Kinde's First Story

Kinde has enjoyed making words and occasionally witing someone a note with the moveable alphabet. Today she announced she would write a story, and she worked out all the letters on her own. Occasionally she would start to ask me, and then would figure it out and move on. Here's the result:

Same Work, Different Skills

Kinde has finally been rediscovering the sensorial works after basically a year hiatus in our transition from school to homeschool. She asked for a reminder on how to build the house out of red rods. I'm not sure if that's as common as the maze, but one her teacher had in a batch of photos they could try to duplicate. I showed her, she recreated it, and then used the pink cubes and brown rectangular prisms to "furnish" it. I can't remember what she said all the pieces were, but the one in the middle is the bed.

Pre then decided to get in on the action. She brought over some pasta we have in nice autumnal colors for pouring, and proceeded to carefully place one pasta piece on each sensorial piece. When she had leftovers she poured them in the "attic swimming pool". It was fun to see her find a developmentally appropriate aspect (one-to-one correspondence) to a work that is otherwise way beyond her.

Following the Child All Over Seattle

Lately there have been lots and lots of things we've had to do, places we've had to go, and people we've had to see, and it has been wearing on Kinde. She's generally pretty flexible, but more and more when she realizes she has no choice about doing X she's asked if there could be a day where she gets to decide everything. I had been thinking that could be a good birthday tradition (and it still could be), but we decided to act a little more promptly.

Sunday morning Mark and I realized that Kinde had chosen breakfast, suggested our going to the park where we were, and we had been there much longer than usual to her delight. It *had* so far been her day and we had no other commitments (assuming we were willing to continue living in squalor). We asked her if she had noticed what a special day it was yet, and exclaimed that it was her day! She had a ton of ideas of course, and we pointed out that we only had one day, and certain technical challenges. For example, she really wants to go in the stadiums and we pointed out there were no games. Overall, though, she was really reasonable. She filled her hiking backpack with lunch and snacks for all of us, and we hopped on the bus (her first two requests).

First stop was the Pike's Place Market. We smelled the flowers, sampled the produce, saw a fish tossed, listened to street performers, saw one play a violin like a bass and another act like a gold robot, and tasted Market Spice's phenomenal cider. Then we caught the bus to Seattle Center.


Though we intended to be mostly exploring outside, it was just chilly enough that we headed to the Center House to eat after gazing up at the Space Needle. There we found ourselves accidentally attending TurkFest for the third year running. Apparently we have some cosmic Turkish connection, as we don't go to Seattle Center very often, and have never tried to attend TurkFest and it just keeps happening. We ate lunch and watched folk dancers and a fashion show. We were there for a while as Kinde *loves* to watch dance. We have logged something like 20 hours over 5 festivals watching folk dancers of various cultures. We worked our way upstairs to the kid activities where both children got their faces painted and made Turkish flags.



We walked to dinner by way of the Olympic Sculpture Park. We didn't make it down to my favorite piece, Wake by Richard Serra, but headed straight over to Kinde's; Eagle by Alexander Calder. She really wanted to create her own art by dragging the chairs at Eagle's base around in the gravel as she has done before, but Pre was losing it and needed pasta stat. We pressed on across the street to the Old Spaghetti Factory, where we secured a table in the coveted trolley. Good food was had by all and we enjoyed a leisurely stroll down the waterfront at sunset to our bus stop.

Amazingly (and luckily) Kinde made it all the way home awake. We actually ran into someone on the bus who had been at the park that morning and overheard all her big plans. She was too tired to regale him with every detail as is her wont, and just confirmed that we had managed to do it all. She seemed quite content with "her day". I hope it does refuel her for following the family's needs again for a while.

Sound Object Collection

Kinde spent a year in a toddler room and then a year in primary at a Montessori school. As such, we're always working with a weird mix of things she's already done, things she might have done, and things I present. Our language path has been no different. She knew many of the sounds before she switched back home, but I never knew quite which. We used sound buckets... sort of. I had them all out since she had seen them all already. Then I tried having one at a time out. Then I pretty much gave up, as she rarely chose the work, only used it for pretend play (a BIG issue with everything when we started), and seemed to have good phonemic awareness. I do plan to use them with Pre, and will probably start playing I Spy with her very soon as her vocabulary seems to be getting big enough to think about anything other than its expansion.

