Repair Box

"It was an accident!" the four year old had immediately blurted out when the crash of breaking glass subsided. He didn't quite have a look of terror on his face, but he was certainly concerned that he was in trouble. I told him that I knew (though inside I was thinking "How on earth am I going to replace that?!??!) and asked him to carefully take a step back so I could go and get the broom. I swept up the glass while he cleaned up the rest of the food prep activity. The rest of the class either kept working or wandered over for a quick peak then went about their business.

Mistakes happen, especially when you're learning something for the first time.

Things break all the time in the classroom or pieces go missing. As Montessori guides we always try to help children learn first how to be careful to try and avoid these things; and then when they inevitably happened anyways we show them how to pick up the pieces (thought not literally in the case of broken!).

Some kids get petrified when they break something. Others seem to not even notice. I'd rather they fall somewhere in between. In our classroom we have what we call the repair box. It's a plain plastic storage bin that's tucked into the cupboard by our resupply items so the children have full access.

Whenever a child breaks something, or finds something broken we encourage them to put it in the repair box if it's not an easy fix. We also use it for empty bottles of polish, glue, soap, etc; hence the location right next to our resupply area! Basically we explain to the children that the repair box is for something that needs the teacher's attention later.

Most times I know why/how something ends up in there. Usually the children tell me when something breaks, but sometimes random pieces of work show up in there and I wonder what happened. While it seems like this might end up being a "get out of jail free" card, I feel like the ability to take the pressure off those more sensitive kids is worth it.

With our repair box we're saying "It's ok, mistakes happen. Let's try to fix it."

Back in action

Whew, back after an almost two week break for the holidays. It was nice to have some free time, but I did miss the children. Boy were they happy to be back! Actually now that I think about it, it's kind of surprising that we didn't have anyone who was reluctant at the door.... though that might be connected to the fact that the short week had a lot of families just taking some extra vacation time.

Those who did come back though were ready to work. After doing some greeting at the door and giving a little assistance in the coat room I came into a classroom that was just humming with activity. Yet I had almost half an hour to sit and observe what was going on. Then I made the mistake of leaving the stool. I'm beginning to think that a teacher sitting quietly on a stool is absolutely invisible to the children. It's actually kind of funny.

J, one of our smallest students was wandering around, telling me she didn't know what she could do so I suggested she get out the color tablets. J couldn't find them and I didn't remember if she'd had a presentation or not. I showed her the box and asked if she wanted to invite S to work with her. I knew S had been shown the color tablets but she is also pretty shy and doesn't like to try out new work. I was really hoping that J might convince her to not only repeat this work, but to branch out to something new. Yeah...it didn't really work out that way, but oh well. So instead I decided to give J a quick refresher on how to use the tablets.

I showed her how to handle them, taking out a few colors and matching them. It was pretty easy for her, and she even knew all the names. Pretty soon she had the entire box out and mixed up for matching. Another three year old, Q, had wandered over at this point and was really interested in what we were doing. I asked J to pick out a tablet and ask Q if she could find the match. They were just delighted! Q and J thought this was just a great game. I stuck around just long enough to make sure they got the idea of taking turns and actually verbalizing the color.

And then I left. That's the ideal role for a Montessori guide; giving the child just enough to get started, working and curious for more, then leaving them to explore.

Ideally.

Because that's sure not how my next presentation went.

First off, I will give M some leeway because being invited to help make birthday treat is enough to make anyone forget what they were working on. Anyways, after that M had come back in and chose a new work like he'd been taught. I caught him, and asked him to clean up the practical life activity he had out and go back to the number rods. After he did that though I found he had no idea what he was supposed to be doing with the number rods. So I sat with him, and kept him on track....and kept him one track...and helped him some more...and realized he had no recollection at all about how to do combinations of 10 with the rods. Finally after about half an hour we had made all the combinations, written them down, and I had him start cleaning up while I read a story to some 'wanderers'.

I have to say, with as much trouble as the actual process was, M has the concept of clean up down pat! That's got to balance out not remembering how to do all the steps right? Well at least it's a transferable skill!