Friday February 24 & Saturday February 25 , 2012
As the last sweet notes of Albinoni’s Adagio in G drifted away the silence began. We had all been sitting or lying as we listened to the music unfold, preparing ourselves for a journey through the children’s environments at The Montessori Place. Starting in this way, I knew immediately it was going to be a very different evening from any Montessori parent evening I had led or participated in before.
We were about to embark on the first part of the Journey & Discovery; a two-day workshop created to offer parents a deep and close experience of life at The Montessori Place as seen and felt by the children. The Journey took place on Friday night and aimed to open our eyes to the beautifully prepared environments of the Infant Community, Children’s House and Lower Elementary, seeing the details, seeing the harmony that connects each space, and seeing the journey each child takes in the first 9 years of life.
The shared relaxation at the beginning invited us to let go of all of our thoughts of yesterdays and tomorrows and to try to place ourselves in the mind of the young child we once were, to observe with fresh eyes.
With a flick of the lights we set off into the Infant Community where, quite soon, everyone was spontaneously kneeling or sitting to come down to the height of a 1 or 2 year old child. I was surprised how moving I found the experience. I had been in the room a hundred times, helped build it and create it, and I was hosting the evening. Yet there was something different about taking the time, with a group of adults, to quietly revere this space for young children. The mere fact of giving this time, thinking about the child of this age, reminded me again that these were not just ‘babies’ or ‘toddlers’ but small human beings with vast internal lives, so complex and so capable.
After 20 minutes the light flicked again and we filed quietly downstairs to the Children’s House, the place where I spend each day with the community of 3-6 year olds. I know this environment intimately; every box, every corner of every shelf. So I just sat instead of moving around and enjoyed sharing this carefully prepared offering, soaking up the atmosphere and enjoying the beautiful calm.
Then up we climbed to the Lower Elementary, the domain of the intellectual explorers and discoverers that are 6-9 year olds. The different psychology of the child at this age was immediately apparent to me moving from the meticulous order of the Children’s House to the dynamism and energy of the Elementary. The Children’s House brings the world to the child, but up here the child’s mind turns outwards to the world outside the home or the classroom, to the universe and questions of why? and how?
We gathered back together at the end of the evening to break the silence and share our immediate impressions, before heading off into the night.
On the Saturday morning when we met again, I felt a new relationship with the parents sitting around the table in the family room. It was as though we had all been though something significant and intimate together. And there was a lovely eagerness in the air, a desire to get going, to work, much like the buzz when I hear the children’s feet upstairs in the family room just before the door is opened each morning.
Friday night had been a silent Journey, today was the active Discovery, working and using the materials as a child might do. A range of materials were laid out as though the children had just vanished, each activity accompanied by a card offering simple instructions.
We reminded ourselves of the age-range of each environment before setting off to explore. We began at around 2 years old, polishing, sewing, painting – trying to the manipulate all manner of tiny objects with adults hands. Leaving the familial cosiness of the Infant Community, we entered the larger and vastly more complex environment of the Children’s House. Here most of the parents seemed to sidestep the practical life – such as the ironing and scrubbing – in favour of the more abstract. Pairing fabrics by touch alone, matching 40 different cylinders with the correct socket, completing an electricity circuit, doing additions in 4 digits with some friends, reading and acting verb cards, all reflected a typical day in the 3-6 community. Later in the morning we headed up to the Lower Elementary where the mood seemed to become more quizzical as new or forgotten knowledge was encountered. Flowers were dissected and labelled, long divisions carried out by a small group, the fundamental needs of humans were discussed, and a sparrowhawk drawn.
In all we spent two hours working in the three environments encountering increasingly complex materials and ideas. What the session also tried to recreate was a taste of the functioning of the communities, in particular the significance of self-directed discovery. In Montessori communities, children have great freedom to choose what it is they do. Initially children are led into making choices – ‘Oh look, there is a bit of paint on this table. What could you do..?’ But gradually this gives way to the child having idea after idea and acting on them – ‘Today’s going to be a multiplication day!’
In the end two hours felt like such a short space of time to traverse 7 or 8 years of human development from 1-9 years. I began the morning as newly bipedal human being, my hands now free to use tools and work. From this point it took the human species the best part of a million years to become literate and numerate, but by 10.30am most of our group were there. I finished my morning looking at the small metal pieces that represent one of Pythagoras’s most famous discoveries and recalled Sir Isaac Newton’s famous line ‘If I have seen further it is by standing on the shoulders of giants’. I smiled as I thought how on this day I had seen a little further by standing in the slippers of a young child.
