Holidays

[Lingmom]

Our Montessori school doesn't make overt celebrations of any holidays and I have to say I really like it... I'm not a fan of the themed holiday units that I've seen dominate other kinds of classrooms. And since it's a pretty diverse crowd of students, there is always going to be somebody in the class who wouldn't celebrate the holiday. Anyway, is this no-holiday policy particular to Montessori schools or just to our local school?

[daytripper75]

Our school to be is Catholic so I am sure there is a lot of attention paid to the Christian holidays. We're going to have to educate our children on most of the rest I am sure.
I think that the other school we were looking at looked more at different cultures and their holidays were a part of the learning...

[freistms]

Our school does holidays, but focuses on the cultural rather than religious aspect of them.

[teagansmama]

Teagan's school learns about all the holidays for religions, not just the Christian-based ones.

[wrzos]

Our school tries to be relatively holiday free as well. For example, they didn't stress Halloween, but instead focused on the fall harvest (harvested and baked sweet potatoes planted the prior spring). The did do a card exchange for Valentines, and St. Nick brought healthy snacks for their shoes in December - but these were treated more as historically significant events rather than strictly holidays or religious events. I've been thrilled as it means not a lot of hype about things that we don't emphasize in our household...

[MattBronsil]

It's up to the school. I've used theme holiday stuff. Rather than count out 0-9 with counters, I'd replace some of the counter works with small Christmas trees.

I think one thing Montessori schools SHOULD do, regardless of religious affiliation, is to look at different holidays at least from a cultural perspective. I would teach students about how different holidays are celebrated.

Matt

[Flor]

Ours are low-key. Like, a cut, glue and glitter card-making activity if they want. They could bring cards on V-tines, but it wasn't requested. Christmas I'm not a fan of. They do "Kris Kringle Day" where the parents of primaries are supposed to sneak a gift to the teacher the week before and it appears under the tree on Kris Kringle Day, and we don't really do Santa. However, ds still tells me "This is the dinosaur that Jim gave me." He thinks it is from his teacher, not Santa, so I didn't correct him . In general, it seems like they may read a story and do a craft, but it isn't a big theme.

[MovingGirl]

Our previous M school did a Halloween parade, Thanksgiving feast, Season of Sharing (December), St. Valentine's and Easter. The Season of Sharing was a school-wide evening event - potluck dinner and service projects. Basically the school had all of the projects ready to go, so the children and families did the projects. We made snowflakes that were taken to a nursing home, tied fleece blankets for the children's hospital, and made cat toys for the animal shelter. The emphasis was on sharing/giving to others, which I'm sure all religions and cultures embrace.

Our current school is very low-key. They have Holiday Program and exchanged valentines. The Holiday Program featured winter songs and a song about the menorah. The teacher said something about hiding Easter eggs - the older children hide them for the younger ones. (We weren't at this school for Easter last year.)

Both schools incorporated the holidays into their works - shamrocks to count, heart punching work, heart beads to sort, etc.

[Bellejar]

We do holidays. At least so far. They did chinese new year and valentines day recently.