Okay, I wasn’t going to get into this whole “Tot School” thing, since we’re not really doing all that much in terms of formal schooling.  But, she did a few really cool things this week, and I know that “Tot School” isn’t supposed to necessarily mean “formal schooling” anyway, so I decided to jump on board and share.  Maybe next week I’ll take more pictures too…

First, art.  I’ve been getting Waldorf-y lately art-wise.  I’ve just read Painting with Children — I’ll post a review of that another time.  I’ve also broken down and ordered Stockmar watercolour paints and some accessories (painting board, paint jars and holder)… We’re still awaiting those, so I decided not to do the typical early Waldorf painting experience, where we would start with just one colour to fully experience it.  Pomme loves drawing great details — even though she’s only 3, she draws people with hair, eyelashes and eyebrows, toes, teeth, clothes… she draws a baseline too, which is apparently very unusual for her age.

So I decided to do a Waldorf-inspired “child copies the parent” painting.  I started with a light wash on part of the paper, for the grass, which she then imitated.  Then another wash for the sky.  Then we added a tree, apples on the tree (using a different brush technique), a sun in the sky, and a few people around the tree, all of which she duly (and most excitedly) imitated!

Here is my finished model:

According to Waldorf art principles, the people are deliberately simple, mere suggestions of people.  Here is her finished work — she had a bit too much water in the tree paint, so it ended up spreading and fading as it dried, obscuring just how amazing her tree looked originally.  But it still looks pretty cool!

Notice that her people are more detailed than mine — she tried to add faces, hair, etc, which didn’t work as well with the thicker paintbrushes, but she refused to just to basic shapes like I had.  The taller person is daddy, apparently, and the shorter one is her.  Then there’s a mere suggestion of a person on the other side of the tree — that’s one of her imaginary friends!

This was such a fun and simple activity.  We’ll definitely do this sort of thing again.

The only other thing we did ‘formally’ this week was math.  We’re working through Right Start level A — nice and slow, she’s only 3!  But she gets it and she loves it, so why not, eh?

So far, she’s learned to recognize quantities up to ten at sight (when grouped as “five and something”), using fingers, objects, tally sticks, or the abacus; instantly count aural taps up to ten; parallel and perpendicular; squares, rectangles and triangles (which she mostly already knew, but didn’t know a square was also a rectangle!); and repeating patterns with up to 4 elements (ie, Red Red Blue Green).

Rather than using the “bead cards” (reproducible in the appendix of the book) as a manipulative, I decided to make Montessori-style bead bars — like the golden bead bars, but using the 5-and-something patterns of Right Start, and using natural wood beads à la Waldorf.  Here’s one finished set:

I’m actually really proud of how these turned out.  I plan to make another post describing how they’re made, with more photos, and a video of Pomme helping!  She instantly recognizes each one, it’s so cool.

This week she did her first official math worksheet, as part of lesson 10.  This was writing tally marks to match the number of objects shown.  She’s only 3, so her writing is not great, but I think it’s darn good for a 3yo… (today she wrote “mom” on her own…)

Ain’t she something?!?

Most of this, of course, has not been “taught” to her.  At least not with any sense of expectation.  She’s been exposed to the concepts, she works with them herself, and she picks things up in her own time.  We only “teach” her when she’s asking for more, which she often does — a sign that she’s developmentally ready to learn it.  I’m so glad that I’ve read Dr. Montessori’s writings on early development and letting the child’s own interests and instinctive drives to learn lead the way.  Mostly, we just sit back and watch her develop.  We try not to interfere by ‘helping’ too much, but let her figure things out herself — that’s what she wants to do, anyway!

The next phase in her numeracy development that I’ve been watching is actually counting objects (ie, recognizing quantity as opposed to merely rattling off the sequence of counting words).  She’s recognized and been able to identify quantities of one and two for a long time now, but anything three and up was hit or miss.  She’d often get three, but usually anything three or above was just “a bunch of stuff” to her and she’d name a random large number.

