Parent-Teacher Conference

Alex has now been at Community Montessori School for about two months. I spent the first month bribing and begging him to get into the car every morning and feeling my heart break every time I had to leave my crying darling at school. He really did not like it. I think a big part of the reason was that he started about three weeks after most of the children so he felt like everyone knew each other and he didn't know anyone. He kept saying he had no friends (very hard for any mama to hear from their child) and that he didn't know anyone's name.

Well here we are two months into school and just the other morning he told me he loved school. He actually gets a hint of sadness on Saturdays because there is no school (he does not get that from his parents). He now has his little group of friends and according to his teacher a little girl who invites Alex to join her for tea everyday. Alex has told me about her and tells me that she loves to drink tea, but she talks too much. He also has the friend who he gets crazy with and has to be told not to work with him anymore. He loves tracing, table washing and the geometry cabinet. His teacher says he is not too interested in practical life anymore, but loves sensorial, he actually spent half an hour on the binomial cube trying to put it away, he got it upside down but managed to put it away.

Every day I am blown away with the things that he comes home with that he has clearly learned at school. There are a lot of thins that I can take credit for teaching him, but recently most of learning is definitely coming from Montessori. As a Montessori teacher I obviously wholeheartedly believe in the methodology but it wasn't until I had Alex that I got to see Montessori in practice in the home. I always saw things happening in the classroom, but it is reassuring to know that the lessons learned at school actually carry on over into practical use at home. I have many examples of this happening with Alex but a few of the ones that stick out in my mind are him helping with laundry and hanging clothes on hangers properly. The other night one of his shirts fell off the hanger and he actually went and fixed it. He has always loved to wash windows in our house but now he will notice that they are dirty and go get the squeegee to clean them. He loves to teach me lessons when he gets home from school and he always makes sure I have a mat to put my work on. He is so quick to correct any mistake that I make. He loves to do his homework which could be table washing or tracing numbers.