I Show What I Know

By: Josephine
At my Montessori school you get to choose your own works, choose your spots to work and you don’t have to stay in a desk. You get to do the works by yourself and sometimes you get to do partner works. You get to move freely around.
Works are things like punctuation key experiences, large bead frame, and some things you’ve never seen before like parts of an angle. Sometimes at indoor recess we get to do yoga.
And you can also, if you need to change your work, just erase your work on your plan and do something else on your blue lesson card instead. Sometimes my teachers teach things individually. My very, very, very nice friend showed me the Parts of A Frog Lesson today, because I missed school yesterday.
At my Montessori school I get to “show what I know.” All the kids get to do that.

I got to bring in shark teeth to share and tell about. And I also got to do a really long whole class project about South America. We did not make up the things, we researched them and then we did make up our own drawings, sculptures and our reports about the things. We made the hallway into the biomes of South America. And we did the Marinera dance from Peru and we all sang a song in Spanish called Que LLeva about animals finding a shelter in a cave and a play called the Speckled Hen about a hen who carried a letter to the king. All the parents came and we did the shows and they did a tour of our biomes and we each gave our presentations like experts. And we taught the younger kids about our animals and research, too. I was the capybara expert and a partner with the green iguana expert.

The really big deal of the showing what you know thing is the “three minute talk” that you get to do when you get in elementary. It doesn’t have to be three minutes though. My talk was actually twelve minutes. Kids do the talks so they can tell the others what things they know a lot about. I did sewing. At first everybody thought I might be kind of scared because I was the first first-grader to do a talk, but I was actually really really happy that I got to be the first first-grader. I liked doing a presentation in front of my whole class. I told the class about sewing, the materials needed and the steps to sew. And I shared some of my sewing projects that I made before. The kids clapped and ask questions at the end. My family got to come and watch.

It’s important that kids get to show what they know so other people can learn new things about each other and just how to do things. And I learn things by showing others those things. That’s kind of what Montessori is pretty much all about.
(transcribed by Mom)
About the Author: Josephine is a six year old montessori student in her first year of her elementary cycle (also known as first grade). Her favorite thing in school is “language works.” Her second favorite thing in school is “cultural works.” When she’s not in school she likes to play with her little sister Beatrice, practice her piano, make Rainbow Loom bracelets, and go to ballet class. Her favorite animal used to be a zebra, but it is now a giraffe because kids change their minds.