Given just the option of “two or three” she did fine — for instance, I’d shown her that the black keys on the piano are in groups of two’s and three’s, and she loves going up and down the keyboard, placing her fingers over the groups, and saying “two group” and “three group”.  (And she also now knows that the white key in the middle of the two group is D in his doghouse!)

Yesterday, she quite suddenly (to my observation anyway — though of course it’s been gradually developing for awhile) and spontaneously pointed at my hand and said “four!” — I had indeed had four fingers up at that time (I can’t remember why lol).  So I tried other combinations and she was able to correctly identify how many when I’d hold up my fingers, all the way up to five.  She was confident and excited and loved the game.

I’ve been thinking of different activities we might do today to play with this new ability.  Then about a half-hour ago, she was sitting on my lap while I was on the computer, held up her own hand, and counted “one, two, fee, four, five!” while raising her fingers in turn.

She’s got it!  By george, she’s got it.

Flipper was about three when he did one more big step — he held up his hand, counted up his fingers “one, two, three, four, five”, then thought for a moment while staring at them… then put his fingers DOWN in turn and said “five, four, three, two, one” — completely spontaneously.  I don’t think he’d even had any real modelling of counting backwards, he just figured it out.  I remember how stunned I was that he would do that.

I’m very curious when Pomme will figure it out!

So I pounced on Pomme’s bedroom, which at one time a few months ago had been a paragon of Montessori organization and the epitome of orderliness.  In a bizarre series of events which I’m sure most parents are well-familiar with, empty boxes piled up, toys multiplied and spread, clothes expanded and erupted from drawers.  Besides which, there were still several moving boxes stowed in her closet that had yet to be unpacked (mostly toys belonging to Flipper).

The boxes were unpacked and sorted into stuff for the basement playroom, stuff for Flipper’s room, and GARBAGE to be tossed.  Honestly, if it weren’t for the wasted space in Flipper’s packing boxes — full of garbage (sometimes literally, like a rotten apple core), empty containers, and just plain old wasted space due to thing packed loosely — we could have been able to bring several things with us that ended up having to get left behind because there was no more room in the moving truck.  Things like, I’ve just discovered, my bike helmet (not too big a deal, easily replaced and probably due anyway), and one of my saddlebags (a bigger deal, because it was quite expensive and I believe was storing the waterproof covers for both the bags as well as my cycling computer — another expensive item).  But I digress.

Then we went after her clothes.  She has grown quite a bit lately, so there were plenty of things to pack away that were now too small.  The poor thing actually cried about some of them, especially the shoes.  Other things, it was just like a fun game.  “Too mall!” she would happily exclaim upon trying something on (even if it actually still fit just fine).

After that, we could tackle the toys.  Now of course by “toys” I mostly mean, well, educational activities of a Montessori bent.  The toy-toys are downstairs, the “developmental” toys are in her room, so she has access to both worlds… a free-form, disorganized, creative free-for-all in the basement; and a calm, orderly, intellectually stimulating environment in her room.

But there were in fact, an awful lot of toy-toys that had relocated themselves to her room.   And even the Montessori-style items have been reproducing at an alarming rate — we recently inherited a fantastic set of lacing beads from her cousin, as well as a wooden texture-matching clock puzzle and an alphabet fishing game (which she just loves)… And I’ve yet to tell my husband that I finally broke down and ordered the metal insets which I’ve been pining for.   She’s very keen on letters, loves to draw, and is always asking us to write letters for her — I think she’s ready for the “pre-writing” exercises of the metal insets.  I actually had got her a simple wooden frame with an oval cutout as a cheap inset substitute, and she does so well with it, I can’t just leave it at that.

Those insets take up a lot of space.  And so do the number rods… which I also ordered.  She’s completely obsessed with numbers right now, and with the concepts of quantity and counting.  The number rods seem to be the appropriate ‘next phase’ for her right now, along with the spindle box — which I will make myself and save a few dollars.

So, with the extra space cleared out of her dresser drawers after the clothing cull, I was able to put away the little empty boxes and baskets that weren’t currently being used, as well as several puzzles and activities that either are too advanced for her right now or just aren’t being used.  These can then be rotated out every once in awhile.

