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How to Live in an Uncertain World: Optimism Through Montessori

Mon, 20 Apr 2026 15:21:39 GMT

Humans have many special abilities that set us apart from all other species. Dr. Maria Montessori spoke of these abilities as gifts that have allowed us to thrive for hundreds of thousands of years. We can reflect on the past, we can imagine the future, we can care about people across the world whom we have never met, and we have created language, which allows us to share stories with people from different places and even different times.

These gifts have allowed us to thrive on this earth, building civilizations, creating inventions with capabilities beyond the wildest dreams of earlier generations, and saving ourselves as a species many times over.

However, with these incredible accomplishments also come incredible anxieties. More than just reflecting on our past, we also ruminate on it, poring over our actions as individuals and as groups. More than only making plans for the future, we also have deep fears for what tomorrow will bring, for ourselves and for our loved ones. Additionally, as we have felt generous urges to care for people we do not know, we have also felt crippling empathy for people in countries thousands and thousands of miles away from us—people for whom we can do very little except feel pain for their suffering.

Technology and language have made this possible. Our original communities were fewer than 200 people, and our love for humanity in general was abstract. Now, the internet, social media, and constant news cycles have expanded our communities almost infinitely. We can hear stories of great anguish about people who live literally as far away from us as geographically possible. We can be incited to fear about dangerous situations across oceans. Technological progress has made these threats feel as though they are closer than ever.

While there are many positive aspects to these incredible advancements, they also make the physical, mental, and spiritual work of living our lives and raising children much harder. We can feel paralyzed by fear and despair.

But fear and despair will not save humanity. Fear and despair will not improve this place in which we were blessed to be born. Fear and despair will not allow us to be productive, deepen friendships, or raise children who will inherit our flawed and beautiful world.

So what are we to do?

When hard times are upon us, we cannot succumb to anxiety and hopelessness in perpetuity. We must cultivate optimism in the face of our challenges. Many people understand optimism as look for the silver lining, or the glass is half full, adopting a Pollyanna-ish attitude towards tribulations and otherwise sticking their heads in the sand. This is not true optimism.

True optimism comes from courage. It comes from believing that there will be goodness in whatever chapter comes next. And it comes from knowing that we, as individuals and as a global population, have the strength and potential to handle an uncertain future. In fact, that is all we have ever done.

As humans, we have incredible physical and spiritual tools at our disposal. But we must decide how we use these tools. It is not enough to simply react or to act out of habit. We must harness our technological and human abilities.

The Montessori approach offers a way of understanding the world and understanding children so that we can give themselves and ourselves the perspective necessary to thrive in an ever-changing universe. We must act with intention, and engage with our thoughts in such a way that encourages and strengthens optimism—fortifying ourselves for challenging times, allowing us to live lives of purpose and meaning, and giving our children these same gifts.

The Emotional Climate of Our Homes

Dr. Maria Montessori recognized that, as parents and caregivers, we are the most important part of our children’s environments. Our emotional state colors the air our children breathe. This may feel like astounding pressure, but it is also important to note that we do not need to be perfect.

We do not need to be perfect.

We can feel emotions—all kinds of emotions. In fact, we should feel all emotions. We want our children to recognize that healthy adults experience the fullness of human life, which includes joy, sorrow, delight, anguish, and more. But our responsibility is to ensure that no emotion becomes our singular state, and that we are able to allow these feelings to pass through us, accepting them, and then recovering to a place of stability again. This is part of the nature of optimism—knowing that no state is permanent, and that we will be able to handle what we are living through now.

This means that tending to our mental health is of the utmost importance while raising children, however that may look for any individual (See Forest Bluff School Blog, Preparation of the Parent: The Work of the Heart for further discussion).

A part of our home’s emotional climate directly relates to the information that comes in. Because of the internet, we have access to the news in real time, and can have headlines plastered across our phone as they are being written. It is impossible not to react to unfolding stories that involve fear, sadness, and pain. This is human nature and related directly to our ability to reflect, imagine, and care for others.

The issue is that these news stories can affect our ability to function in a healthy way and to maintain emotional stability for our children. It is hard to stay optimistic about life when we hear about the worst things happening every day. While there is a purpose to staying informed, keep in mind that reading about an event that is happening across the world as it is being written may not actually be the best way to stay accurately informed. These stories are often written with two or three degrees separation; facts are corrected after hours, days, and weeks; and only the passage of time can truly indicate an event’s significance. We may find ourselves on an emotional roller coaster as headlines are unrolled throughout the day, only to find out that the event did not unfold exactly how the articles first indicated, nor did it have the impact that the particular journalist or writer first claimed it would.

Additionally, while terrible things happen, we have to keep in mind that the news tends to only focus on the most dramatic events. The truth is that there are also wonderful things happening every day, but we do not hear about those things. Our internal optimism is bombarded by negative news without also being bolstered by the many stories of courage, creativity, and generosity that we know are also inherent to humanity.

None of this is meant to say that adults should not continue to consume the news. The question is to first realistically assess how the current consumption of news is affecting us. Questions to ask are: Do you feel paralyzed, anxious, or angry after reading or watching news or stories on social media? Do you carry that emotion into the rest of your day?

Instead of thinking of it as all or nothing, consider reducing consumption by one degree. If your phone is set to share alerts as news breaks, you can turn that feature off, so that you are only exposed to news when you go looking for it. If you find yourself checking the news or social media every hour, cut back to twice a day. If you check twice a day, cut back to once—perhaps not first thing in the morning (when it sets the tone for the day) or in the evening (when your brain is shutting down and has fewer defenses, and will set the tone for your sleep).

We can be informed citizens while not participating in a 24 hour news cycle with a barrage of stories from multiple media sources. We can put up boundaries so that the news comes in with a filter of time as a perspective maker and so that we can hear the information without being bombarded by our own paralyzing emotions.

All of this is shared against the backdrop of also considering what news our children are exposed to. This, too, makes up their emotional climate. Dr. Montessori observed that children’s capabilities changed when they turned six, when they turned 12, when they turned 18, and when they turned 24 and entered true adulthood. The youngest children are very concrete thinkers and have no real way of understanding when something is thousands of miles away and when something is in their backyard. Even as they grow older, they still have developing brains, unable to fully comprehend frightening stories within the context of history and geography. While they can hear more as they enter their teen years, they still need adults to protect them from too much information that makes them feel helpless. Their youthful optimism requires time and space to bloom into an authentic ability to take purposeful action. Our children need to learn to love the world before they can save it. We can show them how to do this by letting them be children while they are still young.

The Arc of History

An important perspective to take for ourselves and for our children is a deep understanding of what our earth has been through and what humanity has survived before. There is a long arc of history that has preceded us as humans and where we stand today. We created shelters and clothing to protect ourselves from the elements. We devised tools for gathering food. We created civilizations through sheer ingenuity and a willingness to cooperate. We harnessed electricity and water. We built vehicles for transportation. We invented medicine to treat thousands of illnesses. We have lived through wars, famine, and deadly viruses.

None of this is meant to belittle the real challenges that face us today. But they serve as a reminder that humanity has shown us again and again that we are resilient and we are resourceful. This is optimism. This is an abiding understanding that humanity can prevail. The world is uncertain now, and it has always been uncertain. The world is changing now, and every part of it has always been changing. Even the great oak trees, which seem unchanging are transforming on a cellular level with every second that passes.

The Montessori history curriculum reflects this perspective. Children learn about the history of our universe, all living things, humans, civilizations, and historical periods through timelines that show our place in time against the backdrop of all that has come before. They see that our universe has existed for 10s of billions of years, and life forms have existed for billions of years. They see that humans first arrived on earth 300,000 years ago, and that civilization is 4,000 years old. The timelines show them major events and changes that took each historical arc from the beginning to where it is now. All of these stories are told with awe and gratitude for what has come before, and with an implied sense that more will come after us.

With this backdrop, children learn that their story is important, but it is also just one story set against billions of years of history. They cultivate a feeling of wonder and inspiration from the accomplishments of the people who came before them. They understand that they too are human and have these same capabilities. They feel optimism about who they are and who they will be. With this understanding of themselves, how can they not also feel that they will be able to handle the trials that the world brings them when they reach adulthood?

The future is not something they need to fear. It is something that they are born to live through and work through, just as the billions of people who came before them did.

What You Can Do

One of the most enduring qualities of a Montessori education is the sense of one’s own competence and agency. This trait develops from the age of the tiniest children—infants who are encouraged to reach for their own toys on the floor, toddlers who put on their own coats and prepare strawberries for their classmates, young children who clean up after themselves and make choices about what work they will choose, and on and on. In Montessori, the concept of independence isn’t an afterthought. It isn’t an isolated subject in the curriculum. It isn’t contrived or managed. It is inherent in the fabric of the approach. It lives in every part of a Montessori child’s life.

