Montessori at our house

As part of my work responsibilities, I started visiting a local Montessori preschool last spring. Everything about the environment appealed to me: the soft, solid colours, the art on the walls, the entire airy, organized space. The children in the school were calmer and more self-controlled than any of the children I had witnessed as other preschools and daycare centers I have visited. My interest was peaked, and my natural inclination for research took over. I had to learn more about this.

Previous to this experience, the only thing I knew about Montessori school was that Anne Frank had attended one. We read her famous diary in English in junior high, and I remembered that she had to leave her beloved Montessori school to attend a Jewish school when the Dutch segregation began. After learning about the Montessori method, and seeing the difference in approach and its resulting effect on the learning atmosphere, I can understand why Anne saw the change as a loss.

After months of research through books, magazines, blogs, websites, and even YouTube videos, I have slowly brought some Montessori-inspired changes into our home. The Montessori idea that has most resonated with me is one of the Prepared Environment. That basically means making a child's environment accessible to him by using low cupboards, shelves, and child-size furniture and tools. Making these modifications to my home has been a labour of love, and I am delighted to share them with you.
This first modification is something many families may have in their home, but definitely is in line with the idea of the Prepared Environment. Nik is able to take out and put away his own jacket and shoes, thanks to a Shaker-style peg rail I picked up at the local thrift store.

Adding a Rubbermaid foot stool to our livingroom has made the space much more functional for Nik. He can use it with the coffee table for snack, or playing with table top toys.

It is also so lightweight, that he can move it around himself to explore or access things that are otherwise too high for him to reach. Here he is standing over our cabinet stereo, watching the cd in the cd player spin.

More involved changes have been things like Nik's kitchen cupboard.All of the child size dishes and cutlery can be found here, organized and ready to use or explore. Favourite things included in this cupboard are

Child-size metal cutlery in a miniature cutlery tray, and A stoneware creamer used for pouring as a child-size pitcher.

Both the cutlery tray and the creamer were thrift store finds. I have yet to order even a single item from the high-priced Montessori supply catalogues.

I have saved my very favourite home Montessori spot for last: our mini-classroom. Against one wall in my small home's very small office, we have this area:
It consists of a child-size table and chair, bulletin board at child-eye level, drawers for art supplies and an open shelf of table tasks. Based more on what I have seen at the local Montessori preschool than what I have read in books, this area is designed so that Nik can choose his own task, and bring it to the table to work on.

He loves his "desk". My husband and I both have desks in this room, too, so it is satifying to him that he has not been left out, I think. His current favourite 'work' is a toss up between pressing alphabet cookie cutters into homemade playdough, and stringing buttons on shoelaces. See photos below for a few more details of this space.

Playdough and accessories.

Work shelf with stringing beads, buttons, puzzles, hammer toy, alphabet desk and peg board.

Blogging for Bliss

After having the name and address for this blog for more than a year, now, I am ashamed at how little I have a) posted to it, and b) learned about how to use it.

Oh, I have an excuse list a mile long, mind you. I have been reading my little eyes out, for one. Nik and I have been spending time every week at the local library. We spend it mainly in the children's department, due to his ever-moving ways, but our local library has a fabulous online catalogue, and I search and place books on hold from the comfort of my PC during the respite that comes during Nik's naps on my weekdays off. Paired with the wonderful recommendation system developed and hosted by Amazon.com, I have access to more interesting books than I ever have time to read.

I have also taken another Internet-related plunge, which is taking up some of my computer time lately. I, too, have fallen victim to the Facebook epidemic. Oh, I resisted for a long time, believe me! But when searching for active online groups covering a variety of topics, I found everyone was meeting on Facebook, time and time again. That, paired with a co-worker implying I was only abstaining out of snobbery, was enough to push me over the Facebook cliff. Immune to peer pressure I am not. ;-)

But, here I am today, with new resolve for broadcasting the innane details of my existence to an Internet community of strangers. Blogging holds the appeals of being able to ramble on and on, without interupttion, a true tempation for a chatterbox such as myself.

But I need to start slow. Even trying to figure out how to change my background from black to the more popular white a few moments ago opened a Pandora's box of stress for this technologically-challenged sister. Not knowing how to do something, especially when I don't even know where to learn how, hurts my pride, and my body puffs up with ugly entitlement. Before I know it, I am angry at the Internet itself for being difficult on purpose! This techno-tantrum is truly not my most attractive side, so my first aim is to only add a photo. And to all you smirking veteran bloggers out there, remember... We all start somewhere. Also, never underestimate my ability to make mountains out of molehills.

Given that this blog post has no real subject, sort of like Seinfeld, choosing a photo to illustrate it, will be in itself a challenge. Vacation photo? Latest shot of my son around the house? What about Halloween? All contenders, but all seem a little common, a little dull... Not quite right for an inagural photo. I mean, this could set the mood for all that is to come! I may never reach elusive blogger fame, if the first photo isn't just right. Let's see... Pretty nature shot? Flowers, butterflies, beaches... Nope, nope and nope. Hmmm... I've got it!



A duck!


*quack*

Art journalling

Since my son was born nearly 18 months ago, I am afraid that my long time papercrafting passion has gone by the wayside due to lack of time and opportunity to indulge. Oh, I still get my Scrapbook etc. subscription in the mail, and I am keeping all my supplies and continuing to take photos, but I have pretty much stopped shopping, and haven't completed a single layout for months. I kept telling myself the opportunity would arise again, and maybe it still will, but in the meantime my soul was withering away from creativity dehydration.

Enter art journalling.

For Christmas, many members of my family write wish lists, and post them on my brother's web site, to make shopping easier on us all. I didn't have many things on my list this year, which resulted in getting not one, but two, copies of Kelly Rae Roberts "Taking flight", one of the books on my list. A fabulous, inspiring, tall-drink-of-water book, but I still didn't need two. So off to Chapters I went to exchange the second copy for another book of the same type. I looked through all the scrapping and cardmaking books and magazines, feeling sort of ho-hum about them, and then a new type of book caught my eye: Sharon Soneff's "Art Journals & Creative Healing". I knew Sharon Soneff's name from the scrapping world, best for her Sonnet's line of scrap supplies, and so I flipped through the book, deciding almost immediately that it was the book I had been looking for.

Being the research-oriented kook I am, I had to read multiple more books, magazines, and online articles/blogs on art journaling and altered books before I was ready to put pen to paper in my own version, but during a recent holiday I took the plunge, picking up a spiral bound sketch journal, and a giant jar of gesso at Hobby Lobby. My work is simple so far, consisting of drawing and/or painting with a wide variety of mediums (watercolour, pen, coloured pencil, crayon, oil pastel) and handwritten thoughts. I hope to get into more collage techniques in time, and also complete an altered book honouring my love of children's literature, in a old copy of A. A. Milne's "Winnie the Pooh".

In the meanwhile, I am staining my bedsheets with art supplies, working in my journal before bed a few nights a week. It has proved a wonderful tool for combatting overthinking and negative self talk, and I hope create a record of personal growth (a la Sabrina Ward Harrison). The spin off benefit of beginning this new hobby is that, in addition to meeting my needs of getting messy and making things, I feel more in touch with my inner artist than I ever have, and I am having the strangest cravings to read poetry, or spend a day at the art gallery. If only I could afford real art lessons...