At the farm festival for the Middle School I had made lots and lots of corn bread. It was the sweet variety. There was a great quantity left over and I brought it to school for the teachers to enjoy. After we had all eaten as much as we could hold yesterday there was still plenty left over and Rebecca suggested that we serve it for snacks today.

It was a hit. Some of the children wanted to know if we could have it for snacks again. So I told them I would send home the recipe. And here it is:

Sift together:
¾ cup self-rising corn meal
1 cup self-rising flour
1/3 cup sugar

Stir together:
1 cup milk
1 egg
2 Tbsp melted butter (I use the squeeze kind to save time)

Mix both sets of ingredients gently and pour into a greased 8” square pan.
Bake at 425 degrees for 20 minutes.

As a side note, I was just getting ready to put the last three batches into the oven Friday night when the big storm came through. The electricity did its flickering act and I wished for only 20 minutes to get all that corn bread finished. Just think. If I had lost power, the kids at school might never have had this special treat!

Note: I wrote this yesterday, but could not access my site.

I have written previously about how much I appreciate the biomes materials available from Waseca. This morning a first year student got out the biomes of Africa for the grasslands. He had worked on these previously and was able to remember every animal that he had done. I overheard him reciting these to another adult.

Then over the next forty-five minutes he read about each of the remaining animals, drew their pictures and labeled them. He was in deep concentration for most of that time. He was working at the table where I was conducting student-teacher conferences. At one point he looked up and said, “I think I’ll do my conference before I finish these.”

Once he had completed his conference he went right back to work. The interesting thing though was that during his conference he expressed an interest in doing further research on elephants. We see this phenomenon fairly frequently. One activity inspires another, and another.

We also see that horizontal inspiration happens. One child gets excited about a topic and that interest spreads to others. We even use that process to get disinterested children inspired in different areas.

Through it all, I find that the biomes material lend themselves to a great deal of inspiration across the curriculum.

Some children come to us with more challenges than others. One student has struggled this year with behaviors that might test Maria Montessori herself. We see improvement followed by regression in a pendulum swing that keeps us working hard to meet the particular needs of this student.

Today he said to me, “I finished all the work on my desk, did an SRA without anyone asking me to, and was really busy.”

“Sounds pretty impressive,” I replied. “How do you feel?”

“GREAT!”

Of course. Don’t we all feel good when we have really accomplished something?

Another student has sometimes expressed some boredom. She is certainly old enough to understand the idea of “flow” as described by Csikszentmihalyi in the book by that name. I shared with her a chart that shows how flow is most easily achieved when the challenge and the skill level are in balance and neither is too low. She keeps that chart in her lesson log and refers to it these days when she is feeling a hint of boredom. On the chart boredom falls at the intersection of low skill level and low challenge. So, she now is learning that to combat boredom, she needs to increase her skill level and/or challenges.

In both of these cases, the challenge for us has been to find ways to allow the students to take more responsibility for their choices.

Challenge is intertwined in all our tasks!

Yesterday a second year student was matching element names to element samples. He asked about the graphite, wanting to know if it was really carbon. I assured him that it was.

He was suddenly quite animated, clasped his hands together and squeezed them. “Just think,” he said, “Diamonds are made of the same kind of atoms, but they are really, really tight.”

Yes, indeed. One could almost imagine the graphite being squeezed in those hands, turning into a diamond.

A dad said to me that he wants his kids to go to a school where they come home and talk about the things they do at school, sharing ideas about lessons they have learned. A school where the kids are upset when they are too sick to come…

Our peace pole is up. The dedication was yesterday. I learned that I still have a hard time thinking about the loss of the infant sibling for whom our pole is dedicated. I so appreciate that Wren’s grandparents donated such a beautiful memorial for him. The pole is lovely. The message is important. The memory of Wren will endure.

The annual May Pole dance followed our Peace Pole dedication. The children did a fabulous job weaving the ribbons in this celebration of spring. It is so short. I wish the dancing could go on and on.

When children work with the Montessori materials for math, they absorb the concepts seemingly effortlessly. Oftentimes when asked who taught them how to do something they seem surprised and answer that they taught themselves. In many ways, that isn’t far from the truth.

Today one of the first grade boys had the golden beads out to work with addition. The problems he had chosen did not involve any changing and when I glanced over at his process, I noticed that he was simply writing the answers without using the beads.

Hmmmm.

I checked in with him and observed that he understood exactly what he was doing and had added correctly, starting with the units and moving up the place values. Since he was obviously working in the abstract, I suggested that he try using the beads to do addition that involved sums that changed across the place values. He was delighted and attacked the challenge with gusto. At each change I observed a little physical burst of excitement. Shortly after he showed me his completed work. He had finished all the problems on the card and had gotten them correct. He was beaming.

I predict he will be doing addition with changing in the abstract very soon.