Whenever the school is closed for an extended break, we find ourselves spending time there even without the students. There is often much to do. Animals and plants need care, and we frequently find that we spend time during the break preparing new things for the classroom. I’ve been getting folders ready, making new labels for the new students who will be attending once school resumes, and doing some general tidying. It is somewhat relaxing to be at school when it is quiet.

During this break I had the opportunity to spend time in my daughter’s school, too. Since this is the first year of operation for them, there was so much more to do. Through trial and error, they are discovering the things that work well and those that need to be tweaked up. Also, as children in that new environment progress, there are many new things that need to be added to the shelves.

While there I spent some time getting new grammar materials arranged on the shelves and helping to plan new biology materials. I also sorted through the stereognostic items and put some new materials out. There were reading materials to organize, too. Next year they will be adding an elementary program and I went through all the math materials that were still crated, finding those that could be added to the present math shelves. When I think back to my own humble beginnings, I am truly amazed at how far my daughter’s school has come in such a short time.

I was delighted to see a wonderful practical life lesson that she had created for teaching children how much toilet paper to select and also how to change the empty toilet paper rolls. I want to make one of those for my own classroom.

There was much other work to do there and I wish I could have spent more time, but home was calling. I have a few more days to get things done here before the children fill the classrooms with busy-ness. I look forward to those eager faces.

I learned today that Montessori is a three ring circus. But OH, let me explain.

Today was our holiday open house, which is a wonderful event for parents to have a chance to come into the classroom and share lessons with their children. The open house begins immediately after school, but not all parents are able to attend at that time, so we let the children play outside until their parents come. For some of the children, especially the younger ones, it is VERY hard to wait for parents in the classroom where other children are happily sharing with their parents.

So I was on the playground with a handful of mixed age children this afternoon watching them create their own games (it is always interesting to see what kinds of creative play they develop). Today there was something going on with hoola hoops and balls for a while. One child would hold a hoola hoop overhead while the other children took turns attempting to throw the ball through the hoop. It looked like great fun, and indeed, the children were having a blast.

But the game morphed into something else as some of the children drifted off. Four remained playing with hoola hoops, but now the hoops were on the ground and there appeared to be some kind of dancing and jumping around them. I heard the children call one child a monkey and I considered monitoring closer to assure that there was no name-calling, but the four truly seemed to be interacting positively, so I kept out of it. Then a girl broke away from the group and came careening over to me in great excitement.

“Aleta, Aleta!” she announced. “We have a three-ring circus! It’s a Montessori three-ring circus!” Ho, ho. A Montessori three-ring circus. I chuckled to myself for a long time over that. Imagine what the media could do with it!

This was simply a wonderful day at school. At least for me it was. I spent the best part of the morning in the elementary. We are busy getting things ready for the holidays. The kids make gifts for one another and form their parents. And they make a decorated bag to take things home in. So those tasks were going on along with the normal hum of activity.

The weather was so nice today that we decided to let the elementary students eat outside at the picnic tables. That was great fun. I look forward to doing that more frequently as we round the corner into spring.

In the afternoon I was with the kindergarten. We did some French for a while. I wanted to try out using my computer to play the CD. The CD player in the early childhood class doesn’t have a counter, and I have not been able to find one to buy. When we are doing French from the CD I often have to stop and start it and begin in the middle of a section. It is very annoying to have to fast forward through a section I don’t need to find the place I’m looking for.

So, I thought I’d give the CD player in my computer a try. I was mostly worried that without external speakers the children would not be able to hear it well enough, but it worked like a charm.

After a bit of French I gave some lessons with the new art postcard materials we received. The kindergarteners really enjoyed that. they were busy, busy, busy after learning how to use the packets. I predict that we will be seeing lots of art appreciation work over the next couple days!

Yes, being able to move back and forth between classes is the best of both worlds.

For the past couple of weeks I have spent very little time in either classroom. I have been working under a deadline to complete the self-study for re-accreditation of the Montessori teacher training organization that runs in the summer. It has been an arduous and tedious task. I really should have had it completed earlier in the year, but circumstances just kept that from happening. This process happens every seven years, and this was the first time that I had to do it mostly on my own. Fortunately, I had been through it twice before.

Today I finally finished. Just before lunch I completed copying the entire self-study. While the elementary children were on the playground I took the binder to the post office to get it mailed out to the accrediting agency. What a relief.

What I didn’t realize, though, was how much I missed being with the children, and how much they missed me. During the late afternoon, I went outside to give Carl some extra time to finish doing the Friday afternoon cleaning. One of the three year olds saw me from across the playground, squealed my name and came running at full speed to me for a hug. I think it is time for me to get back into the classroom. I’m glad that self-study has been sent.