I’m still not sure what to do with her closet.  I’d like to move the closet rod down to within her reach (or just add a second one below the one that’s in there now), but I’m not sure what to do with the area as a whole.  Most closet organizer systems seem to assume that you can access the entire width of the closet (or nearly so) from the front, but her closet (all our closets actually) just has a single, regular, door in the middle, despite its “double” width.

Well, I feel like it’s not nearly finished yet, but we made some very good progress.  Now I just need to remember to take some pictures…

Don’t want to take my word for it?  Have a look for yourself.  Here she is cuddlin Gunther the “orange cat”, who she used to just call “owan tat” and now calls “peu peu”, which apparently is the closest she can get to “Gunther”.

See what I mean?

Not convinced?  Here is how we came across her this morning.  Flipper walked by the bathroom and saw her in there.  She goes through phases of increasing demands for independence.  For a time, she only wanted to use her little green potty, then only wanted to use the big toilet with the cushioned seat insert and her little step stool to get up there.  And of course, she had to put the insert in all by herself (”DO IT SELF!!”) and push the stool into just the right place, which usually meant that by the time she’d got it all organized, she’d pee herself just as she was climbing up onto the stool and starting to pull down her pants.

Well, no more of that.  Now she skips all that ‘baby stuff’ and goes right to it.  I swear to you, this is exactly how we found her, she had no assistance in any part of this.

Yup, just sitting there doing her thing.  Number two, in fact.  And the book?  H.P. Lovecraft, of course.

So by now you’re saying, sure, she does cute things, but is she, y’know, truly cute, as in, to look at?

Exhibit three, pigtails.

I mean, come on.  That’s a face begging for a magazine cover.

Okay, I’m just supremely chuffed that she finally does have enough hair to put into pigtails.

She loves them, gets very excited about them, then about five minutes later, pulls them out.  How do you get toddlers to keep their hair up???

See?  There she goes.

Well, I’d like to conclude this argument for Cutest. Baby. Ever. with a final montage of Pomme at her domestic best.  I’ll mention at this point that she made the hot dogs for lunch pretty much completely by herself, putting the weiners in the pan, turning them over with tongs, removing them and putting them into the buns.  But I didn’t get any pictures of that.  What I did get is a documentary of her latest discovery… she can reach the kitchen faucet.  And therefore, she does the dishes.

Well, I rest my case.  Cutest Toddler Ever, both in appearance and in action.  So what do we win?

I’m particularly looking forward to Home is Where You Start From’s look at Homer’s Odyssey.  As I’ve mentioned, we’ve recently shifted to a Charlotte Mason style with my 10yo son, Flipper.  Into week 5 now and still liking it!  For history, we’ve been doing “introduction to history” things this session (each of our sessions is 6 weeks), looking at archaeology and what history means, as well as a wee bit on the earliest civilizations   Our next session will be Ancient Egypt, and I’m all planned up for that.  Following that, we’ll be taking a session on Ancient Greece, which I haven’t done too much planning for as yet.  I’ve heard about only a couple adaptations of the Odyssey for kids, so I’m very keen to check out all the great ideas in this post.

The Recession Depression Therapy blog has a post on Cookbooks for Kids, and I think I’ll have to search out the Little House inspired cookbook!   I’ve recently been exposed to Montessori’s teachings on little kids in the kitchen, and so my 2yo daughter Pomme helps me a great deal with food preparation.  But I was none so enlightened when Flipper was a wee boy, and boy oh boy it’s a struggle to get him interested in helping.  Or doing anything for himself.  “MOM!  I need you to butter my toast!” is a refrain heard far too often.  One trick that sometimes works is dangling the carrot that girls like boys who can cook… he’s only 10, but he’s already looking forward to finding a wife!  What works the very best, however, is one cookbook we have, a Company’s Coming cookbook for kids.  He’ll do absolutely everything by himself when he finds a dish in there he wants to try.  He even made breakfast for himself and his sister this morning, a toasted “cheesy apple melt.”  I’ll pass, thanks.

