Ik kon het niet laten om bij de taak voor Dutch Culture and Society vermelding te maken van het, voor mij typisch Nederlandse, toilet... We moesten immers 15 Nederlandse symbolen bespreken...
The smallest room of the house is made to be cosy. However its bowl is in contrary to all that is civilised: historic or modern. Most tourists agree that being able to see your own waste, and wanting to, is a sign of a twisted almost sick need, yuck! The toilet bowls vast plateau offers an unimpeded view of ones excrements. Are the Dutch congenitally unclean or is the mystery connected to their built-in tendency towards water management?
In technical terms, the Dutch toilet is a shallow flusher, not a deep flusher. Toilet experts give two reasons for the popularity of the shallow flusher: a plateau is very useful for studying waste, which can come in handy, especially with children. And the shallow flusher does not splash back on the users buttocks. So it is common sense and has little to do with a presumed Dutch built-in tendency to want to see land above water but one has to wonder.
Five minute lesson of Spanish for our peers. Singing La Bamba
(I joined the Spanish students Iris and Alba for this groupwork. Seeing as I love the Spanish language, I've learned so much from them allready and want to learn more.)
Learning goals
-Intense listening as a starting point for differentiating the typically Spanish sounds, learning about sayings, stressed syllables, personal pronouns, the verb ser,
-Learning words in a context, how to write and pronounce them.
1. Activation
-You are allowed to turn around your page once the music starts.
-Listen carefully and fill in the blanks as fast as possible.
-Every sentence is repeated several times, so dont panic if you cant fill in everything the first time.
-Finished? Turn your page around and start dancing La Bamba like crazy! The winner will receive a wonderful prize!!
-When everybody is dancing, the game is finished.
2. Exploration
We check the spelling of the words they filled in and talk about what they think it means.
3. Consolidation
We construct the English translation together with the pupils, discuss and practice the pronunciation of the Spanish sentences and afterward off course, we sing the song.
4. Check
We put on the video and start dancing La Bamba, sing along everyone!!
We continued the spring theme with the exploration of young animals. Our impression this time was the birth of another lam at Fleurs home. We took this opportunity to learn a song Vannacht op de boerderij is een lammetje geboren (last night on the farm, a little lam was born). We were invited for a visit and petted the sheep. There were 17 lams in total and little squeaky chicks. The children were enchanted and back in the classroom they kept on talking and playing about the farm.
The garden store is still popular, but this is the right time to expand the possibilities for role-playing. The spring seasonal table has also been amply explored and can be now adapted to learning more about farm animals.
In the house corner there are already some stuffed farm animals: lams, rabbits, a dog. The children notice that they dont really have a place to put, nurse and feed them. Could we make it ourselves? The children think about how this can be turned into a small farm house.
As I observe its easy to see that they are learning so much just from redecorating this corner. They are making plans, dividing tasks, working together and thinking of solutions to solve problems along the way.
It is remarkable how inventive they are when theyre free to come up with ideas and have very little limitations in carrying them out.
Entire cupboards are filled with unnecessary materials an turned around to become a henhouse. A nest is made out of a boa and some eggs are added.
They provide a bedroom for the people and go into the corridor to buy some flowers to decorate the farm house some more.
The big green mat is taken out to pass for the grass pasture.
Everything is ready; they are happy with how it has turned out and start playing. They dress up with sunhats and feed the animals. A girl just sits and pets one of the stuffed bunnies while her mother is making dinner. The other children also want to play animals themselves and, there are Easter bunny-suits in the dress up trunk. The children shout out they should also make a place to sleep in the farm for the big bunnies!
Table and seats are turned into homes for the animals.
They take them out, put them on and start hopping around.
But the animals can easily get out of the farm, theyre hopping around and going to the garden store to look for food.
Now we have to think about making a fence this is also the perfect opportunity to think about elaborating the garden store this week with pet products
The children are much more motivated to play because they thought up everything themselves. They dress up as animals, farmers or gardeners, mothers and fathers and practice a variety of skills by doing so. By taking care of the stuffed animals, each other, watering the plants, going to the store, working together, getting pet and hopping around, exchanging ideas, making plans, , and so much more.
Nijmegen has three Montessorischools, two of which have the same schoolboard. Out of the wide area around the city, there are nine different schools who attend meetings.
About 8 years ago, the inspection advised the schools to expand their method with realistic education, for example for math; It was said that only the Montessorimaterials were not enough to provide adequate development. The schools needed to start thinking how they could integrate things like RME and still stay true to their ideals and pedagogical methods. It is typical for Montessori to work from the cosmos, starting with the general overview, to more detailed observations. Other methods, like RME and world orientation, do just the opposite and work outwards starting with the small things. They had to make concessions to meet the inspections quota.
Montessori is more then just education, its upbringing as well. Keywords are:
-free choice
-self-correcting
-independence (gradually starting from kindergarten)
-individual and group lessons
-responsibility for development lays with the child
-teacher is only one of the final resources
This also brings up the question were the responsibility for upbringing lies. The school thinks it is very important for parents to be on the same track, work in the same way at home, to optimise the learning transfer in both situations. If you want children to be independent at school, you dont tie their shoelaces at home. Parents should try to stimulate independence in a similar way, letting children, explore, try, answer themselves. Which also puts a big chunk of the responsibility with the parents.
This school has three groups 1 and 2, three groups 3 and 4, one group 5, one group 6 and finally two groups 7 and 8. These classes are quite small, about 20 children in kindergarten en 25 children in the groups going up. Next year however, one group will disappear, because of the stagnating number of pupils. The school changed from regional school to neighbourhood-school, so the population changed also. Now less parents make a conscious choice to bring their kids here, its close, so why not. This is also linked to the declining independence among the population, seeing as there are many immigrants and their children sometimes have language problems.
The schools however treats all children equal, this is one of the important pillars. For example, everyone stays over at lunch. This is another way of ensuring the childrens independence but also enhances the feeling of belonging to one big family at school too. Ad to this the mixed age groups and special days for the whole schools or activities for some classes together; and the children develop social skills, are provided with many sources for learning from each other, materials,
Kindergarten (onderbouw) is what interests me the most, considering my own education.
All classes have the same theme at the same time, this includes identical wall of words, newspapers on the insides of the doors, materials, In the classroom the children put on oversloffen a kind of slipper over their shoes. The respect for the classrooms and materials is tangible. The senses-cabinet is one of the most important cupboards in the whole classroom, especially for kindergarten. Children follow the logical order of the materials (with help of the teacher). Hereby they ad to previous knowledge every time, because the material always holds more difficult qualities to explore.
Otherwise the classrooms and way of working coincides with my general practising knowledge. I will however take elements home for my own practice. The teachers let the children work as free as possible, which is not as easy to do as one might think. They go trough special Montessori-training during their first years of practice to perfect their approach. It is all about letting them go, observing and planning the right intervention at the right time. During all this, having an approach that stimulates their independence and intrinsic will to develop is essential.
On the other hand, the materials: for example: working with the red, green, question-mark dice or the colour clock seems interesting.
The realisation, that children dont need playschool pre-made materials, help from a teacher or computers is surely reinforced.
It is good to hear that Jenaplan, Dalton and Montessori now also have meetings together to discuss their future, survival and how they could work together to improve education. There are already a lot of aspects in common. I hope in future we see a transfer from knowledge between all these schools.
