Thursday, April 30, 2009

Identification of Members (or "Introducing...")

Hello fellow blog authors! As each of you recieve and accept your invitations, I'd ask you to read the Welcome post, and feel free to comment, adding any thoughts you have. Then take a few moments to respond to this post, letting us know who you are, where you are, if/how many children you have and ages, and what is your interest in Montessori (i.e. if you're a homeschooling mother, a teacher in a Montessori school, just someone interested in educational theory, etc.). I'll go first:

Hi! I'm Alisha and I'm from New Brunswick, Canada. I have three children: Ella, aged 4 1/2; Henry and Eli, twins aged 3 months. I have been homeschooling my daughter using the Montessori method for a bit over a year now and I'm hoping to do the same with my two sons. I don't have any professional training as a teacher, but I've got a Mum who is a teacher/librarian and she keeps me on track!

Can't wait to "meet" you all!

Tuesday, April 21, 2009

Welcome to the Montessori Book Club!

I'm so glad you're here. This post, which will be edited in the future to update information and/or rules regarding the Montessori Book Club, is to help us begin to organize our blog and to figure out what we're doing!

The "labels" that we use for our posts will be fairly simple, and it is by these labels that our posts will be organized. Thus far, the labels we can use are as follows:

  • "organization" - When your post is not about a specific book and chapter, but about the formatting and/or the way we use this blog site, label it as organization.
  • "ABSORBENT MIND" - When you want to discuss a book in the broader sense, talking about its over-arching theme, rather than by chapter, write the book's title in all capital letters.
  • "ABSORBENT MIND chapter 1" - When you happen to be the first person to post on a specific chapter that we've read, please use this format: TITLE chapter number - that is, the title of the book in capital letters followed by chapter in lower case and the numeral of that chapter. Put only one space in between each word and do not use any punctuation.
  • "scheduling" - Before we begin any book we'll make a tentative schedule/reading plan. Whenever a schedule is made you can comment on it to indicate whether you think it's too fast, too slow, or just right. And if, as we go along, we find that we'd prefer to speed up or slow down, then we'll just edit the schedule!
  • "off topic" - If you want to share something with this group that does not pertain to a book by Maria Montessori, please label it as off topic.

If you happen to be making a post that does not correspond with any of the above labels, then either keep it label-free or make your own label up and add it to the above list.

Anyone who is a member of this blog automatically will be allowed to author posts. If you happen to be finished a chapter before anyone else and want to get the discussion started, please do so! If this method doesn't seem to be working (i.e. if everyone is too shy to write first) then we will assign the first posts on each chapter to different people, trying to keep everyone involved and spreading the pressure of being the author of the initial post.

When you are the first person to post on a chapter, title the post (as opposed to labelling the post) with the chapter name. For example, the first person to post on chapter one would give it the title: "The Child's Part in World Reconstruction" (without the quotes).

When someone has already posted on a chapter, please don't begin another post on the same one. We will be using the "comments" to continue the conversation, so don't feel that you need to keep comments brief.

If the post doesn't cover an aspect of the chapter that you have been thinking about, don't feel that we need only discuss the aspects of the chapter brought up in the initial post. You can make a comment on a completely different aspect of the same chapter, essentially beginning another area of conversation, under the same post and label. If you have a lot to say on one sentence, that's fine.

If you have just a little to say on the entire chapter, that's fine too. We don't all have to write an essay (although you can if you want to)! Should you happen to find a passage that you thought was particularly profound, you can simply write the quote and let us know what you think about it. (examples: "I LOVED this!" or "What on earth does this mean? It doesn't make any sense!")

If you fall behind, don't worry. Jump in wherever and whenever you can. And it would be helpful if you begin to get bogged down or too far behind to let the rest of us know. For all you know there could be a bunch of us behind! If that happens, we'll just do some re-scheduling!

Okay, that's all I can think of right now. If you think of something else, please do comment! Any brilliant (or prudent, or logical) additions or changes will be added/adjusted to this post.

I'll begin to work on a schedule for The Absorbent Mind and once it's posted and approved of, we'll begin!