Pink Houses (er, Shelves)

My son and I are only one week into our magical mystery tour and we've already visited a zoo, attended a wedding, enjoyed a festival, watched a parade, run a 5K (well, in Parker's case, a 1K... most of it atop his grandfather's shoulders), waded in Lake Erie, careened around naked in my in-laws' backyard (OK, I abstained from that activity), bathed in mud (that one, too), visited a local orchard, strolled along the remnants of a bustling, prosperous nineteenth century canal, romped around my husband's family's 150-year-old family farm, and eaten a combined total of seven ears of sweet corn, half a peck of peaches and one buckeye. This weekend promises more excitement, with a trip to my father-in-law's factory, an evening of bowling, a morning at Cedar Point Amusement Park where we'll cheer on my father-in-law as he swims in a half-Ironman and an afternoon celebrating the Erie County park system.

Believe it or not, we've had ample downtime in the midst of all the hullabaloo, during which my son and his doting, ever-patient grandmother have played and played and (cue the trumpets) done some Montessori activities! My mother-in-law used to teach in a Montessori school here in Ohio, and she prepared for our visit by setting some old pink shelves (originally built for her own kids) in a corner of her living room and filling them with all sorts of fun Montessori-inspired materials. Grandma Betty and Parker have been bead stringing, gluing, pouring and labeling. They've done puzzles together, read books and created farm and zoo scenes using little animal figurines and pieces of felt. It's awesome to see my son not only basking in the love and affection of his grandparents, but also practicing old skills and acquiring new ones under the tutelage of a teacher other than yours truly. Students cannot help but benefit from occasionally being taught by a "substitute teacher." Different teachers use different methods, have different personalities and provide a different point of view. And my son has the best substitute of all in his grandma; my mother-in-law is a natural educator and constantly perceives learning opportunities, even in the most mundane of tasks.

I, myself, have learned a lot over the past seven days. It's such a gift to be able to sit back and really observe your youngster, especially when you're accustomed to acting as his primary caregiver and educator. My son has been absolutely insatiable with regard to knowledge since we arrived here; he's soaked up everything his grandmother has said to him as well as everything we've seen, from the trucks on the highways to the combine harvesters in the fields to the family photos displayed around the house. That's not a huge surprise, though, since Parker, like most three-year-olds, wants to know everything about just about everything. Also not surprising is how much he has profited from his grandmother's seemingly endless reserves of patience. She either has a very good poker face or she just really and truly never gets frustrated while interacting with my son (and I tend to think it's the latter). It's obvious to me that Parker is thriving in the glow of his grandmother's (and grandfather's) unconditional love. More to the point, it's undeniable to me that he's learning more; and he's learning more because he's not distracted by the fear that his grandmother will fly off the handle if he spills a little glitter or gives up halfway through putting the matrushka dolls back together. (In case you haven't read any of my earlier posts, I have a bad habit of occasionally flying off the handle.) What is surprising to me is how beneficial it's been to have the pink "school shelves" constantly at hand. At home we keep our school materials put away and only pull them out when it's school time, and no playing is allowed during school time. Here, Parker flits from playing with cars to bead stringing to playing with trucks to gluing to reading books to playing ball. It just feels so much more organic, and there's never a "But I don't like school!" struggle. It makes me think that maybe I shouldn't keep Parker's school stuff tucked away in his closet. I don't know, though, if I could really let go of the reins. The absence of structure scares me. I mean, our culture has taught us that kids need to spend a set amount of time in school; a set amount of time learning (or being taught, at least), without any toy-like distractions. What would happen if I did away with school time? Would my son still learn--would he periodically choose to pick up his graduated blocks or dressing busy board--or would he spend all day vrooming his Matchbox cars around the kitchen table? I don't know, but my mother-in-law's pink shelves are making me wonder.

Skyscrapers and Sandpaper

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Cutting
• Graduated Blocks
• Rough and Smooth Boards
• Using Tongs

I must have missed the memo about three being the new two. My son chose to skip the "terrible twos"--allowing me to slip into a naively content and unguarded state of mothering--only to dive head first into some sort of "tyrannical threes" phase. He's willful, ornery, domineering and contrary. Quite contrary--if I say up, he says down, if I say sit, he says run, if I say playground, he says beach. It's to such a degree that I'm absolutely certain that if I said, "Let's go play at the beach and then eat lots of cake and ice cream and then go to the store and buy one hundred new toy trucks for you," my son would reply, "STAY HOME!" So I wasn't exactly shocked this morning when he lay down on the couch and stated in his most crotchety voice, "I'm not doing school," after I'd pulled out our school shelves and rung our school bell. I just said, "OK, I'll do school by myself," grabbed the cutting materials and started placidly snipping away. Soon enough, Parker was sitting by my side, patiently awaiting his turn with the scissors.

I've noticed that my son tends to enjoy--and be able to apply himself more patiently and with more focus to--new activities the second or third time he works on them. Maybe this is because the newness of the materials is a distraction to him the first time he handles them, or maybe it's because he needs a school session or two to completely grasp the object of the activity, or maybe it's because I get incredibly, hyperactively excited when I'm presenting a new activity to him and he can't concentrate when his mom is acting like such a geek. Regardless, today proved no different; he had a lot more fun working with the graduated blocks today than he did yesterday, especially once he started stacking them on top of his little table, thereby creating a really tall ("taller than me, Mommy!") "skyscraper." Like my mother-in-law said, preschoolers love repetition, and Parker confirmed that fact by building and dismantling his skyscraper again and again and again (and again and again). I do still struggle with staying silent while my son is working--it was hard not to speak up when I saw him grabbing the wrong block--but obviously there is so much value in sitting back and letting him discover (and remedy!) his errors all on his own.