Many, many years ago, when Parent Child Press first began offering the art postcards for art appreciation lessons, I purchased some for the classroom. There was considerable work involved to prepare the postcards for use by the children. I remember the hours of mounting the pictures, writing the necessary information on the backs of the cards and adding color-coding dots. Furthermore, I had to make folders in which to organize and store the postcards, ready for use.

When visiting my daughter’s school earlier in the year I was delighted to see the new materials that she had. Her postcards came nearly classroom ready. What an improvement! I was delighted at how pretty these looked in the room.

The school recently received a wonderful gift enabling us to purchase another set of these art materials. All these years the two classrooms have shared a partial set. Yesterday I received an e-mail from Parent-Child Press informing me that the new cards have been shipped and should arrive on Wednesday. I’m anxiously awaiting these new materials.

I was working away in the elementary Friday morning when Carl reminded me that since Emily was out it was my day to “do” group in the EC classroom. I normally do singing or French with the children since the others are not as strong in those areas, but Friday we took a different direction.

After singing a welcoming song I looked around the group of eager faces and realized that we needed some work on what kinds of things should go in one’s mouth. We talked about germs and I explained that a better word would be “bacteria.” I also told the children that we all have our own bacteria living in our mouths that are just fine for us, but maybe not so fine for others. The children came up with all sorts of things that were okay to go into one’s mouth, from food to tableware to straws. I was both pleased and amazed at how thorough they were in listing these things. We talked about why fingers and lessons should not go into mouths because then the bacteria that are okay for us might get into someone for whom they weren’t so okay. The children really seemed to understand this.

To round out the discussion, we practiced how to sneeze or cough into the inside of our elbows so the bacteria would go onto a place that would not be getting on other surfaces were people could accidentally pick them up. This was the highlight of the group time. What fun!

Earlier in the year the elementary children learned that it takes about 30 seconds (or about how long it takes to sing the Alphabet Song) of hand rubbing during hand washing to get most of the bacteria off their hands. I get tickled to hear the Alphabet Song all the time now. At least I know they are listening! And getting their hands cleaner!

I very much enjoyed my trip to Florida to observe two interns who work there. It is truly reassuring to see teachers applying what they have learned in training successfully. My trip included observations of two elementary classrooms in one school.

It is always interesting to see how different schools address their physical constraints. This school was fairly large with separate buildings for the different levels. I felt the loss of the flow between older students and younger ones, but the physical separation of the classes precluded that. They had a large playground, but because of the numerous classes using it, they had to schedule outdoor time very strictly to allow all of the children some outdoor time. Unfortunately, that meant that some of the children did not get an uninterrupted work cycle. What a shame.

I was late arriving at school this morning. The first student I saw was a kindergartener carrying a lesson from the elementary class back into the EC class. I felt an immediate appreciation for our flow between the classes. I think it is good for the students to have a feel for the entire community.

No matter how nice the classrooms were where I visited, I’m glad to be back.

What a surprise we had when we arrived at school Friday morning. Even before I noticed that the hall lights were out, I saw the emergency lighting shining in the early childhood classroom. Oh! Oh! No power.

Carl and I had a quick conference about what to do. Under normal circumstances, the electric department is very quick about restoring power, but in this case we realized that there were going to be many areas of the county (and whole region) without power. It might be a long time before we would be up and running again. Since it was too late to announce that school would be closed, we decided to have one of those emergency days where we would keep those children whose parents really had no other place for them to go. So as parents began arriving (only a few minutes after us) we conferred with each of them about their status.

We ended up with a total of eight children. The younger ones in the early childhood class needed to be escorted into the room because the office was darker than they were comfortable with! The older ones took it pretty much in stride. Fortunately, the morning started off fairly warm. We knew that the temperatures would be dropping as the day progressed, though.

Carl went home to get a generator to run the furnace from if it came to that. A second piece of good fortune was that the power was restored about the time we started noticing a chill in the inside temperature.

With the low number of children, teachers were able to get some extra tasks completed. I made the new atom models that had come in earlier in the week. It took several hours to complete that task, so this was a good opportunity.

The students were busy throughout the day. I was somewhat inspired to hear the elementary students strategizing about how only a few of them would accomplish all the chores that a whole class normally performs.

And I was REALLY impressed with the responsibility of the school news correspondent. He came to school in the afternoon to get his news article completed since it was due at the newspaper by 3:00 PM. It would have done him no good to be at school in the morning because there was no power to the computers, either! I could tell he was upset about going home during arrivals.

And that really highlights another aspect of the emergency day. Most of the children just wanted to stay at school instead of going home. Isn’t that a welcome attitude?