Ali's Adventure Abroad

My last week at Montessori Valkenbos was bittersweet. I am so thankful for my time here and have learned so much these past three weeks. On Wednesday, the school celebrated Juffendag. This day was set aside for all of the teachers to celebrate their birthdays on one day of the school year. Teachers who had birthdays in the summer got to be celebrated, too. It was a day filled with food and games! Students brought flowers or a small gift to honor their teacher’s birthday. Wednesdays are half days at Montessori Valkenbos, so the students go home at 12:15, while teachers stay at the school to plan. In the Netherlands, most all schools get half days on Wednesdays—the reason being so parents can be with their kids in the afternoon. I like that this system is built into the school schedule. It gives time devoted to families to be together during the week. I was also asked to teach an English lesson in my bovenbouw class this week. I did not write a plan, as I was asked

This week was very busy! We went on a field trip with the onderbouw classroom to the local library. It was about a 5 minute walk from the school. The students were very excited to visit and pick out a book for their classroom library. The onderbouw students begin when they turn four, so many students come in mid-year. In this classroom, the teacher does the "mapping" for the students because they are too young to do it on their own. In the onderbouw classes, each student moves around from station to station throughout the day. The students move on their own, as the teacher pulls aside two students at a time to work on a mini-lesson. Students may work on things like art, puzzles, making patterns, matching, etc. There are lots of Montessori materials for the students to choose from. Numbers Learning my numbers in Dutch helped me the most this week. I quickly realized that I could help the most with math, but the name of the numbers were different. The students were a huge

On Wednesday after school, Maite and I visited the Kinderboekenmuseum in The Hague. It's an interactive museum for kids of all ages. The museum itself is actually located inside the library of a college campus and has two floors. The top floor is where children begin at the letter A and follow the trail to letter Z. Along the way there are different rooms dedicated to the Dutch children's books. In each room, there is a task the children can complete to move on to the next room. The rooms are definitely kid-sized and hard to go through if you're too big. But, what I love about the museum is how centered it is on the child and not the parent. At the end of the alphabet trail is a room dedicated to a famous Dutch author who wrote the book, Ik ben kikker , or, "I am frog." The end of the trial is more of a large jungle gym for children to play on. Downstairs, the museum is geared toward older kids. There is a really cool maze-like structure that was built on the bo

My first week at the Valkenbos Montessori school was wonderful! We have a great mentor who introduced us to the school and his classroom. The main classroom I'm assigned to is a bovenbouw group of levels 6-8. These students are 10-12 years old, or Grades 4, 5, and 6 in US schools. However, I have the opportunity to be in middenbouw and onderbouw classroom as well. The Motessori structure is very different from that of public schools in the US. The middenbouw classrooms include levels 3-5 and ages 6-9, and the onderbouw classrooms have levels 1-2 and ages 4-5 (Kindergarten). This week has been very busy! I was able to visit all three levels and really got the opportunity to see how the children of various ages interacted within the classroom. I spent the majority of my time in the bovenbouw classroom this week, so I thought I would focus this post on how the bovenbouw classroom operates. The students in the bovenbouw classroom are very autonomous, as the majority of the students

I am sitting in the DFW airport waiting for our flight to take off. I'm nervous yet so excited for what this month will bring me. Currently I am student teaching in a third grade ELA class in Aledo, TX. I am so grateful for the time I've spent at the school so far and I look forward to going back to the same classroom in March. For the month of February, I will be student teaching at a Montessori school in The Hague, Netherlands. Since I've only observed one Montessori classroom in the states, I am intrigued to see if there are any similarities, but I anticipate many differences. I am eager to get to our school this Monday to begin student teaching and learning about education in The Netherlands. I'm not sure what grade-level I will be with yet, but I am looking forward to this ed-venture. See you in one month, Texas!