It's Sunday afternoon. Sawyer and Jordan are out on the porch earning stickers for their sticker charts by sweeping the front porch. Christine and Brian from next door come over to chat. Brian owns a Professional Interpreting company. Any language. I ask Sawyer to count in German for Brian. "Eins, zwei, drei, vier," he grabs between his legs and starts jumping around while counting, "funf, sechs," and then Jordan joins in, "Sieben! Acht! Neun! Zehn!" While Jordan continues in Spanish, I turn to Sawyer. "Sawyer, it's time to go potty." "I don't has to." "What's your body telling you, Sawyer?" "That it doesn't has to go potty. (jump, jump, jump)." "Are you sure that's what it's telling you, Sawyer?" He runs inside. Later, he's grabbing and jumping again. "What's your body telling you, Sawyer?" Pause (jump, jump). "Sawyer?" (jump, jump) "That it needs more jellybeans."
We're pretty sure Jordan is part fish. We get this from her constant desire to "play Mermaids", her innate ability to swim from an incredibly early age and her comfort in the water from birth. Sawyer is incredibly comfortable in the water on the shores of a river. He is more of the sucker fish variety in the swimming pool. (Unless he has his "purple floatie".) He grabs on to you with arms and legs and hangs on for dear life. He'll look at you directly in the eyes from this position and solemnly say "Don't let go of me, always."
Maybe there is some magical link between water and language. Jordan seemed to find her comfort level in both from an early age. Not to mention her comfort level with keeping water of the pee variety in it's appropriate place (the toilet) from an early age. It's a joy having two children so remarkably different, and to have them be so close. We can get frustrated occasionally with how Sawyer may copy Jordan, but really, he's carved his own path. Part of why they are so strongly individual at such an early age may be (and may not be) due to their early exposure to Montessori education.
Most children, I believe, as long as they have the support of their parents, thrive in a Montessori environment. "It has been shown to provide children, during the earliest and most impressionable years, with a sense of security, a positive self-image, excellent social skills, habits of concentration and creativity, and a level of physical and intellectual development previous thought possible by only a fortunate few individuals." Montessori educators see the children as the leaders in the process of education: if an environment is provided with resources for the child to explore, the child will essentially teach themselves through this exploration. The teacher interacts one on one with the student as needed, but there is also quite a bit of mentoring/modeling that happens between the students. We were incredibly grateful when Jordan began in the standard public education model this year. Her self-directedness and ability to focus was what got her moved from Kindergarten to First Grade. She was more challenged in this environment and we were happy with her teacher, but stunned at the difference in the school day. When asked, Jordan said she missed most the individual work, didn't like always doing the exact same thing as other students.
When we got a phone call at the exact midpoint of the school year that a Kindergarten spot had opened up in the charter Montessori we'd applied to in the spring, it was a painful choice, but one we knew we had to make. "The mission of the California Montessori Project (CMP) is to offer a quality, tuition-free Montessori education to every child in the state of California."It's a public education, but a whole different ball game. Jordan can be a bit of a loner and we were a little concerned about another transition - especially since she came waltzing out of what was supposed to be her last day of school at Sutter's Mill holding the suitcase that meant she'd been chosen as Student of the Week for the following week. She had her last day on Monday and her teacher graciously let her fulfill Student of the Week duties that day, and she didn't complain or fuss or seem to worry at all about the transition. I think being in a Montessori environment is a comfort to her.
Her classroom is as fabulous as any Montessori classroom should be, full of wonderful items meant to be touched and used. She has three turtles living in a wonderful aquarium in her class, three teachers working with the 38 K and 1st graders, and kids both older and younger than her. Her main teacher, Ms Charmaine, is from South Africa and has a lovely smile. Even halfway through the year. I was so relieved that on her first day other students showed her where to put her lunchbox, her jacket, how to line up. There is such a sense at a Montessori of that connectedness. In her first grade class, an inordinate number of the students had teenage siblings and it showed. Jordan's desire to play puppies or mermaids was often met by an "that's for babies" attitude, but at the new school a few kids jumped right in. It's a little sad for us to not have that morning connection with the other parents, but it's honestly such a huge relief to have her in the Montessori environment again. She was thriving at Sutter's Mill, but it was a whole different world. At CMP, she gets to be a Kindergartener again and we can relax about sending her to college to turn 18 halfway through her first year. She's reading at our beyond a fourth grade level, though, and so she gets fourth grade level books and reading assignments and homework rather than the "See Spot Run" books she was getting. She takes her math jobs from the first grade shelves and will soon be able to go beyond that, and she hasn't said she misses her old school at all.
I watched Sawyer in his German lesson at school a couple of weeks ago. The woman who teaches looks to be about as old as, oh, the hills. She was singing a song in German with the kids who were all enthusiastically singing along with her. I speak not a single word of German but was laughing as these three year olds were twirling, falling to the ground, playing asleep and jumping up in perfect synchronization and with huge smiles on their faces. It's a much different environment from the previous Montessori the kids were at, but it seems well suited to Sawyer. He says he doesn't want to go to school some days, but I think it's more that he'd rather (and I see this as a positive) hang out with either Tom or I, that he enjoys his time at home. And like any child, I'm sure he assumes we spend our days when he's at school having the kind of fun we try to provide for the kids when they are home: trips to the JellyBelly factory, board and card games, puzzles, bike riding at the park, swimming, playing racquetball or tennis, baking. When we get to school to drop him off, he never looks back, always has a huge grin on his face and beelines straight for the door. His teachers seem to genuinely enjoy him. We have much less of an idea of what he's learning as both of us spend a lot less time in his school - Tom was with the kids every day for a year at Madrone - but when he counts to twenty, identifies his numbers and occasionally even a letter, or randomly dishes out an impressive fact or two, we're sure there's something valuable going on. German might not be the most useful language to learn in the new global economy, but it's good to be prepared for anything. He can learn Mandarin later, when he's a little more skilled at speaking English (not to mention interpreting the messages his own body is sending him).
