This past Friday I had the great pleasure of being a guest at the Oak Knoll Kinderhaus, a Montessori school in Pasadena, CA.

The Montessori method is a style of child-centered education where the students are encouraged to follow their own interests.  Several children from the class had become interested in gemstones.  They organized a field trip to the Natural History Museum, where they gathered information on various stones, made sketches, and practiced identifying rock samples they had collected.

When I arrived on Friday, the students were excited to share the discoveries they had made and to pick my brain about the stones that had interested them the most.  I was more than impressed with their enthusiasm as well as  their ability to retain new information and ideas.  It was so exciting to work with students motivated by their own interests–I haven’t encountered that outside of a university.

I showed the students examples of the different gemstones I work with in my jewelry.  We talked about ways to classify a stone and how to identify it based on qualities such as hardness and opacity.  When we discussed the difference between transparency and translucency, the children were quick to tell me that one could use this information to determine the authenticity of a diamond.  A true diamond is translucent; whereas as an impostor is transparent.

I had a wonderful visit and am looking forward to returning to work with the students again.  The image below shows the children opening an amethyst geode for me.  I think I learned as much from them as they did from me!