injenuity

Posted by Jennifer on May 26th, 2008 in Uncategorized , Learning, Teachers

I spent part of my weekend doing my mandatory parent volunteer work for my 7 year old daughter’s grade 1-3 Montessori class.  I had been prepared to simply write them a check, when the teacher contacted me because I “know about computers.”  She said she had typed up the students’ US President reports in a Word document and wanted to make it into a booklet.  I was in a store when I took the call and immediately agreed, thinking it would be easy to just format a nice book for the class.

Weeks after I accepted the assignment, I realized I should have volunteered some PD or classroom instruction time.  Too late to make changes, I spent several hours of grudge time making a fancy booklet full of hideous clipart.  I showed it to my daughter this evening and had her read me her report.

The whole time I worked with it, I really thought there was no way these kids learned anything.  She read the report, then she went on talking about the other presidents and conversations she’d had with her classmates.  She was angry one classmate wrote in his report that his president made the railroads more safe.  She claimed her president started it, and she should have been able to put it in her report.  I asked how they all learned all this stuff. She replied, “books,” and looked at me as if she thought I had never heard of one.  These kids learned, and didn’t get near a computer.

Following that conversation, we started talking about fashion and she wondered about clothes in the future, or what kinds of clothes we would have in space.  I asked if she wanted to go into space.  She replied that she would love to see Mt. Everest from space.  I ran downstairs and grabbed a laptop.  We Googled, “view of Mt. Everest from Space”  and this is what we found.  We continued to click through the photos and she not only identified many of them, but wondered if we would see photos of the star nursery, or a comet.  She had learned of these things from books, not from a computer.