I introduced the rough and smooth boards activity this morning, which is designed to stimulate tactile awareness and illustrate the textural opposites of rough and smooth. The materials for this activity are three-inch squares of various grades of sandpaper, glued to pieces of cardboard. You make at least six of these "boards," jumble them up and then have your kid sort them according to feel. Parker was already familiar with the terms (rough, smooth), because I often use them to describe things he touches (and, like all little tots, he is absolutely addicted to touching anything and everything): a tree's bark or a marble or his dad's unshaven chin or the glossy cover of a magazine. He liked feeling the sandpaper squares, but he quickly realized that the grey squares were the ones that felt smooth ("flat") while the brown ones were the rough-feeling ones. Like I briefly discussed yesterday, when creating the materials for these sensorial activities, it's important to have everything appear the same except the object of the lesson (in this case, texture). In other words, the sandpaper squares should have all been the same color, shape, size (even smell and taste!); the only thing that differentiated them should have been their texture. I could not find various grades of sandpaper that were all the same color, though. My solution to this was to have my son do the activity while wearing a blindfold after he'd become acquainted with the materials. He would then have to sort the sandpaper squares by touch, not sight. Well, when I rolled up a kitchen towel and told Parker that I was going to tie it around his head so that he wouldn't be able to see anything, he did a pretty good imitation of a donkey digging in his heels. Apparently, he feels very attached to his sense of sight. When I was a little girl, I used to love to tie a bandana across my eyes and stumble around the house blind, so I was a little confused by my son's resistance. But he's never been blindfolded before and I guess the idea can sound a little unnerving if it gets sprung on you out of the blue (like when you're sitting in school with your mom, happily sorting some sandpaper squares). I didn't force it. Instead, I donned the kitchen towel and let my son watch me categorize the squares using my sense of touch. Meanwhile, he used his sense of sight to tell me whether I'd grouped the squares correctly or not.

Postscript: I put out some uncooked penne with the tongs today (usually we do the using tongs activity with cotton balls). Parker ended up putting the tongs down and eating the "crunchy pasta" only a few minutes into the activity. He had refused to eat all morning (did I tell you he's been acting contrary?), so it didn't surprise me. In fact, I switched out the cotton balls with the penne at the start of school because I figured he had to be hungry. Uncooked pasta is better than nothing.

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?

I've Created a (Cleaning) Monster

TODAY'S ACTIVITIES:

• Transferring
• Using a Dropper
• Pouring
• Hardware Puzzles
• Dusting

Not much new or exciting happened in homeschool today. That's not to say that my son and I didn't enjoy ourselves--scooping beans together was an absolute blast--but we didn't really do anything I'd call newsworthy. And no, I haven't finished the dressing busy board yet...

Although I'm undoubtedly much better at keeping quiet while my son is working than I was at the start of our homeschooling adventure, I still struggle with the need to stay muzzled. I don't speak unless spoken to while Parker's actually working on an activity, but I realized this morning that I have an annoying habit of verbally prodding him whenever he pauses in his endeavors. "How are you doing? Are you finished with this activity? What do you want to do next? Do you want to do the clothespins next?" Blergh. The poor kid is just sitting back for a minute to take a break, maybe even to reflect upon what's been doing. We all do that from time to time while we're working; isn't that what the office water cooler is for? And I, his meddling mother, can't give him a moment's peace. OK, it's not as bad as all that, but still. I need to stop with the interrupting already.

It occurred to me the other day that there is one activity Parker has yet to revisit: folding. I presented it to him on the first day of school, using old washcloths upon which I'd drawn lines to guide him in the folding process. I dutifully bring out the washcloths along with all our other school supplies every time we do school, but they just sit there on the shelves, ignored. Since I'm still struggling to reign in my interventionist tendencies, you can bet that I've encouraged (well, maybe even nagged) my son to try the folding activity again. No dice, he is the opposite of interested. (Probably my repeated prods haven't helped here.) So much for getting a little help with the laundry.

Speaking of getting a little help around the house, you might have noticed that my son does a lot dusting, most often at the end of our "school day." This is not because I'm trying to train him to be my own little Cinderfella. Parker really just loves to dust. I'm pretty sure a big reason why is that I bought him an old school feather duster (made from neon blue feathers, no less)--I didn't think he'd get as much of a kick out of a Swiffer. He probably also enjoys the opportunity to get up and move around, after more than an hour of sitting, doing schoolwork. While he was dusting on Monday, I decided I'd do a little sweeping. (I try to "do school" with him whenever I can, so my son doesn't feel like he's on stage while he's working, performing school activities for my viewing pleasure.) Parker at that point told me that I should really just get the vacuum out; apparently I'd let the floors get so dirty that my preschooler didn't think a broom could get the job done. Today while he was bouncing around the room, dusting stuff, he started commenting about all the dust he was finding. "Even there's dust behind my books, Mommy! Even there's dust under the bookcase, Mommy! Mommy! Even there's dust on the chairs!" Of course, I realize that he's three. He wasn't purposefully criticizing my housekeeping skills; he was merely making observations. But it's not so great to hear your kid tell you how dirty the house is. "Yes, Parker, I know. There's dust everywhere, all the time. Everything's always getting dusty, all day everyday. Even your books. Even the chairs." I don't think I'll point out to Parker the cobwebs on the ceiling, or the lizard poop on the counters.