When someone feels competent, when they feel autonomous and believe they can have a positive impact on whatever is around them, they can’t help but feel empowered about their prospects. They may worry and feel fear. They may feel momentarily overwhelmed by hard times. But their internal optimism will inevitably take over. From the time that they were very small, they have learned again and again that there is always something useful they can do. This feeling comes from the inside, because in Montessori, they are doing work and making contributions that are truly useful to themselves and to their peers. This understanding of themselves will never go away.

As adults, we can model and encourage this feeling in our own lives. Depending on the scope of our energy, time, and concerns, we can always find ways to empower our children to contribute to the world around them. There are many age appropriate ways to do this. It may look like a fundraising bake sale for refugees in another continent. It may look like visiting a local food bank to support people in your community. It may look like baking cookies for a neighbor, or even simply folding clothes with their parents to help in their own home. (See our blog Love in Action: Community Service With Your Children for more ideas). Even if they cannot solve the world’s greatest problems, showing them that they can solve some problems plants the seed for tomorrow.

The only way despair wins is if we do nothing. If we do nothing, then we tell ourselves, You’re right. There is no point in doing anything. Despair can be a temporary state. Show your children with your actions that optimism has a place in their lives. Their agency is real and matters. They can have an effect, however small, on the lives of people they know and people they don’t know. It all matters.

Final Thoughts

It is not easy to be human. It is not easy to be alive and to love people in a constantly changing world. There is uncertainty, there is fear, and there is suffering. But emotion itself exists upon one spectrum. The greater our capacity for sadness, the greater our capacity for joy. The more we can hold emotions of a negative valence, the more we can hold emotions of a positive valence. Many great thinkers have proposed that it is wholeness and not happiness that should be our life’s pursuit. Taking this to be true, we can move forward with courage to face the challenges that come our way, knowing that they will bring us meaning.

It is a privilege to be on this earth. We get to enjoy the budding spring every year, the sounds of the lake against the sand, a star-flooded sky far away from a city, the quiet crunch of footsteps after a new snowfall. With this beauty comes uncertainty and loss. That is the nature of the world. But this nature does not mean that we need to succumb to a permanent feeling of helplessness or anxiety.

We have so many incredible intangible tools at our disposal. If we can harness these tools with intention and thoughtfulness, we can live lives of optimism and purpose. Dr. Montessori said, “The child is both a hope and a promise for mankind.” With this perspective, we can nurture our children, recognizing that hope and promise, and allowing them to instill in themselves the feeling that they can and will live lives that better mankind.

Montessori and Accountability: Developing a Moral Compass

Wed, 25 Feb 2026 13:00:05 GMT

In Montessori education, we view each child as inherently capable of developing a strong sense of right and wrong. A child’s moral compass is not something we impose upon them—it is something that grows within, guided by experiences, reflection, and consistent modeling from the adults in their lives. For that moral sense to take root, children must be allowed to experience accountability for their actions. When parents shield their children from consequences or defend behavior they know is wrong, they unintentionally undermine that process, creating confusion and instability in the child’s understanding of truth, fairness, and responsibility.

Many parents defend their children out of love and protectiveness. They wish to spare their child from discomfort, embarrassment, or the feeling of failure. Yet this kind of protection, though well-intentioned, teaches the opposite of what true love demands. One of the tenets of Montessori is to put children in contact with the real world in age-appropriate ways, trusting that they have the inner capabilities to grow and adapt when they have real experiences. When parents constantly justify, minimize, or excuse poor behavior, a child misses an opportunity for feedback; they learn that honesty is flexible and that integrity can be negotiated. This erodes their moral foundation and leaves them uncertain about what is right—not because they cannot feel it, but because the adults they trust most are contradicting that inner voice.

In Montessori, children learn to do work and make decisions based on intrinsic, not extrinsic motivation. We trust that they have goodness inside of them, and while they absolutely need guardrails and guidelines, we can best serve them by teaching them to distinguish between their internal drives, and to take action in accordance with their conscience. Children are perceptive. They often know when they have done something wrong—whether they spoke unkindly, acted selfishly, or disrespected another. When their parents immediately defend them or blame others, the child experiences an internal conflict. On one hand, their conscience tells them they made a mistake; on the other, the parent’s response tells them they are in the right. Over time, this mismatch between inner truth and external validation creates confusion. The child begins to question their own moral instincts and may even learn to ignore the pangs of conscience altogether, relying instead on external approval to define what is acceptable.

This is one of the greatest harms of over-defending a child: it separates them from their natural moral compass. When children are consistently told they are right—even when they know they are not—they start to equate love with being defended rather than being guided. They may learn that relationships are maintained through justification and blame-shifting instead of honesty and repair. Later in life, these patterns can manifest as difficulty accepting feedback, resistance to authority, or an inability to take responsibility in personal and professional relationships.

In Montessori classrooms, we see accountability as a cornerstone of growth. When a child makes a mistake—perhaps they take another’s materials without asking or speak rudely to a classmate—we respond not with shame, but with calm guidance. We help the child reflect: What happened? How did this affect others? What can you do to make it right? This process nurtures empathy and clarity. It helps children see that they can correct their mistakes, that doing wrong does not make them bad, and that making amends restores both harmony and self-respect.

Accepting that your child can be wrong is not a sign of parental failure—it is a sign of courage and wisdom. When you model accountability yourself, your child learns that truth is not something to be feared. They see that mistakes are part of being human, and that integrity means facing them with grace.

Ultimately, allowing your child to experience and accept the consequences of their behavior builds confidence, empathy, and moral clarity. Shielding them from accountability may protect their feelings in the short term, but it confuses their conscience and weakens their inner sense of right and wrong. By guiding them lovingly toward truth and responsibility, you empower them to grow into kind, honest, and self-aware individuals—qualities that form the true foundation of a moral life.

Why Holding Children Accountable Matters

Accountability is essential for the development of values and character, internal regulation, and healthy relationships .

Values and Character

Accountability supports moral development and internalization of values. Holding children accountable is not merely about controlling behavior; it is about helping them develop a moral compass. When children are asked to be responsible for their misbehavior, they learn that rules are not negotiable and that their actions matter. Their conscience is allowed to mature, and they develop the habit of taking ownership of their actions in the future. Such ownership is a key ingredient of moral development: recognizing one’s mistakes, acknowledging harm if done, and taking steps to repair and improve.

It builds character, integrity, and social responsibility. Beyond the “here and now” behavior, helping children face the outcomes of their actions cultivates deeper qualities: honesty, integrity, respect for others, ability to apologize and make amends, and being a trustworthy community member. These are the very traits that character education, moral development, and social‐emotional growth aim to instill.

Internal Regulation

Accountability fosters self-discipline, self-regulation and responsibility. When children understand that their actions have consequences, they learn to think ahead, to consider how their choices affect others and themselves, and to internalize expectations rather than just react to external control. Teaching children responsibility through consistent, logical responses to behavior helps them become more independent and mature over time. With this accountability, children internalize the idea that they are agents of their behavior.

Healthy Relationships

Accountability fosters healthy relationships and trust. Children learn about trust, fairness, and relationships through accountability. When a parent says, “I trust you,” and then when the child acts against that trust and is held responsible, the child learns that trust can be broken, must be repaired, and is meaningful. Children learn that relationships are not transactional and that honesty matters. In this sense, accountability is relational—not adversarial. It says: We are on the same team, but behavior matters, and when things go wrong we fix them together.

How the Montessori Classroom Supports Accountability

A Social Community

A Montessori classroom is naturally and authentically social. The work students do, especially as they get older, is often centered around social groups. These groups arise spontaneously among the classmates, and children quickly learn how to behave in order to have other people want to choose to work with them. The work itself requires them to navigate social situations: accepting feedback, taking responsibility, and working through conflict. All of this deeply enforces their sense of accountability, as their actions have direct consequences with their friends and the work that they do all day.

Freedom Within Limits

While some people believe that Montessori is a place where children can do whatever they want, and some people believe that Montessori is a place where there are an excess of rules and restrictions, the truth is some combination of the two. Children are given precisely the freedom they can handle, given the responsibility they are able to demonstrate. Their freedom has thoughtful and specific limits. A child who has exhibited responsible decision making will be allowed to choose the work they want to do on a given day. A child who has been distracted or distracting to their peers will have a reduced number of choices, and perhaps no choice in where they work until they are able to show better decision making. Their freedom expands and contracts in accordance with their inner discipline. All of this supports accountability, as a child’s actions have a direct correlation with their privileges.

Trusting the Child's Inner Guide

A final point for accountability relates to the view the adults take of children. The conventional school method is based on the philosophy that a child is an empty vessel into which adults pour knowledge. Dr. Montessori held a different view. She believed that there was a wise inner guide inside of children that already has positive impulses and constructive wisdom. Her method of education is built upon providing an environment where that inner guide can direct a child to productivity and development. However, she cautioned that this does not in any way mean that children can be trusted to do whatever they want. In fact, it is abundantly easy for children to stray from a positive course of growth and exhibit “deviations,” as she called them, from development. Adults need to first respect the existence of a child’s inner guide, and then also provide the feedback and consequences to ensure that this guide grows in strength and productivity. By recognizing the guide and encouraging its growth, children are able to develop accountability.

