Since Ryann has been able to walk I’ve dabbled in creating spaces for her in the kitchen. At one point she had a cupboard for her snacks and dishes but I wasn’t very good about keeping her snacks stocked and she rarely used it.
We moved into a new house in July and I’m just now getting a handle on how to approach her space in the kitchen.
I bought cheap, clear plastic bins to hold her snack foods. She still has access to the entire refrigerator and pantry, I don’t think keeping something as basic as food off-limits is very Montessori, but this gives her some ownership of “her” food and helps her choose what she wants to eat for snack. She has two boxes in the refrigerator, one with food and the other with drinks. And another box in the pantry for dry goods. I may add another pantry box, but it might get too overwhelming for her.
Currently, her snack boxes look like this:
Drinks: Vanilla milk, Tropical Punch Capri Sun
Refrigerated snacks: Cottage cheese cups, sliced apples, string cheese
Pantry snacks: Pringles, applesauce, pineapple fruit cups, fruit rollups
These are the normal choices she has for her lunches as well. So the snack boxes organize the sides for her lunch so she is less overwhelmed by what to choose. Usually when I ask her to help me pack her lunch she quickly asks me to pick for her. But tonight she could easily pick a couple sides to go with her macaroni and cheese.
Next I need to find a way to put her dishes down where she can reach. I will update when I piece the rest of the kitchen organization together. For now, how do you help your child’s independence in the kitchen? Add your experiences in the comments.
My daughter is a worrier. She worries beyond her years, often literally worrying about growing older and what it feels like. She thinks of endless what-ifs like what if there was no food? What if she never, ever falls asleep but still feels tired?
Helping her manage this anxiety sometimes feels like its beyond my normal parenting techniques. And also tends to spill over into areas of her life that I don’t always anticipate or even recognize.
At school this year Ryann obviously wasn’t applying herself. It wasn’t so bad that her teacher said anything but I could just tell by the materials she was bringing home, her attitude about school and pictures from her classroom.
Yeah, that’s my kid laying around in the background of pictures of other children working…
So I realized there was a problem but it took me some time to realize that she was experiencing some social anxiety. At first she couldn’t express it, but by October she started expressing that she didn’t have any friends and no one played with her at recess. I was still unsure of how to help her, especially because I knew she did have friends at school. The breaking point finally came when she told her dad that a boy kicked her. She didn’t tell her teachers about it at the time so the next day I left a note and the head teacher asked Ryann what she wanted to say to the boy, Ryann practiced it and went and told the boy how she felt. Then she immediately went and worked intently on a sewing activity.
Ryann’s stress relieved handiwork
After practicing how to resolve disputes, she was a different kid in the classroom. She works with purpose. She has grown her reading skills by leaps and bounds. And her teacher is really pleased with her focus. I’m still not sure exactly what was causing her anxiety, whether it was that boy in particular, who she usually gets along with very well, or a vague idea of “what would happen if..” but with a little help she has pushed through it.
I think the important thing here was realizing that it was anxiety that made it hard for her to do her work at school. Not a lack of ambition or ability, but just a nervous feeling that affected her day in a major way. Sometimes children don’t express their anxiety in the ways you would think.
She still has frequent worries about school and other things, and it’s hard to help her work through them while also not making the worries bigger in her mind. Overall I think she is dealing with the same issues other children her age are and I am thankful she is so vocal about what is bothering her. But some days I can feel a little lost in her worries myself or the explanations I give to try to relieve her anxiety only make it worse. For instance, I tried to help her distance herself from her worries by saying that her worry brain was thinking those worrisome thoughts and her worry brain isn’t always right. This caused her to think she had two brains for awhile and then when she assured herself she had one brain she was worried her one Ryann brain was going to worry forever! The whole ordeal was a lesson for me in not using abstracts and metaphors with a five-year-old, for sure. Or at least not mine, not if I don’t want to spend days re-explaining myself!
