1 Observation Journal: Entry 5 Observer: Allison Conces Date of Observation: March 9, 2005 Setting/Context: Tomorrow’s Promise Montessori School classroom Huntsville, TX Children/Adolescents Observed: 40 boys and girls, ages 3-5 Observation Notes: I come in and take a seat at one of the child-sized tables in one half of the room. On the other side of the room, the children and teachers are seated in a circle on the carpet. They are getting ready to go play outside for a little while because it looks like rain. The children line up and go outside. On their way out, 5 or 6 children wave to me and one little boy comes up and gives me a hug. They play outside on the playground for about 10 minutes, at which point it starts to rain; Miss Charlotte rings a bell on the playground and everybody heads back inside. Everyone forms a circle on the floor again; while everyone is getting adjusted they sing “Where is Thumbkin?” After the song, Miss Charlotte and the other two teachers put their fingers to their lips to get everyone quiet and the students follow suit.

2 One of the teachers (Miss Judy?) looks at a spiral of colored paper and says it’s Ryan’s turn to lead this morning. They all bow their heads and say the Lord’s Prayer, then stand for the Pledge of Allegiance. Miss Judy then leads in saying what the day is today and Ryan comes and puts a number 9 on the calendar. Everyone says the date together. The children are told they have to get 8 pieces of work done today. They come get their work cards from Miss Charlotte as she calls their names. A rough idea of what the cards look like is below:

Child’s Name Monday

Practical Life Sensorial Math Language Art Cultural Notes

Tuesday

Wednesday

Thursday

Friday

3 Everyone goes and sets up his/her own work area. One little girl, McKaylie, comes and sits next to me at my table. She tells me she’s the birthday girl. I ask how old she is and she tells me she’s four. She has a tray with green and pink puff balls – she’s using large wooden tweezers to pick the puff balls up and put them into little green and pink plastic cups. After she’s transferred all the balls, she takes the tweezers and holds them in front of her mouth, acting like it’s a duck’s beak. “Quack quack,” she says. She tells me, “It’s a pink duck; it’s a pink mommy duck.” I get up a few moments later in hopes of being less of a distraction by walking around and observing than sitting down. McKaylie works some more with the puff balls, then looks at me. She has a quarter. She pretends to put it in her mouth; she says it’s gum. Then she tells me she can’t really chew gum. It makes her sick, she explains, and holds her stomach for emphasis. She gets up and crawls on the floor, pretending to be an animal; she makes a roaring noise which sounds like she’s imitating either a lion or a dinosaur. I move to where I can observe a table of four students also working in the practical life area. One girl is pouring liquids and wiping up the table. A boy has two bowls, one of which has a green rice-like substance in it; he says he’s

4 making baby food. One of the girls says she’s the baby. She says he’s the daddy. At another table by himself one boy is also pouring liquids. He has a tray with different sized little pitchers, a bottle of colored water, and a sponge to wipe up spills. At another table a girl is cutting paper. In the middle carpeted area of the floor, which appears to be the language area of the classroom, children have spread out individual rugs to work on. One boy is matching transparent alphabet tiles to letters on a white ABC board. McKaylie is matching picture tiles. One boy has flat wooden apple shapes; he takes them out of their wooden container and fits them back in. One girl lines up colored plastic pieces on a strip of felt, then counts them to herself. One boy has cards and is matching pictures of objects with the letter sound they go with. In the sensory motor area: Children also have their individual rugs spread out. Some are working with geometric shapes (triangles).

5 Another girl is lining up wooden blocks by size. One girl has red wooden bars of different lengths. She uses them to make a maze, then walks through it on the floor; the girl with the wooden blocks claps for her.

i.e. of the maze the girl constructed

One boy is doing a puzzle of a horse; two other children are doing puzzles of a frog and a bird. One girl wants to work with the triangle tiles; the teacher in the area asks her if she’s had a lesson on them yet. She tells the girl she needs to come sit by her and have a lesson first before she works with them. In the math area: One girl is fitting little plastic geometrically shaped pieces into a hexagonal frame. A boy is working on a foot puzzle – each toe has a number from 1-10 on it. Two girls are working together to line up plastic hearts below tiles that have the numbers one through five on them.

6 Reflection/Analysis: What was most interesting about my observation of the classroom at Tomorrow’s Promise was that although I saw no fantasy related materials (with the exception of blocks, which have questionable relatedness to fantasy) and the only teacher promotion of fantasy witnessed was the singing of “Where is Thumbkin?” (which is only mildly fantastical), the incidence of child-instigated fantasy play was highest here. It is true that most of this play as I observed it centered around the four year old girl McKaylie, but nonetheless, in an hour’s time I saw more fantasy play at Tomorrow’s Promise than I saw in either of the classrooms at Aggieland Country School in the same amount of time. I did not see any materials that were designed to promote fantasy, yet the children were able to take Montessori-approved materials and use them in fantasy play. McKaylie did so using wooden tweezers and currency; two other children did so using bowls and a rice-like substance. This ability to take very “realistic” objects and use them in a way that promotes fantasy, as when McKaylie stated that the brown wooden tweezers were a “pink mommy duck” in itself shows the child’s natural inclination towards fantasy, as well as that just because the teacher does not promote fantasy does not

7 mean that the children will not engage in it. Exclusion of classroom fantasy does not squash the fantastical inclination of children out of them. I recall that when I was little, it was actually the non-fantasy related objects that provided my sister, our friend, and me with the greatest fantastical amusement. We had dolls and stuffed animals, and we certainly played with them, but one of our greatest fantastical endeavors was with an object with no fantastical nature whatsoever. That endeavor was our box. With our plain cardboard box (which soon grew to be three boxes tied together with string) and some carefully prepared mud to serve as gasoline, we constructed a plane and traveled around the world. It was one of our favorite things to do. So although I worried, on first reading Montessori, that the lack of teacher promotion of fantasy would result in children who can’t seem to imagine anything beyond the confines of reality, I should have known that children, with their natural inclination toward fantasy, will make do with what they have to work with. Also noteworthy is the fact that all the fantasy play I observed at Tomorrow’s Promise occurred in the Practical Life area of the classroom, which, according to the account of Martha Torrence’s study seen in Chattin-McNichols’ Montessori Controversy, is where most fantasy play occurs in Montessori classrooms.

8 With regard to non-fantasy related observations of the classroom, the aspect which I observed at Tomorrow’s Promise that I had not at Aggieland Country School was the math area. In this area I witnessed a prime example of Montessori’s concept of control-in-error in a girl fitting geometrically shaped plastic pieces into a hexagonal frame. She had a given number of geometric pieces, and, if she positioned them incorrectly, she would be unable to fit the last piece in the hexagon. Also, I witnessed children working with number concepts with both number tiles and a puzzle; both activities allowed the children a hands-on, fairly self-explanatory means of gaining a grasp of numbers. Although Tomorrow’s Promise is not affiliated with the American Montessori Society or Association Montessori Internationale, in its adherence to Montessori’s idea of how a classroom environment should be and the role of the teacher, by my observation it did at least as well as Aggieland Country School, a full member of the American Montessori Society.