Practical Advice for Parents

Research and practical guides point toward the following key strategies:

Set Clear Expectations and Rules

Children thrive when they know what is expected of them. Ambiguous or inconsistent expectations lead to confusion. Use logical, related consequences. When misbehavior happens, apply consequences that make sense (i.e., relate to the behavior) rather than arbitrary punishments. For example: if a child breaks something because they were careless, part of the consequence might be helping fix or replace it. Be consistent and follow through. Threatening a consequence but not enforcing it teaches children that rules are negotiable. Consistency reinforces trust and clarity.

Engage in Reflection and Problem-Solving

After the consequence, when your child is calm, talk with your child: “What happened? How did your action affect others? What will you do differently next time?” These reflective questions deepen learning. Take note that the younger the child, the shorter this conversation should be.

Maintain Connection and Support

Accountability should not come at the expense of your relationship. Use empathy: convey your love and belief in their capacity while holding expectations.

Balance Accountability with Praise and Positive Reinforcement

Accountability is important, but children also need to know what good behavior looks like and to be affirmed when they meet expectations.

Model Accountability Yourself

This is one of the most important actions we can take. Children learn not only from what we say but what we do. When a parent acknowledges their own mistakes, apologizes, and corrects course, children gain powerful lessons in integrity. We are not perfect. Our children will learn more from what we do than what we lecture them on. Recognizing our imperfections, taking responsibility, and offering genuine apologies show our children what accountability looks like.

Final Thoughts

The act of holding children accountable is less about punishment and more about guiding them into the world as responsible, ethical, self‐aware individuals. Research supports the idea that when children know their actions matter, and when they understand the outcomes of their behavior—including mistakes—they become better equipped for life’s challenges. They develop self‐regulation, moral clarity, social responsibility, resilience, and integrity.

Conversely, shielding children from the natural and logical consequences of their actions—or defending them automatically regardless of their choices—serves them poorly in the long run. It can confuse their moral orientation, hinder their growth, and deprive them of the rich learning opportunities that mistakes and accountability provide.

As parents and educators who believe in the Montessori approach, the goal is to walk beside children in this learning process: to set clear expectations, to respond consistently and fairly, to guide reflection, and to maintain a foundational relationship of trust and respect. In doing so, children learn that they are part of a community, that their actions matter, and that they are capable of taking responsibility—qualities that serve them and society for a lifetime.

References & Resources

“Anecdotes and Consequences of Child Externalizing Problems: Differences in Dynamic Parent-Child Processes”

https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/36917408/

“Consequences Made Easy: An Effective Discipline Tool”

https://centerforparentingeducation.org/library-of-articles/discipline-topics/consequences-made-easy/

How to Support a Child Who Seems Unaffected by Consequences

https://www.emorahealth.com/resources/child-unaffected-by-consequences /

“Parent Power: Rewards and Consequences” https://www.nacd.org/parent-power-rewards-and-consequences/

“Teaching Responsibility Through Consequences”

tubetorial.com/teaching-responsibility-through-consequences/

“Teaching Your Child About Actions and Consequences: Building Responsibility”

https://www.thebraggingmommy.com/teaching-your-child-about-actions-and-consequences-building-responsibility/

“Why is it Important to Teach Children Accountability?”

https://www.schooldrillers.com/why-is-it-important-to-teach-children-accountability/

Grammar the Montessori Way

Sat, 24 Jan 2026 15:15:00 GMT

The pervasiveness of technology in our culture brings the support of technology in our everyday lives. Thanks to tools such as autocorrect, proofreading, ChatGPT, and other on-line sites, any piece of writing can be thoroughly checked and edited for grammar. They make corrections and suggestions, ensuring that documents are properly vetted before being shared in any format.

These incredible and useful tools have had the secondary effect of a greater reliance on them for writing. Now, students and adults alike are inclined to depend on technology to fix their grammar rather than learning how to get it right in the first place. To a certain extent, it is helpful to have assistance in fine-tuning work. But issues arise when people simply stop learning how to utilize correct grammar.

Thankfully, a Montessori education has a comprehensive and engaging curriculum for teaching the intricacies of grammar to students. It starts at age five, with concrete experiences with the function of words, and ends at age twelve, with elaborate sentence analysis. Then, in seventh and eighth grade, students have opportunities to rigorously apply the lessons they have learned in the more complicated projects they produce at this age.

The Argument for Grammar

Grammar matters. Knowing proper grammar matters. No matter how much help someone can get from technology, understanding how words fit together and how meaning changes based on word placement will always be important. There are many reasons for this. First of all, there is (currently) no way for an autocorrect feature to monitor when someone is speaking. People need to have a proficient sense of sentence structure and syntax for verbal conversations. This will impact how well they are able to communicate and how they are perceived in the world at large.

Secondly, grammar in itself provides value because of the parts of the brain that are in use when we learn about and utilize language. Everything that we learn employs the brain in slightly different ways. This allows our minds to develop fully and to stay active and nimble as we age. Underuse sets aside parts of our brains and they grow weaker. It is important to give our minds, especially young ones, a variety of different activities and lessons to absorb. This strengthens thinking and helps provide a robust infrastructure of neuronal connections.

Finally, great ideas and well-developed thinking do not develop in a vacuum. Words bring thoughts to life, and words further develop nascent thoughts. Having an accurate way to express internal ideas allows those ideas to enter the known world and come to fruition in a finalized product. A sense of grammar is like a sturdy structure to hang creativity and imagination on. It provides a foundation for the building of new thoughts and the expression of those thoughts.

The Montessori Way

Dr. Montessori’s approach for all academic matters is to bring the topics alive for the children. This means that students are given ways to experience lessons through movement and through the manipulation of physical materials that are beautiful and engaging. The subject matter is introduced in a way that is personal and meaningful. In this way, learning is a dynamic and captivating process, meant to encourage the children along on their path to discovery.

Take a moment to remember how you learned grammar in conventional school. Perhaps there was a year when a gifted teacher found a way to make learning about nouns, direct objects, and transitive verbs fun. But it is likely that you mostly remember worksheets, textbooks, and sentences taken out of context for the class to analyze rotely. Taken this way, it is no wonder that grammar is often a dreaded, and thus avoided, topic in traditional schools. It is made up mostly of dry lessons, unrelated to life or to communication that feels compelling and interesting to students.

In the Montessori curriculum, the children first learn about grammar with their bodies as they experience the way different parts of speech show up in real life. They learn more about parts of speech through appealing objects that entice their imagination. And they learn about reading (or sentence) analysis through colorful materials, socially productive group work, and their own creativity and passions as they mine their imagination and the books around them for sentences to understand more deeply.

Grammar for Young Children (3-6)

Parts of Speech

Three- to six-year-olds learn grammar in a highly concrete way. This begins with the parts of speech as soon as children are reading well, usually some time after age five. The teacher introduces the children to each category in turn (article, adjective, noun, conjunction, preposition, verb, adverb) in ways that are concrete and also physical within their bodies.

Articles, adjectives, and nouns are all represented through an activity known as “The Farm,” with small animals that the children learn to differentiate through the identifying words that relate to objects (articles, adjectives, and nouns, followed by conjunctions and prepositions). The children choose and name each object by writing on a slip of paper (e.g., “The big pig” / article, adjective, noun) and then place them in relation to each other, using conjunctions and prepositions (e.g., “The big pig and the brown horse behind the red barn”). Then they symbolize each part of speech with shapes meant to represent the concept behind each part of speech. Articles, adjectives, and nouns are all differently sized and color triangles, indicating their relation to each other. A conjunction is a pink line, like a pink ribbon tying two items together. A preposition is a green bridge, showing the way the word bridges a connection between two objects.

Once children are comfortable with these parts of speech, the teacher will move on to verbs. Here, the teacher will write an action word, such as “jump” on a slip of paper. They will then ask questions meant to elicit the understanding that an action word is not something you can hold or see. It is something you have to do with your body. Children experiment with all sorts of different action words (symbolized by a red circle, meant to represent movement). Then they learn about adverbs which tell them how to do the verb (represented by an orange circle to show its relation to the verb).

Exploration with parts of speech continues as the students have different “games” that reveal different ways that adjectives and adverbs relate to nouns and verbs. All of these activities further cement their understanding of the nature of different kinds of words. They come to know them intimately. They also learn about tenses, interior verbs, transitive and intransitive verbs, and the ways that words can change function. All of these lessons are presented in ways that allow the children to experience the concepts in their bodies.

Reading Analysis

Next, students learn about reading analysis, where they come to understand the functions of words in sentences. First, the teacher writes sentences that are interesting and meaningful to the student, often using their name or the names of their friends (e.g., “William ran and jumped.”). William then acts out the sentence. The teacher asks, “What are the action words?” When William says “ran” and “jumped”, the teacher asks him to cut out those words and place them on red circles (representing the predicate, or verbs in sentences). Then she asks, “Who is it that ran and jumped?” When William says “William,” the teacher places a black arrow from each of the red circles, both pointing to the slip of paper with “William” on it, while “and” is placed between the two red circles. She then reads back, “William ran and jumped” and transposes the two predicates, asking if the meaning is the same. The child will say yes, and then she will return the verbs to their original circles.

