Whoops.

I actually forgot that I even had a blog. Seriously.

Let's see; I'm in my last week of classes (how did that happen??), and I can't wait to come home. I've absolutely LOVED being here, being so immersed in philosophy and discussions, but I miss my husband, plain and simple. And air conditioning. And my coffeemaker. And real food. But I will miss everyone I've met here, being able to go to Manhattan every weekend, the cool weather, and counting the most fireflies I've ever seen per square foot.

As my books and notes and more books are spread across my desk, it reminds me that I still have a lot to do before I leave. But hopefully next week, as I try to return to the real world, I can think back on this experience and reflect a little more. I need to keep this passionate and clear mindset when I'm in the thick of things during the school year.

Edison's Day

I love the video of Edison's Day (has anyone else watched this?). It's about a 20-month-old boy named Edison, and how he spends his day in his incredibly-Montessori home.

It's inspiring. :) And slightly intimidating.

That's all I've got time for tonight!

"Here's why babies are officially awesome."

I think that's what this course should really be titled.

Anyway, classes have been intense, but good. Seeing actual children in our environment was really great; I was amazed how comfortable the 5 infants seemed (ages 3 mo. to 11 mo.), even though they had 17 adults sitting in chairs and staring at them (but carefully avoiding eye contact, even if they were attempting to crawl through your legs). We had prepared the environment the night before in lab, so it was interesting to see what activities got used, and which didn't. We get to see most of the same children again today, so I'm curious to see what, if anything, changes about their interactions with the environment (and each other)!

Besides class... Friday we had the day off; of course I still woke up at the crack of dawn, and decided to at least be productive and do my laundry, so I could get into NYC at a decent time. Walking to the station took a little longer than I anticipated, but I caught a train with no trouble. I spent most of the day in the Museum of Modern Art... and it was amazing. I tend to gravitate towards modern art anyway, and this place at 6 floors of it. Chagall, Picasso, Van Gogh, Pollock, Klimt, Miro, Kandinsky, Dali, Warhol... and this neat performance art sort of piece, where the museum staff basically measures everyone's height, and writes the date and their name beside it with a black sharpie.

It created this cool effect that naturally emphasized the museum-goers' average height, with the outliers above and below.




(side note: while I was waiting in line to get measured, I actually found another Monica who had visited the museum already that very day! But she was shorter than me, so I figured I'd get my own measurement.)





























So after the museum and a really amazing latte, I had the splendid opportunity to visit the B. family! :) The girls used to go to our school back in Texas, and I've missed them so much since they moved back to NY. M. and S. seemed to have fun showing me their room, and Q. kept bringing me toys! Anyway, we walked to dinner nearby, and I had a really great time catching up with the whole family.

July 4th was a mix of me attempting to get some work done, and failing miserably. Eventually I gave up, and went out to dinner with some folks from the program. We drove to City Island, and ate at this really neat place with a quiet garden patio out back.



After we got back to New Rochelle, a subset of us walked out to the harbor to watch the fireworks! From our vantage point, we could actually see 6 different firework displays across the water, each for a different little town of the area.

Sunday was just plain productive. Fortunately, the weather was beautiful, so I spent a lot of time outside, too. :)

Anyway, I really have to get going, if I want to eat breakfast before class! Hope everyone is doing well, and I miss you all!

Told you so.

With the onset of Infant-Toddler classes, I have become much more occupied with assignments, typing up notes, and lots of reading and studying. Hence, the lack of daily postings. But I will try and catch up, at least once a week.

To summarize my feelings about the class so far... I'm loving it. We are starting out focusing on infants (though talk of toddlers always seems to come up as well), and it's just fascinating. I never knew what huge amount of development goes on just in utero, and how MUCH the newborn is already capable of doing and experiencing. The environment it is born into is SO important; of course the planner in me is already worrying about that for when Toby and I have our own children! But we won't get into that.

Our class is about 15 students, with 5 more joining us for the second half of the program (they split the training up into two summers). It's a nice size; small enough to feel like a discussion group, but not so small that I feel a lot of pressure to always contribute something. Over the next few weeks, we will get to go observe at the Burke Center a couple times, and one of our instructors has organized a trip to the NICU in White Plains.

We also will get to see actual children tomorrow, so I am looking forward to that! I miss the children at my school, and keep wondering how they're doing and everything! (Anyone want to take some pictures of them for me? So I'll still recognize them in August? :) Anyway, we have a few infants coming in (with their parents) so we can observe them in our environment. We're supposed to pay attention to what each infant is focusing on, and for how long, so we can learn not to interrupt a child's concentration (even as an infant).

In non-academic news, I spent the day in NYC on Saturday! We took the train in, walked around Times Square, Rockefeller Center, explored the Metropolitan Museum of Art, relaxed in Central Park, and I split off to spend some time with my cousin, Joachim. We had smoothies in Bryant Park and just caught up on each others' lives until yet another downpour ensued. Then I met up with a new friend from the program, and we grabbed a quick dinner at a Turkish restaurant in the Theater District and saw Mary Poppins! Awesome set design and choreography. Then we caught the train back to New Rochelle, and I slept really really well.

Anyway, I have to run for a full day of classes (including an extra lab this evening), so I'll leave you with some quotes.

“Be flexible… ‘cause you never know what’s gonna happen.” (Concerning interactions with infants and toddlers)

“Children reach with their eyes before they reach with their hands.” (Talking about infants' focus and attention)

"It's not so much what you do, but how you do it."

I pretended to be a raccoon today!

That was a lot of math for one day... After going through all the didactical characteristics of Montessori materials, possible ground rules (I particularly liked one school-wide ground rule another student brought up, "Be safe, kind, and gentle"), and the sensitive periods, we did math.

