Before my son was born, I worked for a couple of years at the local Montessori school, mostly in the two-year-old classroom, plus one term in the children's house (three-six year olds).
When my son turned two, it was a given that he would be going to the school. I don't think that the school is perfect by any means, but I'm aware of what its faults and strengths are. I knew the daily schedule, the usual songs and stories and most of the work.
There had been some staff turnover since my time there, but the head was the same and my old colleague was still in the toddler room. I had an established relationship with the people who would be teaching my children. I had also worked/helped out off and on since my son had been born anyway, deliberately maintaining my connection with the school. I had an inside track, so to speak.
This made it very easy for me to pick a school. I don't know how I'm going to manage for their next school! For what it's worth, having worked as a teacher, my number one advice for a preschool is to choose one where you feel you've got a good rapport with their teachers. At this age, I think it's very important to have a back and forth conversation about where they are with their needs and skills (not just the academic ones)--and both you and the teacher need to be able to be honest.
The transition from teacher to parent has been an interesting one. After two years of monopolising my son's life and knowing exactly what he was learning every day, it was bizarre to say goodbye to him and let him spend three hours without me. Three hours that would become a void in my knowledge of him.
It was also weird to go from being "Miss Sarah" to "Toby's Mom." Actually, some of the older children at school still call me Miss Sarah, which I take great pride in. However, I used to know the name of every child there, and that's no longer the case... although I imagine I still know more than most parents.
For the most part though, I'm comfortably settled into the parent-role now. I still get agitated about what he's doing. I went in to observe him in January, when he moved down to the children's house, and I might just have to do that again soon, but I probably shouldn't get into the helicopter-parenting habit! When I was teaching, I always felt a little silly doing parent/teacher conferences--how much academic assessment does a two year need? As a parent, I've been so grateful for the insight into just what my son is doing all day.
Perhaps my biggest problem now is remembering that my husband isn't as familiar with Montessori as I am and thus doesn't necessarily understand what we're talking about at these parent/teacher conferences. We had our second last week, and the teacher was explaining that our son had pulled out the moveable alphabet of his own accord. I chattered away to her about his abilities with sounding out words, but my husband had no idea what the moveable alphabet was. We took him into the classroom afterwards to show him.
Sidenote, I am so appreciative of my husband making the time to come to the PTCs. I know a lot don't, and it's important to me that he stays involved in the kids' education.
Let's just emphasise a point here: my son is working on the moveable alphabet. That definitely came as a surprise, since I didn't think he had figured out how to break a word into its component sounds yet. I knew he knew all his sounds (i.e. the alphabet in phonics), but it turns out he can pull out the letters to write 'man', 'hat' and 'bat'. He can't read, but he has made that leap to writing.
At home, he sometimes rearranges the magnetic letters on the fridge, but only in a random order. Still, today, I was sorting out a box of language stuff, and he pulled out some phonics cards I'd bought, saying he wanted to do those (not that he had the faintest idea what they were). The card on top was 'ar', and it showed a picture of a car in a barn with a star painted on. He said 'farm' rather than 'barn' but that worked as well.
I dug out some letters from the same box and gave him 'a' and 'r', and we arranged them in order. Then I tried pulling out 'c', 's', 't', 'f' and 'm'. He got 'car' and figured out 'star' much quicker than I expected, considering 'st' is a blend. We never progressed to 'farm' because my daughter started pulling letters out of the bag and putting them on the table. She does like practising her transferring skills.
Considering my previous anxiety on how best to teach him to read, I'm thrilled by this development, and now I've got to try very hard to sit back and not push him on it. He's definitely early on this, but that's OK. He's not a genius by any stretch of the imagination and even in literacy he might average out in another few years. But as his mother, I am so proud of him right now.
And as a teacher? Well, we'll see what next year brings. My hope is that when my daughter starts school, I'll be making a new transition to both teacher and parent. That should be interesting!
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