introduce a new activity (darn busy board), I looked for other ways to add a little intrigue to school today. I put a drop of food coloring in the water we use for the dropper activity, and I replaced the rice in the transferring activity with a mix of dried beans. (Technically, you're supposed to have your kid do the beans first, then the rice--thereby progressing to transferring smaller, finer objects--but oh well.) Using tongs is another recommended practical life activity, but I'm still awaiting the set of small tongs I ordered (yes, from Amazon). In a moment of inspiration, I broke out the kiddie chopsticks I bought at a Sur la Table store in St. Louis last fall and let Parker have a go at picking up the beans with those.

Postscript: Apparently, in Parker's world, anything that can be poured must be poured, so there's always pouring performed at some point when he's doing the transferring, bead stringing and using a dropper activities. I wondered for the longest time whether I should lay down the law and say, "Hey! No pouring! Only transferring!" I recently decided that I'd rather remain quiet and allow him the freedom to explore the materials. I'm sacrificing structure by doing so, but encouraging initiative. Or something like that.