We've been clearing out and packing in preparation for our move. I had been storing our sound object collection in the buckets, but that didn't seem likely to go well in moving. I have many other miniatures we use for various things, and it seemed useful to have a record of what was actually in the buckets. Even though it could easily change just from what I already have elsewhere for our next go-round with Pre, here's what we have at the moment:

a: anteater, astronaut, ant, aligator
b: bird, bell, bucket, butterfly
c: car, camel, cockroach, cat
d: dog, die, donkey, drum, duck
e: elephant, egg
f: feather, flag, frog
g: grape, gorilla, golf club, goat
h: heart, hat, helmet, horse, hippo
i: igloo, insect
j: jack-in-the-box, jar, jet
k: kangaroo, kettle, key
l: lion, lioness, lizard, lantern, ladybug
m: mirror, mushroom, mitten, milk, mug, mouse, marble
n: nickle, notebook, nut
o: octagon, otter, octopus
p: panther, pumpkin, pan, polar bear, pig
q: quarter, quartz
r: rainbow, ring, rug, racket, rhino, rug
s: salt, snake, squid, sled, spider, scorpion
t: truck, turtle, tree
u: umbrella
v: volcano, violin, vase, vacuum, valentine, vulture
w: wagon, wheel, wood, watermelon, wolf
x: box, six, fox, x-ray, ax, onyx
y: yo-yo, yield, yarn
z: zebra, zero, zig-zag

Long Term Geography Goals and Planning

In order to make our study meaningful, I tried to determine what my goals were in teaching geography, especially this young. Here's what I came up with for Kinde, in approximate order of importance:

1. To create a sense of place, both in where we live and in general of other places to understand when she hears about them

2. To understand how all political regions depend on each other, and specifically how it matters to our lives what happens far away (primarily what food/resources come from where)

3. To recognize and celebrate the differences in surroundings, lifestyle, and culture between us and other places, while maintaining the basic sameness of humanity and without viewing foreign as fundamentally "other"

4. To understand which and in what way cultural features are determined by the physical geography

5. To be able to label a map and know what political regions border each other

6. To lay the groundwork for a study of history

Some of this will be largely irrelevant this year as we will be focusing on the states of our own country, but I am leaving out some other geography works and books that may provoke conversations in which I will want to bear these goals in mind. Once we have moved beyond creating an immediate sense of place (our neighborhood, our city, our state, our country, our continent) I do want to focus more on places farther in distance and/or culture. My US-raised children are unlikely to be totally uninformed about, or have major prejudices against, Europe or Australia, for example. Africa and Asia are going to be of higher priority to cover and reflect the internal diversity of for us.

I will post details as we pursue our study of the states. My general geography plan for the long term, however, is this (and I retain my right to completely toss this and start over):

US states, approx 1 state/week
North America ~ 6 weeks
South America ~ 6 weeks
Africa ~10 weeks
Asia ~ 10 weeks
Middle East ~ 2 weeks
Europe ~ 8 weeks
Australia and Oceana ~ 3 weeks

Then we will start over with the states as Pre will be ready to participate fully and Kinde will be ready to delve deeper, do her own research on topics of interest and comparison, and remember more. None of this study will include history.

I should mention that in my fantasy world we will also be spending a year on the road in the middle school years traveling to all 48 continental states and then one or two years abroad experiencing the world. This is far enough away I can still completely convince myself it is not only possible but reasonable.

Montessori Geography or Not

In general, the Montessori approach to anything is to start with the whole, and then delve into the parts. In general, I think this is great. Learn about trees as a whole, then about leaves, etc. In many topics, this really helps the transition between concrete and abstract; a child can see a big tree easily. They can break it down into leaves, branches, trunk, and roots as they look more closely. If they look really closely, they can see that the leaf has parts. Then it's not so hard to think that maybe those parts are made of parts too. If they get out their microscope, they can see the cells, and understand better than before working through this process that they are parts of the leaf. And if they are ready, it won't be too much of a leap to think that cells have parts, and that those parts may *do* something, and learn about photosynthesis. As I get deeper into the reality of implementing the Montessori method, however, I am realizing that there is one really big topic that is not served well by this process; geography.

In my experience (and I am not trained, nor have I by any means seen them all) Montessori political geography albums begin with the globe. Even with some expanding map work, this seems like an enormous, insane leap to thrust upon a preschooler. A child who in all other areas is understood to be incapable of abstraction is supposed to imagine that we are all on a big ball in the middle of vast nothing? The maps are presented beginning with all the continents of the world, then the individual continents, and finally countries with a breakdown of the specific states/provinces of the child's country. This seems totally opposite to the idea of moving gently to abstraction that really is the heart of the "whole-to-parts" method. I think there is some desire also to start with something conceptually huge and inspiring that makes the kids want to delve deeper into understanding. That doesn’t really work for me either, however, as with a history in astrophysics specializing in the collisions of galaxies, I have trouble summoning the same sense of wonder Kinde’s teacher did holding a globe and exclaiming with wide eyes “This is our whole world!” And ultimately I just feel that the understanding derived from beginning with things the student comprehends and expanding outward in distance and abstraction is more important. Despite Kinde's original introduction to geography in her year of Montessori preschool, and our conventional efforts last year, I am shifting gears this year (and in the future for Pre). We are moving to a system starting with what is close and relevant to the child and moving out from there. Generally this looks like a progression:

Basic mapping and developing our sense of place in our own local
Neighborhood
City
County
State (presented by region)
Country
Continent
Other continents