I went this morning to watch DD4 at her Montessori School for a couple of hours. Let me describe what happened and then please tell me what do you think it is wrong.
So we enter her classroom and she goes to pick up a mat to play something on the floor. She thinked for a little and then chosed an activity where you have to arrange color tablets from darkest to lightest. She started to arrange the purple ones, but not in the right order. The teacher comes and asks her to put them in order and help her a bit with the purple one. Then she goes away and DD then proceeds to arrange the blue ones out of order. I ask her 'are they arranged from darkest to lightest?' and she tells me 'yes' even though I can see in her face she knows perfectly well that they are not. She knows the colors (in Spanish) since she was 2 yr old and I am pretty certain she can arrange them by hues (sp?). Yet she pretended not to be able. She took almost all the tablets out of the box but still show no interest to do the activity as required. I thought that there was very little point in doing something she does not want and that does not teach her anything new so I asked her 'do you really want to do it or not?'. She tells me no and that she wants to sit at the table where the cutting and pasting is done.
She had to wait a little because there can be only 6 children at the same time. In the meantime she started to climb the tables and jump and being quite restless.
While doing the color activity she was quite distracted, looking at what other kids were doing.
Once she was able to sit at the 'manualitys' (is this english?) table she was a much happy camper, but not an enthousiastic one. There was the teacher's aide helping the kids and directing them to do a 'schwartze Pete' ('black Peter' the helper of Sinterklaas (Saint Nicholas) - kind of Dutch Santa. She tried to engage the help of the teacher's aide, asking her to do part of the cutting, etc.
In the meantime I just look around the classroom. Most of the activities are 'concrete' and hands-on. However, in reading and maths they can go quite 'deep' if they choose so. At the end of this two years (when they are 6) they should for example be able to count until 10 and do basic addition and substraction. However, there are activities to count until 100 and of course they could do larger addition and substraction.
The same goes with reading: they sould know letters and phonemas, but if they learn faster and want to actually read book, there are in the classroom.
I have the feeling that her problem is that in many aspects she has the knowledge of a 4-5 yr old but her mind operates like a 7ish yr old one.
If she knew how to read and count I would consider puting her in the next group, together with children aged 6 to 9.
But she does not and I wonder how the activities could be modified to appeal DD4.
When I usually pick her up she looks like a candle that is going off. There is no enthousiasm.
By the way, legally speaking I am only obliged to put her in school at age 5. This year I could still 'homeschool' her. But I do not know if this would be more confusing, first try school 3 months, then stoping and then going back 9 months later.
What do you think?