This exercise will become more and more elaborate in an organized and specific way, introducing sentences with two subjects and two predicate; one subject, one predicate, and one object; one subject, one predicate, and two objects; two subjects, two predicates, and two objects; the addition of pronouns; and the addition of commas. Each lesson is given the same way, with the child acting out the part, answering questions to lay out the structure, transposing the words to see if the meaning changes, and then returning the sentence to its original form. These progressively complex exercises deepen their understanding of the functions of words and the ways that sentences are structured.

Finally, teachers give lessons with wooden circles and arrows with the questions already written on them so the children can fully absorb which questions point to which functions within the sentence (e.g., for indirect objects: “William polished the silver.”) The child always first identifies the action word (“polished”) and puts it on the red predicate circle. Then, the black “object” arrow asks “Who is is that? What is it that?” so that the question reads “Who is it that or what is it that polished?” William will say, “William” and place the “William” slip on a black circle to the left of the red predicate circle with the black object arrow pointing at it. The black “indirect object” arrow asks “Whom? What?” so the question will read “William polished whom or what?” William will say “the silver” and then place “the silver.” slip of paper on the smaller black indirect object circle to the right of the red predicate circle with the direct object arrow pointing at it. William will read the sentence, transpose the indirect object and object to see if the meaning changes (which it will!) and then return it to its original form. From here, the sentences will become more complicated, introducing adverbs, attributes, and appositives, all building a stronger foundation for grammar.

Grammar for the Elementary Student (6-12)

Parts of Speech

The main work of the elementary student in learning parts of speech is done through the “Grammar Boxes.” This activity is usually done by two students together, as children of this age are highly motivated by social interactions. There is one box for nouns, one for adjectives, one for verbs, and so on. Each box has a set of large cards with at least two sentences with actions for the children to act out and a set of small cards made up of all the words in the sentences on the large cards.

Once they act out the first sentence on the large card, they search through the accompanying small cards (one for each word in the command) to produce the sentence in its entirety on the table in front of them. These cards are color coded by parts of speech. Then, the children return to the large card and read the next sentence. In this second sentence there will be some sort of difference that highlights the part of speech of this grammar box (e.g., swapping “noisily” for “quietly” to highlight how an adverb changes the meaning of the sentence). The children act out the second command and then change the small card on the table in front of them so the sentence matches. After completing all the commands, the children go through the sentence to symbolize each word with the special shapes that signify each part of speech.

This activity brings the words to life in front of the children. They physically move their bodies, and feel the way that the words change their actions. They manipulate the beautiful, colorful cards to experience the way that the words relate to each other. They use their own powers of deduction to draw meaning from the activity.

Alongside the Grammar Boxes, the children also play games and work with inviting cards and charts that allow them to explore topics, such as noun classification (proper and common, concrete and abstract, etc.); adjective comparison (longer, longest); pronominal, numerical, and proper adjectives; a great deal of verb tense work; and more exploration of the other parts of speech, all presented in similar ways. These activities involve movement, creativity, and engaging materials and invite the children to explore, guided by their own curiosity and interest.

Reading Analysis

Reading analysis picks up where the Primary student leaves off, examining simple, complex, and compound sentences using the same arrows with questions that the children can read themselves in order to categorize the different parts of their sentence. They learn the names of these different parts from those same arrows (subject, direct object, attributive, and adverbs known by time, place, cause, agent, etc.). This work becomes more advanced as they learn about clauses. At this age they also will work with charts that further explore syntax, while also encouraging the abstraction of these concepts.

These sentences are not assigned by the teacher. They are not found on worksheets or in workbooks. Instead, the children work in small groups and create little stories with each other, using their names or the names of their friends. They imagine stories and share anecdotes about their lives. They mine poetry and their favorite books. They explore the Constitution and other historical documents. They see that sentences are all around them, and that they can come to know their language more thoroughly through reading analysis work. And through all of this, they stay joyful, curious, and motivated to learn about grammar—a gift that will always stay with them.

Final Thoughts

While the systems to edit for proper grammar have only grown more prolific and effective, the necessity of understanding how words fit together has not diminished. Usage evolves over time, but our relationship to the conventions and customs of our language will always matter. It affects how others perceive us, it allows us to maximize and develop the utilization of our brains, and it is the literal framework upon which ideas are cultivated and shared. The systems that technology makes possible are useful, but they should not supplant a nuanced knowledge of grammar and its usage.

Language is, perhaps, the most powerful tool that human beings have. It is how we know others and make ourselves known. We can use it to express love, frustration, anger, and delight. It is how we share our ideas and thoughts with friends, neighbors, and our community. Language allows us to connect with others across the globe and from generations past to generations to come. This tool is a gift, and just like with any tool, it requires care and attention or it will lose its potency. It is up to us to ensure that our children love and respect it, and understand the incredible power and gifts that it offers us.

How Montessori Prepared Me to Thrive as a Future Professional in the Age of AI

Wed, 24 Dec 2025 12:53:28 GMT

As artificial intelligence changes the face of the workplace and the professional landscape across the globe, it is important to consider the tools we are giving our children to thrive in their adulthood. The nature of jobs themselves is changing so rapidly that it may seem impossible to prepare young people for the careers they will embark on in the next two decades.

To that end, it is more important than ever that students cultivate the skills that will allow them to be successful in an evolving society. We believe that Montessori, with its focus on developing curiosity, independence, social skills, and initiative, gives children the qualities necessary for a fulfilling and successful life in the age of AI.

Lina Bhatia, a 2022 graduate of Forest Bluff School, has a special interest in technology and education. As a part of this interest, she has created a blog exploring these concepts and discussing how the two relate to each other. She recently wrote a post entitled “How Montessori Prepared Me to Thrive as a Future Professional in the Age of AI” and gave us permission to share it on our blog.

We are so proud of Lina and the thoughtful way she articulates a mature and insightful perspective on this important topic, and we hope you will enjoy her writing here.

I've always been curious about the ways people learn, the tools we use to shape that learning, and how technology is transforming education. As someone passionate about both education and technology, I’m especially interested in the intersection of learning methods, platforms, and technology. This blog is my way of exploring those questions more deeply, including reflection on my own educational journey and research from those of others.

From kindergarten through second grade, I went to a Montessori school (a type of school that emphasizes self-directed learning, hands-on exploration, and mixed-age classrooms). Not just any Montessori school, but a pure-ist, rural-ish, Amish-adjacent Montessori school in Illinois, where every morning started with a walk in a prairie and ended with baking a fresh loaf.

In second grade, my family and I moved to California for a few years, which is when I was first introduced to the digital world. I remember sitting in my third-grade classroom, being given an iPad, and using a site called Scratch. The first time I moved a couple blocks of code around, hit the run button, and saw the sprite move a couple of steps to the right, I was amazed.

Now, as a rising senior in high school who is interested in education and computer science, I can look back and appreciate how the Montessori Mindset gave me the tools to thrive within these fields, and perhaps, most importantly, within the rise of artificial intelligence, as it reshapes the professional landscape.

Montessori education centers around a few core principles: independence, curiosity-driven learning, mixed-age classrooms, and self-motivation. At my school, no one told you exactly what to do or how to structure your day. You were given choices—a whole lot of them—and it was up to you to figure out how to spend your time productively.

Montessori instills these very traits from the earliest years. No one micromanaged how I spent my time, so I had to learn to prioritize, follow through, and make sense of unstructured freedom. I also had the independence to explore whatever I wanted to; I remember, after we moved back from California and I went back to the same Montessori school, in sixth grade, I was fascinated with frogs, and ended up writing a 10-page research report on frogs. This early practice in self-direction mirrors the kind of autonomy expected in modern work environments, especially with AI.

That freedom taught me how to manage my attention and follow my interests – an experience that mirrors today’s work environments, especially as AI reshapes the professional landscape. According to the World Economic Forum, self-management, active learning, and curiosity are among the top 10 skills essential in today’s workforce. Eighty-one percent of executives in Deloitte’s 2024 Global Human Capital Trends identified adaptability, curiosity, and self-directed learning as critical skills for navigating rapid technological change.

With limitless possibilities and few clear instructions, success depends on your ability to take initiative, manage your attention, and make decisions without someone telling you what to do next, exactly what Montessori education fosters early on.

Montessori’s mixed-age classrooms, where younger students learn from older students, also model the type of mentorship that happens in the workforce. In the upper elementary classroom (4th, 5th, and 6th graders), I was on the “fish committee,” responsible for the care of our class fish named Survivor, aptly named as he was forgotten about over one holiday. These committees were organized where the older student acts as the “leader,” training the younger two protégés. This peer-to-peer learning model mirrors the programs used in 55% of U.S. companies to accelerate skill development and career advancement for early-career professionals. In the workforce, the ability to seek out mentors and learn from peers puts you at an advantage. Building a network, finding guidance, and learning by doing are habits that accelerate skill acquisition and increase opportunity.

