Come to School With Me Day

Eva's school allowed parents to attend a half day session with their child last week to get a better idea of what goes on at a Montessori school.  Obviously, I jumped on the chance to spend 3 hours watching missy-miss in action and I have to say I was completely blown away by the whole event.  I have never seen children so calm and focused on their work, yet sociable and considerate towards each other.  I waited for it, I knew it was going to happen sooner or later-- the ear-piercing scream followed by tears that inevitably comes when one child takes another one's snack or pushes someone or cuts in line for the water fountain... yet it never happened.  Not once did I hear even the slightest bit of "bad" noise.  The room was, dare I say, serene for the first 2 1/2 hours and then only became noisy as the kids got some pre-lunch wiggles out by dancing to a few songs.

Eva worked on a number of things and I can see now that I really need to stop babying her.  The puzzles she worked on I normally would have helped her with at home, assuming she couldn't do them solo.  I was wrong.  She blew threw things I never would have picked out for her.  My favorite thing to watch was a "water work" activity.  She took a tray out with a number of items on it, filled a cylinder with water and dropped the items in one by one, sorting them out afterwards by which ones floated and which ones sank.  After she was done she thought for a moment and told me that heavy ones sink (easy enough for an almost 4 year old to figure out, right?) but then the kicker- she followed up by saying the shape mattered as well.  That some things may be light, but they'd could still sink if they are "straight or smooth."  Maybe I'm one of the those crazy moms who believes their child is a genius but I'm enjoying it nonetheless!

The session ended with a kids versus parents quiz on classical composers.  The teacher would say things like, "I was born in 1732 to Austrian parents and I later developed Alzheimer's, making it harder for me to continue composing.  Who am I?"  And the freaking kids knew them all!  Bach, Beethoven, Gerswhin, Rachmaninoff, Rimsky-Korsakov, Copland, Mozart.... the list went on and on.  They beat the parents 11 to 1 (note: I'd like to add that the lone point for Team Parents was scored by yours truly) This month they are moving on to thallophytes- I'll give you a minute to Google... ;-)  

All in all it was a wonderful experience; I see now what Eva does every day and I couldn't be happier.  She's coming up on her first full year at Minnesota Renaissance School in just a few weeks and we plan on keeping her there for years to come. 

Note: I didn't take too many photos, since the point of the day was to interact with Eva and not be that annoying photog mom, but here are a few of her making a paper flower and doing a bit of counting work.

Final product, no help from Mom- I was pretty impressed