Lots of math. How the child learns to count linearly, recognize the numerals, get the concepts of zero, teens, tens, hundreds, the decimal system, etc. The golden beads amaze me. It starts with just one golden bead, and the child learns that that is one unit (just like you could have a unit of shoe, or a unit of pencil). Then they can use ten of those units, to equal a ten bar, and then ten of the ten bars can equal a hundred square, then ten of those is the same as a thousand cube (which can also be formed by the thousand chain), and so on and so forth. It's pretty mesmerizing. Everything is incredibly well thought-out and connects with the other materials (color coding beyond just the golden beads) so that it is more concrete and interrelated for the child. We were able to add, subtract, multiply and divide large numbers (in the thousands) without using any paper or pencil. We just used the Montessori materials to concretely find the answer, even if it involved exchanging or carrying. (In a subtraction game, I got to be the raccoon who steals hot dogs from a sleeping family, because she has lots of hungry babies at home (i.e. I stole the certain amount that we wanted to subtract from our original number)! In the morning, the campers had to figure out how many hot dogs they had left. The bank game was particularly helpful, because it helped me change out ten bars and hundreds so I could steal the correct amount (just enough for my number of babies... which was about 2784 or something like that... yikes).

Of course, we also got to see a little slide show about Maria Montessori; it was really neat to see the pictures of her family, and of Maria herself at the age of ten, when she was "supposed" to be finished with school, when she graduated the equivalent of high school at sixteen, when she graduated from med school, and when her first book was published.

Anyway, it's been quite the week! I learned a LOT about the 3-6 world, and am just even more excited about starting the birth-3 classes on Monday. Meanwhile, I'm going into NYC tomorrow to do some touring around with a group from CMTE-NY, and also meeting up with my cousin Joachim! So it should be a fun-filled day. :)

Today's quote: "I'm so gushy I practically need duct tape over my mouth." (In reference to holding back distracting praise of a student's work)

Blue skies!

Ah, I'm always amazed how much weather can impact my mood. Today was sunny and beautiful, full of blue skies and slight, cool breezes; this is weather I could get used to. It made me feel like I could conquer the world! This morning I was also able to sleep in past dawn a bit, so that helped.

In class, we discussed the three-period lesson, actually acted out with a real child (the same helper from yesterday). It was an informative way to introduce us to the geometric solids! (side note, an unwrapped Toblerone is a triangular prism, in case you were wondering.) Of course, the shining stars today were the binomial and trinomial cubes. I've seen them before and heard about them, but never understood what they were for. I won't be able to explain it here, really, but I will say the binomial cube is a concrete, physical representation of the formula:

a^3 + 3(a^2 b) + b^3 + 3(ab^2) = (a + b)^3

The trinomial cube, on the other hand, is a physical representation of the formula:

a^3 + 3(a^2 b) + 3(a^2 c) + b^3 + 3(ab^2) + 3(b^2 c) + c3 + 3(ac^2) + 3(bc^2) + 6(abc) = (a + b + c)^3

Maria Montessori wanted to make mathematics understandable on a sensorial and concrete level. If you can get your hands on one of these cubes (with a trained guide to present it to you, of course), it will definitely be concrete! The idea is that when the child learns to build these cubes, he will begin to visualize each piece when he sees part of the corresponding formula, because he knows where the numbers are coming from. Suffice it to say, that with this presentation, the formula made complete sense to me; I just wish I had learned it this way to begin with!

Now that I've completely lost most of you, I will say that I was able to walk around campus today and take some pictures of the lovely buildings and grounds. So hopefully this weekend I can get some of those posted!

We also got to explore the Children's House environment that is set up for the full training at that level. Everything was so beautifully arranged, and it felt like an honor to just be in there! It was so calming to observe the students (adult students, I mean) practicing the calculated choreography of each work.

And for today's quote, which I think is especially relevant to our Young Children's Community:

"Nurture the exploration; help with the clean-up."

It sure does rain a lot here...

...I think it has rained every single day since I came up to NJ / NY a whole week ago! At least it's keeping it nice and cool. :)

First of all, I should clarify that this week is sort of a serious crash course in the 3-6 curriculum specifically. I am excited about this for a few reasons: the first Montessori classroom I ever laid eyes on was for that age level; the first classroom I worked in at Mariposa was for that level; and this past school year, I still got to visit that environment twice a week to lead music classes. So of course, I'm totally interested in what happens at that point in development. Besides, it's where my toddlers go when they leave me!

So, today we talked a lot about practical life (including care of the environment and care of self) and sensorial work. Our instructor has set up an environment for us to observe and interact with, and we had time today to really explore the materials. I got to try out the sound cylinders, lots of pouring and transfer work, penny polishing, corn tweezing, color mixing (to discover secondary colors) and a fellow student gave me a lesson on the binomial cube! Throughout the day, we also made bread by hand (from scratch), fried an egg, built sculptures (with the red rods, brown stairs, and pink tower), scrubbed a table, chopped an apple, and a host of other activities. There are so many interesting pieces of work! I was especially impressed that a three-year-old would be able to complete the bread-making and egg-frying cycles successfully. We also spent a lot of time talking about nutrition and how much diet affects the child (this is something I plan on doing more research about on my own over the next few weeks).

Quote of the day: "White sugar is not a food; it's a drug."

We also had a special guest in our classroom today: a child! The executive director's 7-year-old granddaughter visited us, and gave us a hand with the demonstrations. It was nice to see a child in the environment! But it also made me miss my students back in Austin.

Anyway, I am beat. Don't get too used to this daily posting... it probably won't last. :)