As a current high schooler living in the rise of AI, knowing what you want to do with it and having the drive to follow through are essential. Montessori fosters this kind of motivation by encouraging curiosity and allowing students to explore what genuinely interests them. That exploration creates a self-reinforcing loop: the more curious you are, the more you learn, assuming you have access to high-quality educational resources, and the more rewarding that process becomes.

The future of work is changing, and education must evolve to meet it. The principles of Montessori education not only anticipate this future but actively prepare students to succeed in it, as I've described. Of course, there are also other methods, tools, and platforms that help students prepare for the future, many of which I hope to explore in future blog posts. Also, there are important barriers and limitations to Montessori education, and in education policy in general, that must be considered. For example, most Montessori schools are private and tuition-based, putting them out of reach for many families. Some states are starting to make public funding available for private schools, including Montessori programs, raising questions about equity, public resources, and educational priorities. Is expanding access to Montessori through public funding a good thing? Could its principles be integrated into public school curricula so that more students benefit from its strengths without the barrier of cost?

As I think about AI, EdTech, and the future of learning, these questions matter. The challenge isn’t just building innovative tools—it’s ensuring that the invaluable principles of independence, curiosity-driven learning, and self-motivation that I had the opportunity to learn from Montessori education can be accessible to every student, regardless of zip code or income.

A Montessori Masterpiece: The Multi-Age Classroom

Wed, 19 Nov 2025 16:02:57 GMT

If you tell someone your child goes to a Montessori school, one of the first comments you may hear is, “Is that the school where different ages are all mixed together?” Indeed! This is one of the defining qualities of a Montessori education. However, “different ages all mixed together” misses much of the observational rigor and scientific reasoning that went into the original creation of the Montessori multi-age classroom.

When Dr. Maria Montessori first created her educational pedagogy, she spent years observing children in their natural state to come to scientific conclusions about their development. Primarily among these observations was the presence of defining characteristics that marked age ranges (or “Planes of Development”) where these children’s needs would be fulfilled in the same way. Once she understood these ranges, which were broader than a single age level, she further observed the ways that all the children within each age group were served by being in a class “all mixed together,” as it were.

Since then, Montessori schools have upheld this understanding of child development and continued to offer environments that serve children within a range of ages. These environments are suited specifically for each plane of development in every detail—their layout, materials, curriculum, lessons, manner of working, expectations, social opportunities, and interactions with the students. By acknowledging the general characteristics of age ranges, and offering environments that meet these characteristics, Montessori classrooms are able to serve children comprehensively throughout their development. They not only are able to meet the intellectual and developmental needs of children, but the multi-age environments also offer other opportunities and benefits for the students of all ages.

Planes of Development

Dr. Montessori saw that childhood could be divided into four main Planes of Development: birth –6 years, 6–12 years, 12–18 years, and 18–24 years. Furthermore, she observed that for the first (0–6) and third (12–18) plane, these groups can be divided into “sub-planes” (0–3 / 3–6 and 12–15 / 15–18). The sub-planes distinguish between two phases of a child’s development where there is a more significant transition than year to year growth, but not as substantial as the transition between planes.

Birth to Six Years (The First Plane of Development)

The first six years of a child’s life bring about the most extraordinary physical changes that a person will ever experience. The small, helpless newborn will become a walking, talking, and competent child in just six years. During this plane, a child has a concrete understanding of their surroundings. They seek order so they can make sense of their new world around them. They are vulnerable, sensitive, and require a great deal of love and security in order to give them stability. They are social in the sense that they are curious about the people around them, but they do not yet have the ability to internalize someone else’s point of view. The first three years (the first sub-plane) are marked by a tremendous physical leap—from complete helplessness to the ability to feed and dress themselves, as well as walk, climb, run, and communicate. During this time, their awareness is largely unconscious. The second three years (the second sub-plane) has fewer dramatic physical changes as children complete the transition from toddler to elementary child. It also marks a period of increasing conscious awareness of themselves and their ability to learn, as they participate in intentional engagement with their environment with self-direction.

Six to Twelve Years (The Second Plane of Development)

An Elementary child is generally active and sturdy. They are lankier than in their early childhood. These students have tremendous intellectual capabilities. They have well-developed imaginations and an accompanying ability to abstract. They are curious about the workings of the universe and how everything fits together. Elementary children are actively social. They are not only deeply curious about people around them, but they are able to begin to comprehend the inside workings of their minds. The social world is endlessly fascinating to them. They want to work with their peers, and they are able to do so productively and meaningfully. They have a passionate interest in morality, and they look for people to admire in the world outside of their home.

Twelve to Eighteen Years (The Third Plane of Development)

Dr. Montessori observed that the third plane parallels many of the qualities of the first plane. They are both marked by extraordinary physical growth, and they both are characterized by a transition from one life stage to another. The first: From infanthood to childhood. And the third: from childhood to adulthood. These major physical and metaphysical changes bring about many of the same characteristics that are seen in young children. Adolescents are vulnerable and sensitive, and they look for genuine encouragement and support from the adults around them to hearten their sense of self. While they have greater social abilities than babies and toddlers, their attention turns inwards again. They are introspective as they ask questions about who they are and how they fit into their broader society.

Classrooms and Environments for the Different Planes

Given the similar needs of children during their planes of development, Dr. Montessori designed environments that were able to meet the needs of children during specific ranges of ages. She wrote, “Successive levels of education must correspond to the successive personalities of the child. Our methods are oriented not to any pre-established principles but rather to the inherent characteristics of the different ages” (From Childhood to Adolescence, 1).

Home or a “Nido” (0–1.5 years old)

The smallest babies, who are not walking or talking, need an environment where their physical and emotional needs are met quickly. Here, they have a small world to explore with familiar adults whom they love and trust. They have just enough stimulation to be active and learn, but they have plenty of time for quiet, for naps, and for peaceful meals. At this age, babies have basically no conscious awareness of each other, and no true need to be social with other young children.

The Young Children’s Community (1.5–3 year olds)

The toddler is now walking and talking. They are in the process of separating their identity from their primary caregivers and benefit from having time and space in their own community to continue to understand themselves as autonomous beings. This special classroom is simple, uncluttered, and bright. It has chairs, tables, shelves, materials, and real tools that are perfectly sized for small children. The children work individually, as they are developing themselves from the inside, but they have opportunities to serve each other with their work—food preparation, caring for the classroom, and learning how to be respectful of other people’s individual needs and rights within a shared space.

The Primary Classroom (3–6 year olds)

At this age, children enter the classroom with conscious awareness of their peers and their surroundings. This environment offers more materials and a larger group of students. Shelves are grouped into Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, Math, Geography, and Music. Children are eager to learn the facts of their world, and these materials give them access to this information. They work primarily on their own at single tables, as their attention and abilities are still individually focused, with a few small group lessons as they turn six. Just as in the Young Children’s Community, they experience the customs and expectations of navigating a small community of individuals. Dr. Montessori wrote, “The class gets to be a group cemented by affection. Finally, the children come to know one another’s characters and to have reciprocal feelings for each other’s worth” (The Absorbent Mind, 333).

Lower and Upper Elementary (6–9 and 9–12 year olds)

While most Montessori schools divide the elementary group into two classrooms by age for practical reasons, students of this entire age range have very similar characteristics and needs. For this plane, children are eager to learn and work in groups as they sort out their social abilities and understanding. They want to learn about history, people across the globe, the inside of the earth, plants and animals from every continent, and anything else they can imagine from our universe. The materials and lessons in this environment reflect these interests and introduce the far reaches of the known world to the elementary child.

Secondary Level (12–15 year olds)

As children enter adolescence, they need the security of an intimate classroom setting to support and stabilize them, but also need access to extended and real experiences outside of the classroom where they can become valorized as they learn what they have to offer their society. Their classroom is a place where they once again return to more individual work, as when they were very young. This reflects the introspection of this age. They are deeply attached to their friends as they seek belonging, identity, and purpose through their peer group, and they benefit from occasions for collaboration within their small community. Their educational program offers opportunities to spend time living and working away from their family, often in the form of several 10-14 day trips over the course of their year performing service work, learning about history in other states, and relying on each other during adventures and exploration, such as canoeing and backpacking in the wilderness.

The Benefits of a Multi-Age Classroom

Within these classrooms, there are a host of benefits for children in their first, second, and third years in their environments.

A Natural Community of Peers

There are very few professional or personal groups of adults who are restricted by an age span of one year. Friendships are often made up of people who are at least one or two years apart, and many meaningful relationships are made up of people who are years, even generations, apart. In most work settings, there are colleagues of different ages, who learn from and are inspired by each other’s life experiences—the younger ones gleaning wisdom and perspective from elders, and the older ones gathering motivation and new viewpoints from the younger ones. These relationships make life richer and more interesting, intellectually and personally.

While college dorms are often divided by year, most courses are open to students of all ages. In high school, there are some classes restricted to year, but many have different ages. It is in preschool, elementary, and middle school that children are the most rigidly restricted to classes of only peers who are exactly their own age.