I am trying to expand my anxiety busting toolkit and have made a Pinterest board of some techniques and helpful articles. Do you have a worrier? What techniques help your child?
1. The measure of a successful school day, according to my 5-year-old daughter, is how many friends she helped.
2. She can solve fairly complex word problems but has no idea what “math” means.
3. Her teacher realizes that talking with her friends during circle time is a social victory for my shy girl, while still expecting her to listen when appropriate.
4. Ryann was behind in number recognition last year, instead she spent more time with language works. And that was okay. Later, she became more interested in numbers and learned those too, with no pressure.
5. The teachers and administrators always look and sound so happy, even when the day isn’t going perfect.
6. Almost all of her classmates are kind and respectful, while still being kids sometimes too.
What is something you love about your child’s school? Let me know in the comments!
I’m a huge opponent of making every activity around the house a “learning” activity. All experiences are teaching something, I don’t believe I have to make much special effort to “teach.” And I definitely don’t encourage school-at-home time where we work on academic skills. In fact, her teacher discourages it as well. Ryann learns in her own time at school with their methods–I don’t want to mess with that formula.
However, Ryann gets bored at home sometimes. And when she gets bored, she bugs. She makes questionable choices, runs around like a crazy person, and just generally seems unsettled. This is especially true at the end of the day, when she should be winding down she tends to wind UP. Just when I thought I was going to succumb to the craziness of my evenings, I read an article at Not Just Cute about resetting your day with fine motor activities. This is, of course, something I knew worked already, but sometimes you need a timely reminder. As an just turned five-year-old, Ryann isn’t particularly entranced by fine motor activities anymore, but some do still keep her attention and I’m sure anything that requires a bit of focus will do the trick to reset her mood when she gets bored.
While looking for simple activities for the kindergarten set I stumbled upon Playdoh to Plato’s Same and Different game. I fell in love immediately with how simple the game is. This game is used to develop early reading skills, which normally violates my playtime rules but this activity is so well designed it complements the Montessori reading/writing methods without overtaking them. And it’s super fun for those on the cusp of reading.
The game uses index cards (our game was made with envelopes because that’s what I had on hand). You divide the card in half and write short words, random letters or numbers on each side. Some of them are the same and some are different. Hold up one card at a time for about 30 seconds (or less to make the game harder) and then ask the child if the characters were the same or different. This is really challenging for beginning readers, especially normally confused letters like lower case “b”s and “d”s.
Ryann liked this game so much, she made her own cards to stump me with! The game worked perfectly to keep her calm and focused and even inspired some writing.
Every summer I feel like the school year looms out in the distance, suddenly coming into focus far too late to properly prepare. Ryann’s school year starts right after labor day and I already feel behind in preparing. We both need time to get used to the idea. She will be in her third year of primary and it’s hard to think of my little girl as being so big.
School marks the end of summer too. Days filled with swimming and flip flops and shorts turn into school dresses and cute shoes and sweatshirts at night. I’m not ready for that either. Every time I open Ryann’s closet another round of clothing has been outgrown and I haven’t been able to keep up. As of last week, Ryann had three (or maybe four) pairs of sandals and not one pair of shoes that required socks. And buying new shoes is always a hassle.
I spend a lot of time looking for shoes with laces that tie and buckles that buckle. Unfortunately, they are few and far between. Instead traded for velcro and slip ons. On one hand you can appreciate the kid-friendly nature of it. Most young children don’t have the dexterity to tie laces and buckle straps and everyone gets to get out the door faster without them. And a child that puts on their own shoes gets a higher level of autonomy and accomplishment. But when you really think about it, velcro is not kid-friendly at all. It’s adult friendly. It requires the least amount of patience and help from the adults in the child’s life. Kids are rarely burdened by the arduousness of a task, they revel in taking forever to get out the door in the morning. Velcro and stretchy shoes keep up with an adult’s pace, not a child’s.
