In Montessori style education, a big part of it relies on the parent/teacher creating a prepared environment. But, sometimes the environment prepares itself.
Once per month, I host the delivery, unpacking, sorting and tallying up of a large Frontier order of home and body products. This is for my family and several others. My children help me with this order more or less. Everything from using my calculator to make "tickets" to playing with all the corn and water soluble "peanuts" packing material to even kind of..sort of...helping me sort.
Today, to my surprise, we had an enormous amount of "peanuts" and the children made three box "boats" full of them for creative play while I worked on the order sorting. Much of this stuff went all over my craft room, spilling to the other two adjacent rooms too and I just kind of walk through it, contain it to the room as much as possible so it is not all over the downstairs, and then we deal with it when I am finished with every one's order.
Much more to my surprise, with less coaxing than what can be more typical with a dirty job unwanted, I suggested to my seven year old that he get a trash bag, his dust pan and, begin to shovel it and bag it up. The bag pictured is the result and that is a tall kitchen bag full and tied by him without complaint! He even told me he was hungry but was going to finish. I could not help but to tell him after he had worked for quite a while that we would have cookies and milk afterwards....but, I have to say, he did not seem to be too concerned about the snack but more about focusing on getting his work done. He even was patient with his little brother in admonishing him for his help...sometimes, there are blessed times like these.
Thank you Lord for ways, unforeseen, unplanned but very useful to teach (in a relaxed playful way) focused attention. I believe these little exercises have potential to transfer to academics as well. We shall see.