Dr. Montessori saw that this prohibitively restricted children’s social lives. She wrote:

"The charm of social life is in the number of different types [of people] that one meets… To segregate by age is one of the cruellest and most inhuman things one can do, and this is equally true for children. It breaks the bonds of social life, deprives it of nourishment" (The Absorbent Mind, 226).

A classroom that hosts a span of 2-3 years is alive! It is full of the natural encounters one expects to experience every day. A diversity of ages brings variety and meaning to the classroom.

Mentors

Children who enter the class as first-years have incredible mentors in their older counterparts—whether they are just one year ahead of them, as in the Young Children’s Community and Secondary Level, or one and two years ahead of them in the Primary and Elementary classrooms. From the first day that they walk through the doors, the class already has a rhythm and expectations that are set by the older students. Younger children are welcomed into a space that feels secure.

In fact, studies have shown that children in multi-age classrooms show increased abilities in motor, cognitive, communication, as well as overall development, in comparison with peers who attend single age classrooms (Lillard, 2005). Students benefit from having classmates just older than they are in many ways.

When they inevitably need assistance or guidance, they have more than just one teacher and one assistant teacher to turn to. They have an entire year of children who can already zip up coats, tie shoes, show them where the extra paper is, find an entry in the encyclopedia, explain the process for going into the prairie to observe butterflies, square an equation, or use the Algebra textbook. They have role models for behavior and social interactions. They have patient young teachers who will review their map pieces or equations with them. And, perhaps most remarkable of all, they will have two years of observing and overhearing future academic lessons—the capitals in Asia, sentence analysis, finding cube roots. So when their time comes, the concepts and language already have roots in their brain to take hold of, increasing the speed of fluency in many subjects.

True Leadership

Because of the span of ages, older children have two or three years where they experience being leaders within their environment. They gather confidence as they see how their contributions matter to the new students—the way they help them take care of themselves and the classroom, the way they introduce them to the procedures of the room, and the lessons they are able to teach them with the materials when the teacher invites them to do so.

They have implicit and explicit memories of what it was like when they were younger, and they are able to pull from those in order to rise to leadership and serve their younger peers productively. They get feedback when their efforts are not helpful, so they learn how to help in ways that can be received constructively. Dr. Montessori observed that this experience shows them how to lead with sensitivity: “They do not help one another as we do. If a child is carrying something heavy, none of the others run to his aid. They respect one another’s efforts and give help only when it is necessary.”

Finally, when they do give lessons on vocabulary, equations, geography, or other academic processes, they have an inherent review of the material. Instead of leaving the information behind, or feeling forced to review in a rote way, they are able to go over the work again, further cementing it in their minds.

Flexibility in Progress

While development and progress fall along a general track, children themselves do not progress at the same pace. Some may leap ahead what is considered typical, some may lag behind. And all will move along in jumps and starts—achieving understanding, and then holding steady for a bit before moving forward. Likewise, no child moves ahead at the exact same pace across subjects. They will take turns across academic areas, sometimes reaching further understanding in mathematics, sometimes in language, and so on. Learning does not occur in a straight line, nor in a single one!

There is tremendous benefit to having a class of many ages, because, at any given time, there is a high probability that there will be someone else who is near the same point of achievement and progress as someone else. They do not need to be in the same year, and often they are not. It allows a child who is accelerating through cubing lessons to connect with an older peer who is also doing the same work, instead of feeling overly inflated by being at the “top of the class.” It also allows a child who may be struggling with sentence analysis to have a review lesson with a young peer, and take the role of a social leader as they work together to more deeply understand the concepts—instead of feeling like they are falling behind a class who is moving in lock step.

In fact, research has shown that this academic experience enhances children’s cognitive skills, with a study indicating that children who spend three years in the same environment score higher on reading exams than children who enter the environment in that third year. There is an inherent academic benefit to the experience of a multi-age classroom (Carter, 2005).

This range of ages allows for greater grace with the range of ability that always naturally occurs with any group of people. Instead of having one year to master a curriculum intended for one year in a classroom, children are able to connect with classmates as they all work towards the same goal of mastering the curriculum at the end of their 2–3 years in the same classroom.

A Balance of Familiar…

Children who spend 2–3 years in the same classroom come to know the room, the materials, their peers, and their teachers deeply. It becomes an intimately familiar place for them, and they are able to delve thoroughly into their environment. They have time to thoroughly explore their lessons and work, as they are able to use the same materials to learn more complicated and advanced concepts.

In three-year classrooms, they spend two years with a group of friends one year older than they are, and two years with a group of friends one year younger. This provides the opportunity for prolonged experiences in leadership, having role models, and navigating dynamic social encounters. It prepares students for a variety of relationships and connections, and it strengthens their emotional and social awareness. Research has indicated that multi-age classrooms settings produce improved social skills in comparison with single-age classrooms (Saqlain, 2015).

Multi-age classrooms also provide the opportunity for children to spend 2–3 years with the same teacher. There is inherent value in allowing children to stay connected to the same adult for more than one year at a time. Teachers come to know their students deeply, which translates into even more effective teaching and classroom management. It also adds meaning to their relationships and gives students more confidence, as they develop security from the sense of stability this provides them.

…and New

A multi-age classroom is not all familiar. Even when students are returning to the same class, they are not returning as the same year they were before. A first year becomes a second year, and a second year becomes a third year. The first year children enter a classroom, and it is all new to them. They are the youngest and must learn how to find their way. This can be especially challenging for children who are the oldest at home! Our Upper Elementary teacher has shared that often the toughest year for students in her class is the year that is the most mismatched with their birth order at home.

After spending time as the youngest, in the three-year classes, the students spend a year in the middle, buffered on either end, and navigating roles as both younger and older than many of their classmates. And finally, they return as the oldest, and see the classroom through those eyes. This is often a year of great growth for children who are the youngest in their own families.

Every year, there is an outgoing of the oldest students, and an incoming of the youngest students. So while many of their peers remain the same, there is a turnover that takes place at the edges of the environment. New children enter a stable environment and bring their own personalities and interests.

These transitions freshen the experience as they make their way into greater leadership positions and find new ways of relating to their classroom and their new friends. Rather than feeling uninspired by something that might feel too familiar, they are able to be reinvigorated each year by a new role in their class.

Final Thoughts

The multi-age Montessori classroom arose because of Dr. Montessori’s profound observations about similarities across children’s ages. These observations offered new insight into development—and recognized that children’s needs and characteristics do not generally change drastically from year to year, and, instead, are made up of periods of rapid growth, followed by relative stability. Given these conclusions, she recognized that children within a 3–6 year age range did not need classrooms that were dramatically different from one another.

Furthermore, she also was able to observe and define the importance of not restricting children’s educational experiences to interactions with only other children of the same age. She saw that allowing a broader range of ages added a necessary richness to their days, and also offered invaluable opportunities for social and emotional development.

Some of the most important gifts schools and parents can offer children are well-developed social skills, confident and humble leadership abilities, graciousness when it is time to follow, and an ability to be flexible in a dynamic social setting. All these abilities combined make for productive and conscientious citizens in our greater world. The masterpiece of Dr. Montessori’s multi-age classroom is a fertile ground for all of these gifts to flourish, and, thus, allow children to step into the world, prepared for a beautiful and complex social life.

References

Carter, P. (2005). The modern multi-age classroom. Educational Leadership, 63(1), 54–58.

Montessori, M. (1995). The Absorbent Mind. Holt Paperbacks.

Montessori, M. (2020). From Childhood to Adolescence. Montessori-Pierson Publishing House.

Lillard, A. S. (2005). Montessori the science behind the genius. New York: NY. Oxford University.

Saqlain, N. (2015). A comprehensive look at multi‐age education. Journal of Educational and Social Research, 5(2), 285. https://doi.org/10.5901/jesr.2015.v5n2p285

Birthday Party Mania: It's My Party and...Someone is Definitely Crying

Sun, 19 Oct 2025 17:58:44 GMT

( Note: This blog is divided by age but we recommend reading it in its entirety as some of the later sections build on earlier ideas )

Children’s birthday parties evoke many emotions: excitement, joy, and connection. Perhaps also: fatigue, stress, and feeling overwhelmed. These events can be special opportunities to celebrate your child’s life and to gather with people whom you love. But they can also be sources of stress. Parents often talk about the number of birthday parties their children are invited to—“They have busier social lives than I do!” Or they bemoan the amount of planning necessary to pull off a bigger celebration than the year before. And how many times has your own child melted down in tears at the end of a birthday party (always hopefully after leaving the event), and then been overtired and cranky for the rest of the day?

If any of these experiences sound familiar to you, you are not alone! Birthday parties are fun. But sometimes they are too much fun. And it can be hard to create a celebration that is a celebration, but also doesn’t overwhelm your child, their guests, and, frankly, you.

We have both Dr. Maria Montessori’s understanding of children and our experience as educators to inform how we approach these celebrations. By incorporating her wisdom and what we observe regularly in our school, we can make suggestions for birthday parties that provide excitement, joy, and celebration without fatigue, stress, and feeling overwhelmed!