Sometimes I wonder if it’s worth it, searching stores for working laces and straps, having to choose among a couple ugly options when the world has different ideas. Am I clinging to the past, giving up on advancement? After all, looking into my own closet I only have one pair of shoes with laces. None have buckles. And I would say only two require any effort to put on. Ryann could conceivably never have to tie a shoe and live a perfectly normal life. Maybe the adult pace is the child’s pace too.
But like so many things, tying a shoe is not just tying a shoe. It is a sense of accomplishment. It is goal-setting. It is working diligently on a task. It is having pride in your work. It is fine motor function. It is self care. It is part of what Montessori is all about. And without a pair of shoes to tie, what is the point of learning it? Where is the real world application of the skills learned at school?
So I continue my search for shiny, red Mary Jane shoes that buckle, with real buckles. And gym shoes with real laces that don’t stretch to receive a foot. I don’t always succeed, to be honest. Ryann has plenty of slip on and velcro options in her closet. But I think it’s important to try and teach the value of a buckle and the skill it takes to fasten it.
(PS- I am a stickler for car safety and the fact that the buckle was twisted drove me crazy. But she was focused so I waited until she asked for help before fixing it. Learning to buckle is hard work for moms too!)
Last school year, Ryann had a hard time being dropped off at school. As the spring progressed she got more and more anxious at drop off and even cried a couple times. At the same time she started to say she hated school and didn’t want to go. I didn’t want her to be miserable at school so I asked her teacher for some help getting to the bottom of her discontent.
Her only suggestion was that Ryann seemed fixated on who was picking her up each day. Some days I picked her up, some days her Papa and once a week (sometimes twice) her dad would pick her up for his visitation. While I verbally lead Ryann through each day, she needed something more to make the pick-up schedule concrete in her head. Her teacher suggested a calendar.
Great, I thought! Buying a calendar should be easy. So as soon as possible we trekked to Target and combed through all the calendars they had. As I looked though, I realized how kid unfriendly your average calendar is. There was just so much going on. Too many dates, not enough emphasis on the days of the week and in general too many distractions from the current day. All of this is too much for a kid who can’t read and doesn’t even have a firm grasp on the days of the week or the passing of time.
I wanted a weekly calendar that made it easy to differentiate each day without reading but that would also show the rhythm of the week ahead. I needed to be able to label it with the name of the person picking her up and that needed to be easy to understand for a pre-reader as well. Once I figured out what I needed, I left the calendar section and gathered materials to make my own.
I used multicolor foam sheets, glitter foam sheets, stick-on velcro squares and markers.
Each weekday is represented by a different color. Saturday and Sunday are the same color to show that they are weekend days and there is no school. I wrote the day of the week nice and bold at the top of each foam sheet.
Then I cut the glitter foam sheets into strips and had Ryann pick the colors for each person’s name. She picked orange for me because it’s my favorite color. Purple for Papa because it’s her favorite color (and Papa is her favorite!). And blue for her dad because he has a blue shirt, she said. Ryann helped me write the names and attach the velcro squares to the backs. We also put velcro on the days of the week so they are easy to change around as the schedule changes.
We hung the calendar up on the wall, keeping the weekend days together so it was easier to understand than a traditional calendar.
Once the calendar was in practice it was like magic! Ryann immediately stopped saying she hated going to school and within a week was no longer being ultra clingy as I dropped her off in the morning. Confidence in the weekly schedule helped her relax into her school day and have fun.
This project is easy to customize for any schedule. Depending on your child’s ability level, you could populate the whole week with activities! I chose to focus on only one thing as Ryann’s introduction to a schedule and the days of the week, but it will be easy to adapt as her understanding grows.
And back to blogging! I took an unplanned break from blogging this summer and while it was necessary at the time, I miss this space and still have lots to share.
For now, Ryann started back at Montessori school last week and she transitioned back into the classroom so seamlessly it was actually surprising. She spent much of the summer missing her teachers and friends but I wasn’t sure if that was going to translate into an easy transition.
Something about being 4 years old is making all the difference though and she’s having lots of fun with no tears at drop off.
