Presentations, presentations and more presentations!

A presentation is what a Montessori directress calls the process of showing a new material to a child. Most children love getting presentations, even if they're not particularly excited about what the activity is they love the one on one time with the adult. I normally don't do a lot of new presentations in our classroom because we want to limit how many new things the child is introduced to at a time so they go back and practice what they have already been shown. So my fellow teacher and I have decided that it's best if she does the majority of the presenting and I focus more on showing the children extensions and reinforcing what they learned the first time. Today though it just worked out that I had a lot of opportunities to give new presentations.

I caught L right when she came in and said that magic words "I haven't worked with you in a while, what would you like to do?" The first thing she blurted out was the color wheel. I grinned and reminded her that she already knew that work so well that she didn't need me to help her. Instead I offered to show her the leaf cards and had her set out the mat. She laid out one set of the cards and I read off the names of the leaves before handing her the card to match.

Unfortunately I was interrupted a few times during the presentation. Ideally this should be a time where the teacher is completely focused on the one child, but with one of the other teachers busy greeting children at the door I had to step away from L to remind other children to stay in the classroom. Luckily L was patient and I did try to leave her with a card to match when I stepped away. Overall I think L enjoyed matching the cards and she was really quick even though there are a lot of different leaves to look through, and since they're real leaves they aren't truly identical.

My next presentation actually started before I even finished doing leaves with L. A came in and the first thing she asked me was if I was going to give her the presentation I had given her friend M the day before. I told her sure, surprised she had remembered that I wanted to show her subtraction and seemed pretty excited about it. So I had her start setting up the cards for the golden beads. That's one of the really nice things about working with the older children, they can really take direction, and set up even new works independently.

A and I flashed through the process of doing subtraction. She knew exactly how to count the beads, remembered the numbers she needed to get and eagerly followed the steps. In fact she had such a good time that as soon as we finished reciting the problem she asked if we could do it again! I apologized that I needed to work with some other children and suggested a few other friends who knew subtraction that she could ask to work with her. Unfortunately they all declined and she just cleaned it up instead.

Next I reviewed a counting work with one of the four year old boys, helping him recognize his numbers and double check his work. I got another boy started on the sound book he was supposed to be making, helping him find a table where he wouldn't get distracted. I also tried to engage one of the four year old girls in to doing a fetching work since she wasn't working, but rather being silly and distracting her friends. She didn't like that idea though and turned me down. Ouch. Though she was polite about it. Just asking though had desired affect of getting her to buckle down and choose a work to do.

As the day was drawing to a close I saw N running around the classroom, trying to play chase with some other children. I got him to stop running, asked if he had a work out and then told him to come with me and choose one of the chains. This was the first presentation I gave today that wasn't optional. Usually it should be optional if the child wants to come to the presentation, but occasionally, like in this situation, it's necessary to divert them to something more productive.

So N chose the short 7 chain and I introduced him to the arrows that went with it. He quickly caught on to the idea of counting and placing the arrows. Since it was so easy for him I also introduced him to writing the numbers down on special graph paper. Why hold him back when he's obviously ready for more challenging work? It took right up until the end of the work cycle, but N finished writing his number for the chain and I'm sure he's excited to bring that paper home.

Whew, a lot of new materials today. Now hopefully they all liked the work enough to try it again tomorrow.