Making Messes

One of the most brilliant things a teacher can do is allow her little students to make big, messy mistakes.
At school when the kids paint, the table is invariably marked up. My lead said that we should make one table the "paint table" and tape it down with butcher paper, which will be removed (by the asst.) at the end of the day. I'm getting better at fighting these battles. I told her its a better lesson for the child to scrub up after himself. An otherwise obvious child may then become aware of his affect on the table and seek to control himself.

As the good doctor said, "It is well to cultivate a friendly feeling towards error, to treat it as a companion inseparable from our lives, as something having a purpose, which it truly has." (Dr. Montessori)

Paint and its Consequences

I had an interesting thing happen to me yesterday at nearly nap time. All the children were down and the light was about to be turned out when from a corner of the room we heard some whimpering. My lead teacher went over to investigate and then called me over. One of our four year olds had gotten into a little bottle of paint (purple--her favourite) from a nearby shelf and the paint was now all over her mat, her blanket, etc. She was obviously upset and had even hid her purple, wet hands underneath her. I coaxed her out of the mess and to the sink. And while we were washing up, my lead and another teacher from a different classroom told me that I shouldn't be nice to the girl because she had done something bad and she should experience the bad consequence of someone being upset with her.

My response was that regardless of how I acted with the child, she had already experienced the natural consequence. She messed with some paint at an inappropriate time and consequently the paint got all over. And then she spent the rest of the day cleaning up the paint from her mat. "What a bother! I'm not doing that again!"