Flower Arranging

In our classroom, every child chooses a job the first week of school.  We discuss what each job entails and the talents and skills required to do the job well.  Then I ask the children who among them thinks that sounds like a good match for their strengths.  We keep our jobs all year because we all need each child to learn to do his/her job well.  We rely on these jobs for the smooth functioning of our classroom, and each child's job is a genuine and important contribution to our community.  If the job is not done, our community suffers.

At the beginning of the year, it is a sometimes exhausting challenge to introduce each child to his/her job and train him/her properly so that it is done well.  However, that initial investment in time pays off.  Like most of the academic work in the classroom, I provide support--with appropriate tools, initial lesson(s), and a routine--and the child takes care of the rest.



As I looked around just before turning off the lights last Friday, I realized how much had been done without any reminders or active involvement on my part.  Tables were scrubbed and dried.  Chairs were put up.  Pencils were sharpened and restored to cubbies and the colored pencil supply box.  Fresh work plans were in folders.  Journals and pencils were on desks, ready for Monday.  Plants (both inside and outside) had been watered.  The birdbath was cleaned and filled.  Cleaning rags and placemats had been gathered and taken home in a bag by the week's laundry volunteer (a schedule is posted inside the cabinet where dust rags--and the laundry bag--are kept so that the children can check to see whose turn it is to do laundry).  Flowers were cut and arranged in vases.

One of our community jobs is Beautiful Classroom Manager.  This child's role is to review the classroom at the end of work time, notice what needs to be straightened, picked up, restored, or organized, and recruit volunteers to do it.  She often straightens our stack of work rugs or neatens the picture story books on the shelf.  She is also charged with flower arranging.

Several families volunteered (on their Parent Surveys) to send a small bouquet of cut flowers.  At the start of the school year, I organized a schedule, assigning each family a date to bring the flowers.  We receive fresh flowers every month or so, and each family only has to send them once.  Again, once a schedule is established, this requires very little effort or involvement on my part.  Mostly, the bouquet arrives in our classroom, and our Beautiful Classroom Manager gets to work. 

One of my Montessori mantras is "Anything a child can do, a teacher shouldn't."  Over this Thanksgiving Break, remember to enlist your child's help in tasks that need to be done around the house and in preparation for dinner.  The children are capable of so much more than we sometimes realize, and now is the time to recruit their help in your family. 

"If teaching is to be effective with young children, it must assist them to advance on the way to independence.  . . . Everyone knows that it requires much more time and patience to teach a child how to eat, wash, and clothe himself than it does to feed, bathe, and clothe him by oneself.  The one who does the former is an educator, the latter performs the lower office of a servant.  But such service is dangerous as well as easy.  One who has too many servants becomes increasingly dependent upon them and eventually their slave." --Dr. Maria Montessori, The Discovery of the Child