The Thinking Mother ponders about Self-Directed Learning Moments, and how not every “teachable moment” has to involve parental interference.  Once again, I find Montessori parallels… Dr. Montessori observed, very wisely I think, that parents and teachers should not automatically jump in and help, cheer on, encourage, enrich, advise, or otherwise interfere when a child is absorbed in something.  We want to help, it’s a natural impulse, but in fact we’re breaking their concentration.  Since learning this, I’ve found myself having to restrain my impulse to ‘jump in’ with Pomme fairly often (although like any habit, this has gotten much easier with practice), wanting to show her how to do something, or — even worse — just do it for her.  I’ve been gratified, amazed, and enlightened to see that when I just sit back and let her do her own thing, she’ll figure it out on her own.  Not only does this foster confidence and independence, but it’s practicing her own problem-solving skills.  Of course, if she gets frustrated and ASKS me for help, I will.  The idea is not to never help your kids.  It’s just to realize when they really do need help, and when they just need some time to work it out for themselves.

And finally, Dad’s Homeschool Blog sings the praises of StumbleUpon as a search tool for homeschooling resources. I’ve been using StumbleUpon myself for awhile, to help promote my articles at Eco Child’s Play as well as my little blog here.  I’ve also randomly stumbled through their listed sites, and have found some really amazing things.   I’m a bit annoyed right now, in fact, that my latest Firefox upgrade seems to have deleted my StumbleUpon toolbar, so now I have to go find it and install it again.  Such is life, I guess.

According to her, the one on the bottom is a cat, the one at the very top is a pig, and the rest are whales.  The spots are eyes.  She has labelled her drawings before (usually as whales lol), and she has drawn circles, spots, and lines before.  The new thing this week was deliberately making spots to represent eyes, using different drawing techniques to represent different parts of a whole.

She has also started to be able to trace shapes within a stencil.  I’d love to get the set of Montessori metal insets for this purpose, but can’t really afford them right now.  For now, I picked up a $1.50 wooden craft frame with an oval shape (which you can see in the picture), and we also use Flipper’s drawing tools triangles.

She loves to use Flipper’s dry erase board, and that’s fine by me.  It’s easy to clean the dry erase marker if she ‘misses’ the board, and she can erase and do it all over again, getting lots of drawing practice without leaving mountains of scribbled paper.

One Montessori item we did invest in was a set of wooden place value number cards.  I had initially put them out of her reach, because she’s not really ready for those kinds of math concepts yet.  But she found them and took them down and has been happily playing with them for weeks.  She sorts them by size and colour, identifies what digits she recognizes (for instance, she’ll say “one zero zero zero” for the one thousand tile), and practices putting them away:

We haven’t “instructed” her on anything with these, she has created all her own activities with them.

In fact, just after this picture was taken of her putting them away, I turned my back to her to focus on the stove and dinner.  When I turned back again a few minutes later, I assumed that I’d see them all put away, or perhaps taken out again to repeat putting them away.  What I saw instead, was this:

How cool is that?

Anyway, as I said, she likes to identify what digits she knows so far.  She has a wooden number puzzle which has pictures under the digits.  For instance, there are four dogs under “4″, seven hippos under “7″, etc.  At first, she would solve the puzzle just by fitting the shapes, but soon made the association with the animals.  She would pick up the puzzle number “7″ and say “hippos!!”  One exciting day (exciting for me as a proud mama), she saw a number 7 in a completely different context, just a regular printed digit 7, and very enthusiastically said “hippos!!”

Ah, the first step… the recognition that this particular shape, or symbol, represents something.  It didn’t really matter that she hadn’t yet made the connection with the symbol and the concept of quantity.  What mattered was the concept of symbol itself, of one thing standing for something else.  And what’s more, this 7 did not look exactly like the one in her puzzle, which is slightly cartoonish.  So she was recognizing that it was not the size, or the colour, or style, or the wooden-ness, or the texture of it that mattered… it was the basic shape itself.  Very, very cool indeed.

