Today was Bring Your Parents to School day. For our children at their ages, this means forty-five minutes in their classroom, being their guest and letting them show us what choose to. It’s an interesting, if brief, time in which we get a small glimpse of what happens during their school day.
My husband and I took turns with each child and when I joined my daughter she was doing, “gluing work.” As an aside here, pretty much everything in Montessori school is called “work”. She was taking a small paint brush and dipping it glue and then rotating it around so the extra glue would drop off the brush. She would then pick up a piece of small paper she liked (cut up pieces of an old tissue box) and then apply the glue to the back of the piece. After doing this, she put the paint brush down on a chopsticks holder so she could pick up the piece of paper, turn it over and place it on her sheet. My daughter was doing this with precision and carefulness and had a nice collection of squares pasted onto her sheet when I got to the room.
I say on my knees watching her and decided to put her hair up. I told her, “I’m putting your hair up so I can see what you’re doing.” It was hard to see because with her poor vision right now, she was getting right on top of the work. She said to me, “mom, I think you’re putting my hair up because you don’t want me to get it in the glue.” I laughed and told her she was right, but that it did make it easier for me to see as well.
And here’s where I have my personal confession to make to you, my favorite readers. While I was watching my daughter dip that little brush into the white, Elmer’s-type glue, I could remember what it tasted like. I remembered as a child pasting things with glue, getting it on my fingers and when it dried, chewing it off with my teeth. I remembered the texture and flavor of the glue it was wet and how it was stretchy and what it tasted like dry. I remembered it not tasting all that bad…for glue.
When I was a child, the general story going around from child to child was the glue was made from horses hooves. I have no idea what that type of glue is made from even now. I haven’t tasted it since I was much, much younger, but watching my daughter tonight brought back the taste in a vivid fashion I would never have expected.
The Big Boy Update: I went to visit my son in his class today. He had been telling me for a while he wanted to show me, “The Exchange Game.” I had an idea what it was about but I didn’t fully understand until he had gotten out all the components to physically count numbers up to the thousands and had the two of us rolling ten-sided dice to count out onto our trays. When we got more than ten of, say, the hundred’s stack, we could “change” the stack into a cube representing one thousand. Here’s a web page that shows the materials we were using, although their variant requires a teacher present. In our case, my son was running the game. The Exchange Game
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter’s teacher came over to me during Bring Your Parent to School day and said, “I have an observation to show you.” She got some cards with polygons on them and said, “she’s been doing sorting work using these two types of guides recently. One had a heavy border at about a half-centimeter thick, which I would expect she could somewhat see. The second one had a very thin border and yet her teacher said she could see those shapes as well. She said she had also watched when my daughter was working with the Spanish teacher this afternoon. The teacher had printed materials in two different fonts. My daughter (who can’t yet read) told Ms. Carina, “I can see those words better” and pointed to the cards with the heavier, bolder font.
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