Busy Little Bees

This weekend is a fall festival for both May and Ruth's schools. They go to different schools, by the way. May 7.2 goes to a private Christian elementary school, while Ruth 4.6 attends a Montessori school for preschool. May also attended a Montessori school for preschool and kindergarten before switching to her current school.
The Montessori method is really awesome. Instead of leaving your child to play with toys, color with crayons and learn silly little songs, your child can spend her morning learning to wash dishes, sweep, read, manipulate objects with mathematics implications they don't even realize they are learning. The children are given responsibility to find their own work, practice their own work, clean up their own work, and even teach other children how to perform the work. Multiple ages are in each room (3-5 year olds, for example) so that they can learn from each other. And I use the word "work," which is also the term the teachers use, but the children love it. It's not a burden at all. They take a tray to a table or set it out on a rug on the floor and move colored water from one container to the next using a little dropper (teaches proper pencil grip). They use beads or little round plastic circles to lay out a pattern that ultimately teaches what odd and even numbers are. They taste test foods that preschool-age children rarely eat. They learn songs (yes, of course, some fun little silly ones because they are kids after all) both fun and with lyrics that teach them the names of continents. They learn the sounds letters make and have fun tracing them in sand. They polish rocks or wood, learning how to remember and follow sets of instructions to complete a task. Basically, the room is full of little activities, books, projects, that are all fun for a child to do, but secretly teach something interesting.
Ruth is constantly (and May did this too) popping out sentences that you would never hear come out of a non-Montessori trained child. None of which I can think of at the moment, but this is an ongoing blog which will undoubtedly have many posts about so-and-so "saying something hilarious today!"
So, why is May in a Christian school rather than Montessori (because, yes, the Montessori school goes up to 8th grade and the learning and projects completed at elementary levels are just as impressive - more like a younger version of college with all it's independent work/research/presentations)? At the end of her kindergarten year (a time when she'd face transition anyway out of the 3-5 room and into the 1st-3rd grade room), we opted to move her to a Christian school. She is incredibly bright and will learn anywhere, and so we decided that in the grand scheme of life, having an education based in God's word and surrounded by staff that love God and model that love to our daughter was more important than all the benefits (or maybe a better word is differences) a Montessori school offered over the Christian one.
Back to my original intent for this post. We have a festival today with inflatables, concessions, silent auction, craft bazaar, games, face painting, etc. Then tomorrow we have another festival with inflatables, games, tattoos, chili supper, craft booths, etc. And, after a week of 70 degree weather, these 2 days have a high of 50 degrees. Brrr! I'm volunteering for an hour today and for about 5 hours tomorrow.
I predict a stress headache on Monday.