We haven’t done anything to “correct” her animal associations.  All we do is add to it… when she says “hippos!” for 7, we say “yes, seven hippos.”  Over time, she is picking up on this concept and has now substituted the real number name for most of the digits.  She identifies 0, 1, 5, and 7 consistently, 4 most of the time, sometimes mixes up 8 and 9, or 6 and 9, but she’s got the idea.

We have another set of smaller place value cards, that I made myself for Flipper before deciding to buy the wooden set.  She loves to pull them out of the baggie they’re stored in and sort them, and label the digits she knows.  As you can see in this video, she still uses the animal association for some numbers:

So that’s it! A week in the life of an unschooling, self-determining, Montessori-inspired 26-month old.

There is very little that we have actually ‘taught’ her.  She knows lots of things, of course, including some “academics,” but for the most part it is things she has simply absorbed.  Things that we have more directly “taught” are always under her direction — repeated as she insists, dropped when she wants to move on.  And so she is learning the alphabet and numbers from wooden puzzles (and still identifies the digit ‘3′ as “cat!” since the puzzle shows 3 cats under the puzzle piece), and can count ‘by rote’ to 10, and count groups of objects accurately up to about 4.

But most of her “learning” is in practical areas, and this is most definitely from following her lead.  She demands to learn how to do things.

Following Montessori’s admonitions of letting children do things and not interfering, she is allowed to do many things not normally thought of as toddler activities.  I have learned to allow for the extra time for her to accomplish something, rather than feel a need to hurry her along by helping out.  I have also learned to stand back and let her make mistakes, and watch amazed as she figures it out without my diving in to ’save’ her… or, if she cannot yet puzzle it out, she will calmly come to me and ask for my help.  And so I meet her only where she needs help, and not just where I assume she needs help.

And so before she was 26 months old, she was able to almost completely dress herself.  She sometimes gets her pants on backwards, and has a little trouble with shirts sometimes.  But she can pick out a complete outfit, underwear, socks, and all, and get herself ready independently.  And if you dare try to help her before she’s truly in need — watch out!

Some of her non-typical toddler activities include household things like vaccuuming, folding laundry, emptying the dishwasher, and drying dishes.  She is allowed to cut paper with scissors and slice cheese.  And she even helps me at the stove, stirring macaroni, turning hot dogs, mixing scrambled eggs.  Before we even get to the stove, she insists on helping to measure and pour ingredients, mixing and stirring it together… and cracking eggs!

So I’m sharing this video I took of her cracking eggs into a bowl the other day when we were making a white chocolate layer cake.  She actually cracked 3 eggs this time, I only caught the 3rd on video.  The first few times she helped with the eggs, a few weeks ago, she got a few little bits of shell.  Now she’s perfect every time.  She even puts away the empty shells and returns the carton to the fridge when we’re done. 

She had received Melissa and Doug’s clock shape puzzle for Christmas… or her birthday.  I’m ashamed to say I can’t remember which.  I think it was her birthday.  (Her birthday is only 2 weeks before Christmas so hopefully I can be forgiven!)

The shapes are the same 12 shapes.  They’re a bit smaller in the clock puzzle, and of course have big numbers printed on them, but it is the same set of shapes.

So I put it all together.  Shape puzzle pieces on the matching cards, clock puzzle pieces on top of the shape puzzle pieces.

First of all, I just thought this was COOL.  But I also had to think “educationally” so… this teaches that a shape is a shape whatever the size… which, admittedly, she already understands because she loves to draw and point out “GIG ty-goh” (that’s “big triangle”) as well as little ones.

It teaches coordination and dexterity, to place the smaller one on top of the larger.  Which she can do and has other tools already that practice the same skill… It teaches size differentiation, to determine which is the smaller one…. which she can already do.  Um, how about, colour doesn’t affect shape either?  Oh I know, we could use it to talk about colours, “put the red triangle on top of the… oh, both triangles are red, aren’t they… okay, put the green rectangle on top of the… oh right, the other rectangle is missing…”

It introduces the written words for shapes, therefore concepts of early literacy, letters, sounds, etc, as well as the verbal words for the shapes.  But it did that before I added the second set of shapes.

Um… so…

I guess it’s just cool.

