That advice on leading is part out of respect for the child’s independence, but it’s also because the parent has no idea what the child is suppose to do with any of the “work” they might bring to show you. I’ve said it before and I’ll say it again, Montessori is different in many ways from typical materials you might see in a kindergarten class. It might look like nothing at all, but there is a specific process the child knows how to do that works on something like fine motor skills, pincer grasp, tactile recognition, phonetic sounds, etc.
For example, today I saw two four-year-olds working together. One child put on a blindfold and waited for a second child to put three equal-sized blocks in front of him. His job was to determine which of the two blocks were made of the same material. It might be by weight or texture or material warmth. The two selected blocks were handed back to the first child to put aside. This process was repeated until all the blocks were paired. When that was completed the mask came off and the child got to see how many matches he got right. Then they swapped roles and played the game again.
Parents tend to want to say things like, “and does this go here?” or “fourteen is before fifteen” or other phrases and actions that tend to lead the child through what should be a demonstration of their knowledge and skills. But I’m soapboxing and I’ll get off now. Suffice it to say, it is one of the hardest things to do to not say anything or direct your child. Sometimes it’s interesting to find out what they do know how to do, especially if you didn’t expect them to know something they’re proficient in by the time you see them at school.
We saw my daughter this morning and she took us from work to work to work, showing us math by counting in fives up to 112, after which she was suddenly done. She did some fishing work that turned into a cake backing (imaginative) and then she wanted to do some drawing with a chalk board. She worked for a while on this, including a tree on the left, sunflower in the middle, sun and ladybug she had to erase twice before she got it the way she wanted it. She put her name and “mom” at the top.
My son had us visit his class this afternoon as he’s in the next year up class and has more advanced work. I was very impressed with how his reading has progressed as well as his handwriting. He was also doing more complicated math work, making leaps without counting such as how many times four will go into twelve after figuring out three goes into twelve four times. He was very happy to have us visit him, being most proud I think of his pencil which he’d nicknamed, “Pennsylvania”.
The Big Boy Update: My son did lots of work at bring your parents to school day today. The last thing he did was to get a very ornately decorated mug, a piece of paper and a pencil. He would rotate the mug around to find the kanji characters on it (which were tiny) and then copy them onto his paper. This might sound strange, but the hand-eye coordination and the copying of complex characters is something that wouldn’t shock me when it comes to Montessori education. However when I asked his teacher smiled quietly to me and said, “I have no idea what he’s doing.”
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter was working with some small plastic insect characters today. There was a caterpillar, a butterfly, a centipede, a grasshopper and a lady bug. When she gave my husband the caterpillar and she took the butterfly he said, “the caterpillar turns into a butterfly” which my daughter immediately corrected, saying, “no, not yet, it takes a month.”
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