The Metal Insets, or Montessori at Home is Nothing Like Montessori at School

This is a picture of my dining room table one morning this week.  I took a few minutes to sit down and figure out the Montessori metal inset work, and then I presented it to Farmerboy.  You will notice that Farmerboy is not in this picture, however.  That's because his older brother came by and said, "I think we can go outside now," so of course Farmerboy hit the road.  But since the whole experience was sort of... interesting... and highlighted a few of the challenges one runs into bringing Montessori into a home environment, I thought I would blog about it.

The first thing is, my "metal" insets are not really made of metal.  They're plastic, and I bought them on sale at Learning Resources when Farmerboy was a baby.  At that point, I had perused Basic Montessori by David Gettman (not thoroughly) and read Natural Structure, and that was about all I knew of Montessori.  I had no clue how to use the insets, and thought they might make nice puzzles for Farmerboy to learn his shapes.  (They were really cheap, too.)  I set them out in a basket, Farmerboy scattered them all over the floor, and that was about it.  Later, when I learned they were for drawing, Gareth and Katydid used them to draw shapes on construction paper, which they then drew faces on, cut out, and taped to craft sticks to make puppets.

The purpose of the insets is actually to develop the fine motor control necessary for writing.  They're introduced at the primary level (ages 3-6), but now that I have found out how they're supposed to be used, I have to say that I think they're really ageless.  Of course, I'm the kind of person who derives tremendous joy from just smelling a tin of Prismacolor pencils, but older kids (and grown-ups) can use the insets to make increasingly complicated designs, which transition the material from a language (i.e. writing) material to art.  They also reinforce geometrical concepts of shape.

And this is why my eight year old (Katydid) is the one left sitting at the table, making insets.  (Her littlest brothers are busy gathering up colored pencils and asking me their names.)  She likes art, and these insets are right up her alley.  On Thursday, she actually spent 45 minutes on the insets, while Gareth worked with clay and Farmerboy skipped around between our scissors cutting tray, the Brown Stair, clay, and playdough, and Pip and Pop used the Pink Tower and playdough.  (For a while, it seemed as if we were having a real Montessori experience.  Everything was quiet and calm -- for 45 minutes!)

My initial presentation did not go terribly smoothly, however.  (Honestly, they almost never do.)  I was presenting to Farmerboy, but then Katydid scooted in on the same chair.  I have one inset tray, but they each wanted to use half of it.  Farmerboy did not want to fill the insets in at all, but he did enjoy tracing the shapes... after he saw it was going to be something fun, because with Gareth sitting at the other end of the table grumbling about how he hated math, all kinds of math, and all ways of doing math, Farmerboy initially told me, "But I don't want to learn how to learn."  (What he wanted to do, apparently, was run around and get into trouble.)  The babies kept running in and out of the room, dragging a quilt behind them.  After Katydid was done, I tried to sharpen some more colored pencils, had to prevent Pip from sharpening his finger, nearly set the oven fire, and...

(Ok, so I can't blame the kids for that one.  I didn't realize there was big glob of chocolate chip zucchini bread scorched onto the bottom of the oven when I turned it up to 450 to make tater tots.  Incinerating a big glob of chocolate chip zucchini bread produces an awful lot of smoke, in case you ever the get the urge to experiment in your own oven.)

Anyway, I'm glad I persevered, because we got Thursday out of it, and Thursday was good.  The reality of homeschooling in our house is that some of it is going to be bumpy, and none of it is going to look the way it does in books.  But it's going to be good, too, in its own way.   As long as I am not swayed by the individual days and look instead at the piling up of them into weeks, months, and years, it's easier to ignore the chaos and see instead the progress.

Comments

[Cindy]

Thank you so much for posting this. It was such a nice reminder that we can't recreate the school in our homes and to look at the big picture instead of getting bogged down on the day to day stuff. Looks like your kiddos are doing well.

[Marianne]

Thank you for posting the metal inset instructions. I hadn't figured out what those were for before. I'm sure you'll get plenty of good use out of your materials in the next few years if you keep them available. Maybe I'll put those insets on my (long) wish list!

[Theresa]

Terrific! I loved reading about your Montessori experiences.
And 45 minutes of busy quiet learning! Wow!That must be some kind of record, eh? It would be here!

[SuzanneG]

Angela -
We just got our insets the other day and they are SO GREAT! They love them!