22 September

Last day of school today! I am so looking forward to spending some Spring days relaxing at home. But to be honest, we also love our school days - we are Montessorians and we have really embraced the whole Montessori philosophy at home as well.








My little people have learned to work independently as well as to cooperate (mostly) with each other. And they have such a love of learning - Miss M is curious about everything, and one of the great things about a Montessori classroom is that the children learn without realising it. They don't sit down at desks and learn lessons from the board by rote; they choose their own work and they feel such a sense of accomplishment when they complete it all by themselves. They do have a checklist of things they have to complete by the end of the day - for example, they have to select two pieces of maths work and two of literacy work, but it is up to them which pieces they choose and which order they do it in. They can't get away with coming to school and doing nothing except grate cheese all day long (apparently there was one child who began to do this - the teacher gently directed the child to other things once they got the daily cheese fix out of their system!). Miss M loves every minute of it - she is zooming ahead with her maths and her reading, and she loves the social aspect of it - the classes combine different age groups (she is currently in the 3-6 cycle) and she enjoys playing with younger children as well as her own peer group. When I pick her up I always ask her how her day was; she always answers "it was fantastic - 100 out of 10!"

Mister O only goes one day a week at the moment, and I accompany him. He has benefitted so much as well - he has always been very independent but now he has learned that there are steps to every task he completes, and that if he does them in a certain order he can complete them with much less frustration. He likes the routine of the tasks - setting them up, completing them, packing them away. He gets a lot of satisfaction from doing all this for himself, and he has become much more confident in what he does.

Wearing Dad's old glassless glasses ;)



I know that this post isn't directly craft related, but it is still all a part of my creative journey through life :)