“Nothing?”

By Dr. Wendy Agnew

“What did you do today darling?”

“Nothing” - That classic response of some children when asked about their day at school… Then sometimes for variety, “We had a good snack,” and more rarely, “We did a play about Joan of Arc.” But often it’s just, “nothing.” The top theory is that school is your child’s space to discover his or her independence – to become - and sometimes it’s a tacit secret – like playing personality poker. Do we tell our families what we do at work every day? Sometimes, but often we separate space and don different hats according to where we are.

Montessori’s inspiration was to create places for children to develop in a prepared environment that is more like an enriched home than a ‘school.’ Hence, when children waive goodbye in the morning, she or he will be immersed in a complex dance of social, emotional, cognitive, and physical growth and development. Sometimes it’s not easy to describe that, for example, they built the binomial cube – a materialized abstraction of the binomial theorem. They see a game of coloured blocks... or that they explored the parts of a turtle and learned the word ‘carapace’ or that they did carrot-peeling to aid fine muscle control for writing and logical sequencing as a prerequisite of the mathematical mind.