0-4 Years

Under the age of five, birthday parties are primarily for the parents! They offer an opportunity to celebrate another year with your little one, and to gather with the people who make you and your child feel loved and supported. At this age, children have almost no concept of time or what their birthday even means. They can become very quickly overwhelmed by anticipation and excitement if the people around them emphasize it too much. Then they feel confused and overstimulated by an event that is too big, too loud, or too active. They also do not have much social awareness or the ability to understand others’ points of view, and can struggle with the sharing of time and resources that a birthday party with friends requires.

Now is a wonderful time to put together a sweet party with grandparents or with one other family whom you are close to. Resist the temptation to go big! Make it an early night with a simple meal plan. A few presents, a few balloons, a candle on a small cake—and you will all have the joyful experience of being together without having a celebration that takes away from the simple pleasure of the moment.

5-8 Years

After your child turns five, you can be assured that they are now very focused on their birthday! Their sense of time has developed, and they understand the passing of the days that brings them closer to their special day. They also have a better understanding of the privileges (and sometimes status!) that go along with getting older. As such, they are now likely more focused on including a group of friends in their birthday celebration, and having a party with some kind of activity.

If your child is satisfied with a family birthday party, as when they are younger, then, by all means, keep having their parties the way you always have! But if they are looking for a little more excitement, then there are lovely ways to enhance their parties without losing control of the whole endeavor!

We recommend avoiding whole class parties for your child, until possibly when they are in the Secondary Level. Often these events get quickly out of hand, with children becoming excited to the point of discomfort. We are always watching for the point where joy becomes hysteria! When children become dysregulated, they are no longer enjoying themselves. They cry, feelings get hurt, and behavior gets out of control.

Instead, we recommend helping your child to choose a small number of friends (3-6, depending on their age and temperament)—perhaps just the other children exactly their age, or just the girls who are also in their year at school. If there is not a logical way to define a small group of children, then please (please!) keep the selected number small enough that the children who are not invited do not feel specifically excluded. For example, this means that if all the boys who are your child’s age are included in the group except for one, then please invite that one boy also. This recommendation applies throughout their childhood! Our school values inclusivity among classmates, and you can use your invitation policy to teach your child about this important value.

Once you have your small group of children, you and your child can start imagining what kind of an event they would like to host for their friends. We recommend that you keep it simple and keep it short! This means two hours tops for the event, and 90 minutes is fine.

You may find it helpful to come up with a theme for the event. Then use the theme to structure the party with one activity, one craft, and then cake and lemonade. This should not be a complicated theme! For example, you could choose the theme of “Water”:

● Activity - Sprinkler obstacle course or water balloons

● Craft - tie dye

● Cake and lemonade!

Some more ideas:

● “Treasure” - Scavenger hunt in a local ravine or prairie (this is an excellent activity for an active group of children!) and painting wooden treasure boxes

● “Games” - A rotation of short low-stakes outdoor games (soccer, freeze tag, green light / red light) and making a tic tac toe board out of cardstock and puffy paints

● “Letters and Numbers” - Play 500 outside (look up the rules on-line!) and decorating pre-made cardboard letters representing the first letter of each child’s name

*That being said, if you know your child and their group of friends will do better by only participating in the activity or craft portion, then just do one or the other.

Include your child in this discussion so they feel they are a part of the organization of the event, but remember that as an adult you make the final decisions on all major aspects of the party! They can also help you select or make paper invitations and mail them to their friends.

If you feel confident serving a meal then go for it! But you also can time the party so that you only serve a birthday treat. Have some easy games lined up to use the time when the main event is over—hopscotch, freeze tag, keep the balloon in the air. Consider hiring an older child or young teenager to help set up the event, manage the activities, and clean up afterwards. You will be amazed at how good they are at talking to children and thinking of spontaneous games to play until parents arrive!

As a note, we advise against opening birthday presents at the party in almost all situations for many reasons—children often compare gifts, younger ones can become jealous, there is pressure on the opener to act similarly grateful and excited for each gift, etc. Also keep in mind that party favors are not necessary for a memorable event. If you and your child do decide to put together a goodie bag, then remember that as with most things, less is more. A fun pencil, a small notepad, and a bouncy ball are all fun treats to bring home.

While a group party can be fun, keep in mind that, at any age, many children are able to relax and enjoy themselves better if they only invite one friend for an outing—perhaps a train ride to the city or an afternoon at a museum. This can be a great option for a child who wants a special activity and also wants to avoid the drama and stimulation of a large group!

9-11 Years

Now your child is a little older and may be able to handle a slightly larger group of children, but, for their sake, always err on the side of a smaller group if you are unsure. Please continue to maintain an inclusive policy for the invitation list, and communicate this clearly to your child in case it comes up with their peers. You can give them language like, “Because I can’t include the whole class, my parents and I decided to just invite the first-years in the Upper Elementary.” And if they are choosing a group that can’t be easily defined, then make sure they are extra careful not to discuss it at school. If it is unavoidable, then continue to emphasize that it is a small group of friends.

The activities that worked well for children who are just younger are still excellent options for this age, although they may be more complicated now. Perhaps the scavenger hunt has trickier items to find, and the treasure boxes can be decorated with more items.

More ideas:

● “Party” - Classic party games (pin the tail on the donkey, stomping balloons on heels) and make your own pinatas (use a small cardboard box and decorate with paper mache)

● “Dessert” - Decorating plain cloth aprons with puffy paints and making and decorating cupcakes

● “Pizza” - Decorating paper chefs hats and making pizza (with premade crusts)

● “Flowers” - Collecting dirt and seeds and painting flower pots

You may also be able to host more free form games—like inviting a group of children to play wiffle ball in a field with a few parents for extra hands, going to an open area to play field games, or taking them to the beach for volleyball and swimming. However, as in every case, your knowledge of your own child and their friends should guide you! If they have a tendency to become overly competitive or too physically daring for your comfort, these may not be your best choices. As before, brevity is your friend. There is no need for a party longer than two hours, and 90 minutes is perfectly acceptable

If resources allow, you may also find that as they get older, they can handle something like a special cooking class together, a party at a local center with a children’s robotics guide, or a trip to a nature preserve with an expert who can help them find animal prints. Something to be mindful of here is that many adults who run events like this are not accustomed to children who are calm and know how to listen! They often will act zany and silly and wind up the group, especially when they are younger. And please keep in mind that these experiences can be fun, but are not necessary for a joyful birthday celebration. You can host a wonderful gathering in your own home or in the great outdoors!

12-14 Years

At these ages, children are deeply invested in belonging to their social group. It is especially important to create an invite list that respects the cohesiveness of their peers. This means including the whole third year group in the Upper Elementary, or all the boys in the Secondary Level, for example. And if your child wants to select from a smaller group of friends, to make sure that it is small enough that no classmate is being left out on their own. For the Secondary Level in particular, we recommend inviting all of a certain group, or just inviting one friend for a birthday outing. This class becomes very bonded to each other, and their emotions are intense at this age. The feeling of being excluded is, therefore, particularly acute.

This child can now be a full participant in the planning process for their party. You can drop them off at Target or a party store on their own with a budget to purchase decorations and supplies. They can go to the grocery store to get food and snacks. Many children will feel empowered and eager to take on the responsibility of that kind of trust! But, as always, provide the support they need if they would like more involvement from you.

As for the event itself, they are now at an age where an outing to a ropes course, a bowling alley, laser tag, an escape room, or the like is really and truly fun for them, and they are unlikely to become overstimulated. They also are more able to handle free form games with less adult supervision—badminton at the park, pickleball on recreational courts, frisbee golf, or similar games. They have been playing games with their peers for years now and have a better sense of how to regulate themselves and how to communicate with friends who may be losing perspective on the activity.

Children these ages also can now manage themselves in a group indoors for longer periods of time. They can set up card games, board games such as Settlers of Katan or Monopoly, or even a movie night with a film that you pre-approve of for the particular group of children.

At this stage, the children experience deep joy just from being in each other’s presence. Let their interests lead the way, and help them find simple ways of gathering with their friends to celebrate together!

Final Thoughts

As with any experience your child is having, please always consider: What is the purpose? We believe that birthday parties are an opportunity to express love and gratitude, to recognize a special day, and to have some fun that is a little out of the ordinary. This also means to focus on your child’s actual experience, and not the ideas about birthday parties that can become commonplace in our culture. Are they really having a good time, or are they overstimulated? Are they excited, or are they overexcited? Plan a party, or help them plan a party, that allows them to focus on the real purpose of their gathering, and not a preconceived notion of what a child’s birthday party is supposed to look like. Show them that they have all the tools they need to create a party that serves its true purpose: excitement, joy, and connection.

