By Emily Williams
Schools have struggled throughout the late summer, creating plans that allow their doors to reopen and education leaders to welcome children back to classrooms for the first time since early March.
At Creative Montessori School in Homewood – which serves kids from 18 months to eighth grade – school faculty and staff spent a portion of their summer adapting to the “new normal” through their toddler and primary summer programs.
Students arrived back to school Aug. 17 to familiar routines as well as new elements implemented to follow guidelines suggested by the CDC and state and local health departments.
According to CMS Communications Director Natalie Garcia, students in grades primary and above have the option of learning from home. Those who wish to go back to school will be spending less time mingling and more time outdoors.
Working with the rising temperatures of late summer in Alabama, tents have been ordered and will be placed throughout outdoor spaces to provide shade for classes.
Students will wear masks while in all indoor spaces and outdoors when appropriate.
Toddler instructor Lauren Williams and primary instructor Courtney Davis were among the teachers who led summer classes. Both found that spending more time outdoors was an easy transition for the children, who also took to wearing their masks over time.
“It was really nice, because we had smaller numbers over the summer and it allowed us to adjust to the new routine and get a grasp on things,” Davis said.
Before the pandemic, classes frequently would mingle, as is typical for a Montessori-style of learning.
Williams noted that, because of the pandemic, class sizes will be kept smaller and students won’t interact with other groups, to maintain a lower contact rate.
On a typical day, classes also will rotate between indoor classes and outdoor learning spaces.
The design of the school already lends itself to the new teaching style, Davis said, and having the tents will enhance students’ ability to learn in the outdoors even on rainy days.
“A lot of schools right now are thinking outside of the box, which is a concept quite normal to Montessori schooling,” she said. “Our everyday learning is that we are one with nature. That’s what we teach the children. There’s nothing different for us there.”
Toddlers
According to Williams, the summer students were outside almost every day in June. Her students range from 18 months to 3 years old, and their lessons both in the classroom and in the outdoors is heavy on purposeful work.
Lessons that allow them to take care of themselves and gain some autonomy are a foundation for all future learning, Williams said.
“Toddlers love purposeful work,” she said. “They love to put clothes on. They like to wash dishes.”
Her students are thrilled each day when they get to go out into their garden and water the plants.
This summer, the kids tried something new to them as well as to Williams. They delved into growing food.
“I’ve never grown food before, so this was just a big experiment that the kids and I were learning together,” she said.
A hallmark of their success in agriculture was a lone watermelon. Williams said that her class and many others were rooting for this one watermelon for much of the summer, though she was constantly wary that it wouldn’t make it.
“I was cutting this gigantic watermelon and feeding it to them, and they just kept asking for more watermelon, more watermelon,” she said.
Seeing her students get excited about growing their own food was just as exciting for Williams.
Over the summer session, they also made leaps in preparing the kids for fall. Cleanliness is a big hurdle for a small child, especially when spending time outdoors.
“They are toddlers,” she said. “They put their hands in their mouths, but we do wash hands a lot throughout the day.”
A CMS alum herself, Williams is excited to re-introduce a classic Montessori lesson to her toddlers that is a typical practice for older kids.
“In most of the classrooms you will see that there is a Montessori hand washing lesson,” she said. “You’re away from the sink. You have a basin, a pitcher, some soap and a little nail brush. We haven’t had it in my toddler classroom in a while, so I’m putting that out. What better time to play with soapy water?”
Primary Students
With her primary students, ages 3-6, Davis has seen a similar love of the outdoors and getting messy.
While her students were working from home during the schools’ spring closure, one of her top suggestions for parents were not to sweat the messy stuff. She likes to let her students explore during their outdoor time: playing in the rain and mud, finding worms and the like.
Everything in life can be made into an educational opportunity, she said, no matter how small.
“If they dug a mud hole and their shoes got muddy, we teach them how to clean their shoes or work on redressing themselves,” she said.
Her students spend a lot of time in the garden with the flowers, tending to them and cleaning up the beds when the blooms die off. They also grow herbs and have lessons on grinding the herbs and the sensory experience of smelling them.
The students also are allowed to go out and cut flowers themselves and take them back inside for flower arranging lessons. Those arrangements are then placed around the classroom.
“We talk about “making the classroom beautiful” by taking things from the outdoors and bringing them inside,” she said.
Over the break, Davis also encouraged parents to allow their kids to continue to do purposeful work in nature, whether pulling weeds out in the yard or cutting flowers for an arrangement.
“We had one parent who told us everywhere they went their boy said, ‘Oh, I’m just gonna cut this.’ He would bring all of those flowers he cut back home and find a little vase to put them in,” she said. “She said he did this for about an hour. He was so focused.”
Building that focus, Davis noted, is an important lesson that prepares students to properly concentrate during lessons in math, science and language.
“We’re being mindful that education not only happens in the classroom, but through everything we do in life.”
Cleanliness and mask-wearing has also become part of her summer students’ education.
Not only did they learn how to wear their masks, Davis taught them about proper mask care, how to store them and when it is appropriate to change your mask, for example, if you have sneezed.
“We started out wearing (the masks) for just 30 minutes,” she said. “The next day we would add on more time. So, eventually it got to the point where they were wearing it for the entire time that they were in the building and practicing it a little bit outside on the playground, as well.”
Davis and fellow members of the faculty expect that interacting with summer students who are comfortable with the masks will help ease returning students into the new rules.
“We are also teaching them to be mindful that (masks) protect other people,” she said.
Both Davis and Williams noted that all of these changes have been just as much a learning opportunity for the school faculty and administration as they have been for the kids.
Teachers have been able to call on their connections with fellow Montessori schools to glean ideas.
“We have connections with schools in Oregon, Atlanta and Florida,” Williams said. “So, we are learning from these other schools about what they are doing to stay safe.
“I’m just looking forward to having all of the kids back in class. A lot came back this summer, but there are a few that we haven’t seen since March.”