Trial Day 1: Christian Montessori Day Care.

So today was my first day at work. My feet are hurting after being on my feet all day.

6.45: Walk out to Train Station.
7.07: Ashfield Train Station. Bought a weekly ticket.
7.47: About 40 minutes of travel to the designated suburb.
8.10: To be at centre about 15-20 mins before shift starts.
8.30-5.30: Shift For the whole day.
5.30: Get off work...

So I reached home about 7ish this evening. Went to Kmart to get some supplies.

The centre is amazingly quiet.. all the elements of Montessori are found in the way the classroom is constructed. But the centre was not originally a day care centre to begin with.

As the Coordinator explained, the centre through the years, changed the services it provided to accomodate the needs of the society. It has a history of over 20 years.

Elements of the Montessori Classroom as Observed.

• The teacher spoke in a quiet voice. There was no shouting, or loud voices in the room. One of the main staff noted that after having being in such an environment for over ten years, she did not like it when a Liaison Teacher from a teacher training college for one of the staff came in and started talking in a really loud voice with the student teacher. To her, it felt like they did  not respect the calm & quietness that the centre employed.
• The children walked in a neat and quiet manner. Those who didn't, had to go back to the start of the line. 
• The children put their bowls away after their meals, and cleaned their "dining" space on the table. 
• Many of the Montessori teachers stated that their reasons for coming to work in a Montessori school, was due to the Sense of Order found in the montessori classroom.

It was really a change, returning to a Montessori environment. It really is different from the typical Australian traditional preschool system (which currently is utilizing what they called Reggio Emilia's play based approach).

Indeed, learning where and when to "step back" from "overloading" the children with too much interaction is a skill that trainers should include in the provision of teacher training in the mainstream teacher training colleges today. Sometimes children just want to concentrate/focus/work on activity without necessarily needing to have a conversation, which may just distract them from what they were trying to do.

Wouldn't you feel annoyed if someone kept trying to talk/engage you in a conversation when you were trying to focus on an activity, say reading, surfing the Net, baking a cake, drawing a plan?

(But you didn't want to be rude but just let them continue but actually you weren't very focused on listening to them anyways...)

My point exactly.