Homework

We got homework for the first time today for either of the children.   Montessori philosophy is that time out of school should be spent on other things such as building social or other skills and so neither of my children have ever had anything brought home as an assignment they were required to do.

Today we got this little stack of red cards with a hole punched in them and hooked together with a ring clip.    And there were instructions.   This was the start of the Rainbow Wall work (insert “yay!” here).  Each week students would have another color of sight words to learn, with this week being the red cards.   The words are very common and should be easy to recognize—and there were only a few.   We had ‘a’, ‘to’, ‘in’, ‘is’, ‘the’ and ‘that’.

You’re supposed to practice at home (they also practice at school) to learn them.   But there’s a catch.   You get tested at the end of the week, hopefully not in front of your peers, to see if you’ve learned the words.   If you have, you get your name up on the Rainbow Wall (insert “woo!” here).   If you haven’t you work on the set for the next week as well.

But wait, there’s more!  If you master the words for your test, you get special privileges for the next week.   There was a large list of them to accommodate a lot of students doing well.   So there’s incentive, which is good.

But dang, people, that’s pressure.   What if my child can’t master the words and then gets upset because she’s not on the Rainbow Wall and all her friends are getting special privileges and as parents we feel badly because we’re not drilling enough at night?   GAH.

Okay, I’m not worried and neither will my daughter, knowing her.  But it is an entirely different model from what we’ve experienced in Montessori.

But let’s get back to my daughter.   “Sight Words”—did you catch that?   Yeah, we’re not doing that.   What we get to do are, “Touch Words”?   I don’t know the name for the same thing but in braille but you get my point.   The list of words came home for my daughter just like they did for the other students only hers had the addition of the words braille at the top of each card.   It was really nifty looking.   This was something manually done just for her.

So I sat down to practice with my daughter tonight.  The ensuing screaming and resisting until she started to be successful and then didn’t want to stop I can cover later, but I do want to talk about how it’s different from practicing words with a sighted child.

My son and I used to practice his letters while he was eating.   It was the perfect time to get him interested.   With braille you have to use your hands to do the reading itself, and that means your hands can’t be doing other things like eating.    And they need to be clean.   If you’re reading cooking instructions and add the eggs and flour and get some on you you have to clean and dry your hands so you can go back to the raised paper medium you’re reading from to find out the next step.

It was something I hadn’t thought about before.   Especially the whole clean hands thing—that’s going to be a fun challenge with my daughter, I’m sure.

The Big Boy Update:  My son went to his first Parkour class tonight.  He loved it.   He came home bouncing around.   He was ready to go at nine o’clock this morning.   He’s going to teach his sister some of the moves I think; I know she’ll like that.

The Tiny Girl Chronicles:  My daughter desperately wants to “do flips”.   She wants to take a gymnastics class very much.   There is a free gymnastics class for the blind at one of the local gyms but it’s during her school day now so we’ll see if we can find another alternative.