Why We Take Pictures

Thoughts & Reflections

Dear Parents,

The year is getting underway, and the children are finding their groove. Many new materials are being introduced. Familiar materials are mastered. Children are finding their new place and role in the classroom.

And we have the privilege of watching it all unfold.

We are so honored you trust us with your child. That you believe a beginning at Baan Dek will be a sure foundation to success in academia and in world citizenship.

We know leaving your child with us for eight or more hours every day can sometimes be a challenge. They come home with amazing stories about the Decanomial or the Logical Adjective Game, words so foreign to someone outside the classroom. They come home and when asked what they did during the day, the only response is, “eat snack.” What they’ve done for the whole day surely involves more than this, but if it did, it’s a mystery.

Apart from parent education and conferences, the classroom is a place for children only. Very few of us had the gift of a Montessori education, so what your child comes home speaking about, or not saying, is sometimes veiled in a fog.

So we send photos.

One of our favorite parts of the day is sitting down to send photos to families. We delight in helping each other see a moment in the classroom that absolutely must be documented, in seeing similarities or unique personality differences between siblings’ choices, between how two children use a material to test a theory. We adore looking through old photos and seeing a child struggle two years ago, tongue between teeth, to fasten a Velcro Dressing Frame, and then the same child today helping a friend master the Bow Tying Frame.

We know how challenging it can be to truly view your child’s world through a small window. Even if you schedule an observation, you’re seeing a little bit of one day, not the whole process, not all that they achieve. Sometimes, the mystery of Montessori is obtuse. We believe, unnecessarily so.

We send these photos to make Baan Dek transparent. To balance the respect of the child-space of the classroom, with the hunger to learn what your child is doing.

Your child’s teacher works hard to observe needs, to meet those needs as gracefully as possible, to present a material in a timely manner that honors your child’s unique mind and development. No one is being forced to do math because it’s time, or reading because it’s Tuesday at 2 pm. Instead, each child is choosing work and being given presentations or encouraged to take a material one step further because it matches their development. Because the work a child is doing fits so nicely with their developmental needs, there is no trauma, no anguish over learning. The followed their inner teacher all day, and thus it can be hard to recall the natural progression their work took.

We send these photos to spark conversations. Everyone loves to see photos of themselves, and children definitely do. A photo of your child working with the Geometry Cabinet might lead to a list of the shapes your child had selected; if you’re still looking at the photo, could you pick out the quatrefoil and the parallelogram???

You might hear what work their friend was doing at a rug two feet away, and how your child absolutely can’t wait until they’re big enough to do that. You might hear how work with the Binomial Cube moved into work with the Trinomial cube outside the box, or how work with the Decanomial Square meant a new presentation with their teacher on how to make other squares, and how they then helped a friend to get all 27 pieces of the Trinomial back in the box, and how now they’re the expert at tidying the Sensorial Area.

A photo of your child helping with a zipper at playtime might lead to a story about the child they were helping, their best friend, and can they have a play date soon? A picture is worth a thousand words, and can sometimes start a million stories. Some might even be true!

How many times have you been shocked, delighted, awed by something your child did? They ask to help set the table. They come out of their bedroom in the morning fully dressed, pants on backwards and all. You eavesdrop on them reading to their younger sibling or the cat, though every time you sit down and try to get them to read to you, it turns into, “Mommy you do it.” Children are capable of absolutely incredible things. Awe-inspiring compassion. Exquisite patience. Tenacity we aspire to. These moments blip to the surface like a pot about to boil, and can be missed in the blink of an eye. They do not come with thunder and lightning, they emerge with stillness. We get to see these moments every day.

We send these photos to document, to showcase the amazing things your child, The Child is capable of; they aren’t even aware of how incredible their development is. These moments aren’t staged, there’s absolutely no way they could be. These moments are true representations of the day.

We often receive notes back from families of “thank you” in response to our emails with photos sent home. Thank YOU. Your child is a gift to us. These snapshots of their day are our gift back.

With love,
Baan Dek