I’ve put the words “work” and “toys” in quotes in the title of this article, because for young children, the ideas of “work” and “play” are synonymous.  They have not yet made a judgment decision that “play” is all for fun and “work” is necessary but unpleasant.  To the young child, everything is exploration and discovery, and this is inherently fun to them — and so they will work very hard at it.

When adults are first exposed to the traditional Montessori materials and teaching style, the initial reaction is often: “well yes, I can see how that activity would be very useful and educational… but do the children actually enjoy doing it?  And when do they play?”

The answer is, yes, they do enjoy it.  And as far as they’re concerned, they ARE playing.

Child’s Play is Serious Work

A child does not have to be running around, giggling, or even using their imagination to be playing.  Those are all different kinds of play, but they are not required for the definition.  A child can appear deeply focused, intent, quiet, even serious, when at the thoroughly entrancing “work” of constructing a brand new person from the inside out.

As jaded adults, we might look on this seriousness and say “oh dear, that doesn’t look like fun, it must be draining, they need a break to go play and refresh themselves.”  But in fact, as Dr. Montessori herself, and generations of Montessori teachers and parents after her have observed, after a period of intense focus and “work” such as this, the young child will frequently finish the activity on their own (generally after having repeated it many times), and seem rejuvenated, refreshed, and content.

The proof, as they say, is in the pudding, and I have now seen with my own eyes how young children will not only enthusiastically ‘work’ with Montessori and Montessori-inspired materials and activities… but they will be drawn to them.  The urge to create themselves through exploration of their environment will naturally zero in on activities providing the greatest benefit to whatever developmental stage they happen to be in – Dr Montessori’s “sensitive periods”.  Indeed, they crave activities suited to their task.

Montessori “Toys” in Action

This past week, I acquired a few new Montessori “toys”.   Opening the parcel, I first unwrapped a geometric shape puzzle, and set it down in front of Pomme to play with while I unwrapped the rest.  I thought this particular puzzle might be a bit too challenging for her as yet, but she immediately set to it and was deeply involved in it.

Another item I unwrapped was a set of mini knobbed cylinders.  A central staple of the Montessori equipment, I have been coveting the knobbed cylinders since I first learned about them.  But they are so expensive!  I finally found an acceptable compromise in the mini cylinders, only 5 cylinders per block instead of 10 and they are smaller in size, for less than 1/3 the price.

I set the blocks on the counter and went to Pomme’s bedroom to put something else away.  I had not, at this point, even shown her the blocks.  When I returned less than a minute later, she had discovered the blocks, taken one down, and completely on her own initiative, having never seen this item before, had set about removing and replacing the cylinders.  Having mastered this set, she then proceeded to take down the rest of the blocks, lined them up, and got to work:

This was a toddler on a mission!  And there was no cajoling, no bribing, no window-dressing, no inviting, no presenting.  She had simply recognized an excellent tool for exploring her world and herself, and had seized upon it.

Further proof happened a couple of days later.  My brother and his family were over for New Year’s Eve.  They also homeschool, and mostly unschool.  I was excited to share my new “toys” with my sister-in-law.  My 4-year-old nephew, who was right there while we were talking, has had little to no exposure to ‘formal’ academic work, he has lived a fairly free-spirited life thus far.  So he came into this “experiment” with no pre-existing bias one way or the other.

I brought out two blocks to show them, took out a few cylinders, and asked my nephew if he wanted to try to put them back in.  He did, and of course it was easy for him.  He almost seemed… not too impressed, really.

So we adults got talking about other things.  Within a few minutes, I noticed that my nephew had, on his own, returned to the blocks, and this time was trying to work with both sets at once.  So, I brought out the other two blocks to give him the full set, and he worked at them quite diligently for several minutes!

Truth be told, he didn’t actually finish the activity.  It was a busy and noisy house at the time, and he was too quickly distracted by all the commotion around him.  In Montessori terms, we didn’t “respect his concentration”.  Quite forgivable, given the holiday, I think!

Still, there it was.  He had taken to this activity with seriousness, concentration, and on his own initiative.  Would he have done so if it was not, in some way to him, “fun”?