Mountain Shadows Father Quentin Rider (Dashel ‘23)
The Silent Journey was an unforgettable experience that gave my wife and I the opportunity to experience Montessori for ourselves. We were both new to Montessori and had reservations and questions about how Montessori would grow with our son, Dashel. We had been to other school events but felt this was a great opportunity to get to know the school better and experience what Dashel experiences on a regular basis.
In the end, the Journey not only gave us a great respect for his classroom but the other classrooms as well.
The Silent Journey is split between two sessions with discussion in between. The first session is a silent tour of the classrooms, approximately 40 minutes in each room, which allowed us to visualize how children may interact with their environments. It also gave us an opportunity to find lessons or subjects that we might have the opportunity to interact with the next day.
Saturday’s session, the hands on journey, was my favorite. We interacted with lessons and work laid out by the teachers. This session was also an opportunity to do some of the lessons our kids do on a regular basis.
We found each classroom had a unique energy and encouraged parents to research and explore at different levels. There were opportunities to work in every curriculum imaginable and plenty of time to complete multiple tasks and lessons in each classroom. I found most parents gravitated toward something familiar while others took advantage of exploring subjects they had not seen in years. I tend to be somewhat simple so I enjoyed painting, doing an abstract puzzle on Pythagoras’ Theorem, the pet tarantula (Dark Chocolate), and Vanilla Frappuccino, the albino hedgehog.
We loved every minute of the Silent Journey experience. Sharing the experience with teachers, parents, and staff made it that much more wonderful. But the best part was describing and sharing with our son what we did for the day.