February in Mr. Och’s Class
Order is fundamental to a Montessori environment. We often focus on the way the classroom looks when we talk about order – the materials being clean and each having an appropriate place on the shelf, for instance. However, there is another order to the classroom that is crucial to the children’s comfort and learning: time. […]
Order is fundamental to a Montessori environment. We often focus on the way the classroom looks when we talk about order – the materials being clean and each having an appropriate place on the shelf, for instance. However, there is another order to the classroom that is crucial to the children’s comfort and learning: time. It can be quite a challenge to talk about time with children this young. We adults have been here on Earth a while, but time feels very different to someone who just arrived a few years ago. “Past”, “present”, “future”, “yesterday”, “soon”, “later”, and of course clocks themselves are all abstractions of our own lived experience that we have slowly understood only by living with them for a bit. So, much like the other lessons of our Montessori classroom, the passage of time is communicated to children in concrete ways through routine to slowly be absorbed through sensory experience and repetition.
We keep a calendar during circle time, giving children the opportunity to share the month, day, and year. Kindergartners keep their own personal daily calendars too!
Mondays are for Show and Tell, and Children arrive on Friday every morning with great anticipation of Movement class.
We celebrate Holidays like Lunar New Year and Valentine’s Day.
We celebrate birthdays with gifts, a “Birthday Poster” showing the child as they’ve grown and changed through the years, and then finish by carrying the globe around the Sun. With each passing revolution we sing “The Earth goes around the Sun Tra-La-La and (child’s name) is one. The Earth goes around the Sun Tra-La-La and (child’s name) is two.”
We have yearly projects and experiences to look forward to like field trips and pieces of art for the auction.
And of course new lessons, repetition of other work, and a regular daily routine are all little familiar experiences of time passing, so that more abstract concepts like “later” can turn into “after this work cycle” or even “after you finish your work, it will be time for lunch.”
