Waaaaaagh! wails three-year-old Katie. She is inconsolable. Her nose is dirty but her eyes are like gimlets, boring into anyone who will stand in her way. She wants to go down the slide backwards. Alizia Gisler, her teacher, picks her up to find out what's wrong. Waaaaaagh! the child wails. Conor, another little boy who loves Thomas the Tank Engine, is sitting in a corner, lost in a world of his own.
Play-time is in full swing at the Wee Care Montessori School in Monkstown, Co Dublin. All the children are wrapped up against the cold. They're all running about, going from swing to slide to playhouse. Earlier they had nursery rhymes, songs, water exercises with jugs and spoons and cups. And they've had shapes to cut out and pictures to paste together. Like little Indian chiefs, they sit in a circle in the Blue Room discussing what they did at the weekend. This is The News of the Day. It's another day at work for Gisler, who is a Montessori teacher.
Gisler says: "I do enjoy it. There are days when I'm ready to . . . ," she says, but doesn't finish her sentence - "but I do enjoy it. "One of the main things is that they can learn at their own pace. They see what they like. They are actively participating, developing their eye-hand co-ordination. It's demanding work. It's different from a national school. They all have freedom of speech and freedom of movement. I'm not stuck to one spot.
"We give them a freedom to find order themselves. Everything in the classroom is ordered and through that they'll find order. When they're working, there's a buzz of activity; they chat away to each other." There's a goldfish, Sparkly, swimming around in a bowl. There are pictures of a cowboy, birds, animals, a tree in spring and leaves on the wall. They sing Heads, Knees and Toes. They go on nature walks. The children are encouraged to complete a cycle of activity, she explains. The purpose of the activities is to make the toddlers aware of their environment at different levels, such as culturally, socially, sensorily. They clap along to Old MacDonald. They visit the bouncy room. They have their lunch. They do art. It's an action-packed day.
Gisler, who grew up outside Lucerne in Switzerland, came to Dun Laoghaire to study Montessori teaching at St Nicholas Montessori College. It was partly through babysitting that she discovered how much she enjoyed being with children. She started a secretarial course, after second-level education at her school in the village of Adligenswil, near her home. Although German was her first language in school, having an Irish mother meant that English was used at home. She moved from secretarial college, "which I hated", to do an art foundation course at Freie Gestalgungs Schule Farbmumhle. The two-year course has been of great use in Montessori teaching, she says. There are drawings, paintings and artistic bursts of colour all over the school room.
She applied for the Montessori course in Dun Laoghaire and started with 29 others in 1996. "You have to be dedicated," she says of the course. "It was a challenge for me because I always thought that education in Switzerland was hard." From the first year, students spend two days a week in a classroom with another teacher. At the end of the three-year diploma course 20 students (all female) signed on to complete the degree course. Gisler was one of the highest scoring graduates.
As to her long-term goal: "I'd like to have my own school some day," she says.
