I've been a substitute teacher throughout the last two school years at the school my children attend. I've had an opportunity through that time to see how Montessori principles are put into practice across the various levels and I've also gained a lot of insight on how to talk so children will listen and respond in a positive way.
As you well know, not all my interactions with my two children are positive, (or I wouldn't have needed that yelling bowl intervention) but I can honestly say I'm a better parent for having the opportunity to experience classrooms of children and watch trained, educated teachers using good practices with those children.
After two years though, I clearly have my favorite level of students. It's not the cute little adorable toddlers in Toddler House. They have runny noses most of the year, don't know how to communicate, cry loads and then there's the poop in the pants thing. Yes, there are the great bits, such as watching them discover something for the first time, helping them master a skill that makes them smile that big toddler smile and then, of course, there's the cute that's only the cute a toddler can offer the world.
What I like though, are the Upper Elementary students. These students are in grades four through six. They're smart, they interact with you, that have hobbies, passions and exciting stories to tell you. They also like having someone come in they can spend their classroom morning with. It's my favorite age at our school and I have not kept that fact a secret from anyone.
This week I had an opportunity to substitute for two mornings in the Upper Elementary classroom. I skipped one committee meeting and came late to another meeting so I could be there; I didn't want to miss the opportunity to substitute because some of the students were leaving the school next year and this might be my last time with them in the classroom.
They are such a delight. They greeted me warmly. Some of the girls gave me a hug. They wanted me to help them with any questions or problems they had with their work. They were excited to show me the article they had selected to do a report on. I wasn't sure who's table I was going to sit at for lunch, I had so many requests. And then, there's the corrections.
This might sound like no fun, but I very much enjoy correcting work. They have literature, grammar, "Wordly Wise," arithmetic, word problems and other subjects they're all handing in during the day. In the morning, things are handed back out and from that point, the teachers make corrections as necessary and put the finished notebooks back in the pile for the next morning. I spend my morning walking around, helping students across many subjects and levels within those subjects. When I wasn't doing that, I was correcting books filing them for tomorrow.
When it was time for lunch, I had one last chance to walk around the room to say a farewell to everyone for the day. As I approached one table, I noticed some metal inset shapes in wooden forms. My son had done his first, "Metal Inset" work and brought it home yesterday. These looked similar, but with many more pieces and more complicated. I asked the table, "are these metal insets?" One student laughed and said, "oh, those were so five years ago!"
What I was looking at were visual representations of fraction of a whole and other geometric area and shape configurations. They were right though, it was about five years ago that they were learning metal inset work themselves. They commented that it was mostly tracing and drawing (and sometimes coloring in.) To them today, it's literally child's play, but to a four-year-old, it's meaningful work doing pincer grasp and holding a pencil, doing graceful drawing, for the first time.
The Big Boy Update: We found our our friends who've gone on the road to live and explore the country in a forty-five foot rig are coming to town this weekend. When my son heard he said, "oh please tell me Gavin's coming?" We assured him, he would get to see Gavin, Shealyn and Kaitrinn.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter loves it when I go through the Starbucks drive through. She invariably asks me if I'm getting a sandwich. This is mostly because she wants me to hand back to her parts of the sandwich. When she asked me today, she told me, "make sure you get it with cheese and bread."
Fitness Update: We ran five miles today. It was over seventy degrees at five-forty-five this morning when we left the house. I think it got almost to ninety today.
No comments:
Post a Comment