Cursive Handwriting: The Gift of Taking “The Long Way”

Mon, 15 Sep 2025 15:38:50 GMT

When Dr. Maria Montessori first introduced her method of education over one hundred years ago, her adherence to cursive handwriting for children was widely accepted by the culture. However, in the last several decades, as computer usage has swept across the globe, parents and educators began to focus more on print and technology itself for the expression of ideas and the retention of knowledge. Since then, Montessori’s commitment to cursive has seemed archaic, rigid, and unnecessary to critics and doubters. After all, why would children need to learn a type of handwriting that is becoming outdated? And what is the purpose of longhand writing when typing is much faster, and when print is readily available and integrates easily with books, articles, and the computer?

Montessori teachers and trainers have long argued for the importance of learning to read and write cursive before reading and writing in print—and for the importance of continuing to primarily use cursive in educational settings instead of resorting to typing and technology. But it is only in the last decade that research on longhand writing has established that it is superior to the use of technology for writing and learning. While research on cursive versus print has not yet established a clear preference for cursive in direct comparisons, much of the research comparing handwriting versus computers utilizes cursive specifically. Montessori theory holds that longhand writing has a unique value, and there is a general theory that we should not be so quick to assume that newer, faster ways of doing things are always better than the old-fashioned ways!

Montessori Theory on Cursive Versus Print

Easier to Learn Letters

While many adults assume that cursive is harder to learn because it is more complicated than print, Montessori educators believe that cursive is easier to learn precisely because it is more complicated than print. Print letters do not vary as widely from each other and are made up of the same general shapes—straight lines and near perfect circles. Cursive letters are more easily distinguished, with more directionality in the lines, curves, and distinct markings of each letter. For example, children can quickly decipher the difference between an “i” and a “j” in cursive, or an “r” and an “n.” Similarly, because the letters are more distinct, there is less of a chance of letter reversal confusion in cursive. A “b” and a “d” are much more distinct, as are “p” and “q.” All of this allows children to learn the names and shapes of the alphabet more quickly when they begin first with cursive.

Easier to Master the Formation of Letters

Many adults also believe that cursive letters are harder to produce than print letters. After all, print letters are primarily straight lines and complete or partial circles. However, Montessori theory maintains that straight lines and perfect circles are harder for children to produce precisely—both the marks themselves, as well as the way they need to join together to make letters. Cursive is considered easier because there is more room for error in the production of readable letters. Therefore, a child can more quickly reach the stage of writing legible letters in cursive rather than print, where they will need to have greater mastery of their hands before their writing will be readable.

Spaces Between Words Leads to Greater Comprehension

The letters in a word written in cursive are connected to one another, and words are separated by spaces. These clear delineations make it more straightforward for a young reader to isolate the words in a sentence. It also simplifies the writing process, as children understand how to form separate words when they are writing. This aids in their absorption of the organization of language and allows their writing to be understandable sooner.

Continuous, Natural Movement

Cursive writing only requires the pen or pencil to be lifted off the page after each individual word. Print writing requires the writing instrument to be lifted off the page many times, even within the writing of a single word. Montessori educators theorize that this interrupted movement pattern is harder on the creative and expressive properties of the brain. A child will more easily enter a state of concentrated flow when their hand is able to move smoothly and freely with their thoughts and is not continually interrupted by tiny movements.

Montessori Theory on Handwriting Versus Technology

It will come as no surprise to anyone familiar with the Montessori methodology that educators value handwriting over the use of the computer for both learning and for the expression of ideas. For learning, the benefits of handwriting cascade throughout a child’s educational experience: They are able to retain their letters more readily when they can physically move their fingers and hands to make the shapes. They are able to better understand the organization of their language when they are physically creating sentences and paragraphs. They are able to more thoroughly comprehend the information they are learning and working with when they have to form the letters and words by their own hand.

For the expression of ideas, Montessori has always prioritized the utilization of the mind and body in unison for meaningful work. When the hand and body are able to move freely with the activity of the mind, the entire person becomes integrated and fully absorbed in the activity. A computer reduces the expression of thought into the almost indistinguishable tapping of fingers, with the production of the work several inches away from the movement of the body. Only handwriting authentically integrates the hand’s specific efforts with the output of work and expression, leading to a thoroughly engaged activity.

What the Research Shows: Handwriting Versus Computers

Better Recall of Words and Letters for Emerging Readers

Research from 2020 indicates that when children write with pencil and paper, they more quickly and easily learn and retain letters and words, when compared to using a computer and compared to using a tablet and stylus. This study suggests that not only utilizing the fingers and hand in the motions of handwriting lead to greater retention of the shapes and and words, but that the unique experience of using a pencil and paper also adds to the benefit. This argument implies that the fine motor skills required for a pencil and paper, and perhaps the experience of the friction of the pencil and paper, uniquely unite the hand and regions of the brain necessary for language development (Mayer et al, 2020).

Retention of Information and Greater Conceptual Knowledge

A 2014 study examined the differences between students who took notes in a classroom in cursive versus on their laptop. While previous studies had considered whether the laptop itself caused issues with distraction, this one more closely considered whether simply the action of typing produced measurable differences when compared to recording notes in longhand. This particular study showed that students who used cursive in class performed better on exams that tested conceptual knowledge of the content. The researchers theorized that the process of converting the information to handwritten notes allowed for a more thorough processing of the information (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014). This indicates that cursive allows learners to retain more of the information that they receive, as well as gain a deeper understanding of the knowledge, when compared to typing.

Broader Brain Activation, Leading to Deeper Processing

A subsequent 2020 study used EEG scans to record the neural differences in older children and young adults who used cursive or typing in learning contexts. The scans showed that, indeed, the participants who were asked to use cursive in their work had greater areas of activation in their brain than those who used a computer. These findings state that broad brain activation allows for deeper processing and greater retention and understanding of academic material, thereby supporting the 2014 researchers’ hypothesis (Askvik, van der Weel, and van der Meer, 2020). Among other advantages, van der Meer shares that this is likely why children who learn to write by hand instead of typing are less likely to have issues with letter reversals (“b” versus “d”, etc). As Montessori suggests, engaging in activity that utilizes more of the brain appears to lead to more comprehension and greater recall of information on both a micro and macro level.

Final Thoughts

Montessori’s loyalty to longhand is based in a theory created from observations about how children learn. While incorporation of new technologies is an essential element of education at age appropriate times, there are important reasons for continuing to utilize a form of expression that has worked successfully for hundreds of years. It is necessary to consider new ideas! But when we are quick to leave behind methods that work, we also often leave behind benefits and skills that we did not realize were attached to those methods.

Schools across the country are re-introducing cursive into the curriculum, as they see the losses of the last decade during a rush to digitize learning. Students are struggling with learning to read and write, concentration, and retention and comprehension of material. There are many theories as to why this is the case. But as more studies come out showing the benefits of handwriting (usually cursive specifically) over technology, it is clear that when we lose handwriting, we lose more than just handwriting.

It may seem old-fashioned, but there are clear advantages to doing things the long way—the harder way. And our children should be the last group we experiment with by converting the method by which they are learning and expressing themselves too quickly. As our world becomes more and more digitized, let’s not rush to digitize our children’s education at the expense of their education. Let’s let them use as much of their bodies as they can when they learn so that they can also use as much of their minds as they can too.

Note: This post considers the educational experience of children who are neurotypical.

References

Askvik, E. O., van der Weel, F. R., & van der Meer, A. L. H. (2020). The importance of cursive handwriting over typewriting for learning in the classroom: A high-density EEG study of 12-year-old children and young adults. Frontiers in Psychology, 11, 1810. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2020.01810

Mueller, P. A., & Oppenheimer, D. M. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking. Psychological Science, 25(6), 1159-1168. https://doi.org/10.1177/0956797614524581

Mayer, C., Wallner, S., Budde-Spengler, N., Braunert, S., Arndt, P. A., & Kiefer, M. (2020). Literacy training of kindergarten children with pencil, keyboard or tablet stylus: The influence of the writing tool on reading and writing performance at the letter and word level. Frontiers in Psychology, 10, 3054. https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2019.03054

How Can I Help?: Creating a Routine with Chores

Wed, 25 Jun 2025 17:34:02 GMT

This article was originally published in May of 2020 as a resource to help families during the early days of the Covid pandemic. Five years later, it continues to be a helpful guide for establishing a chore routine and involving children of all ages in the care of the home. Summer break is a perfect time to get started!

I know that chores are an important part of my children’s development. Chores are good for their sense of responsibility and community and good for their self-confidence and self-esteem. Chores make them better friends, students, and citizens. Chores teach them how to serve. I know all of this. And yet, for a long time, the chore system in our home wasn’t impressive. Our children made their own lunches for school, for the most part. They cleaned their rooms every week, for the most part. They cleaned up after themselves, for the most part. They helped with dishes and tidying, for the most part. I regularly let die and then resurrected a rotating chore chart, which mostly just caused them to complain about whose turn it was to wash dishes. For a long time, I would have described the chore expectations in our house as “maybe good enough.”

Why didn’t we have a better chore system in our house? Why didn’t it feel more sustainable whenever we tried a new system? As best I can tell, there were two reasons for this. The first was that so far we did not have a true “need” for our children to consistently contribute to our home care. And secondly, I kept trying out systems that worked for other people, without considering how it matched our family’s particular personality and discipline.

Children as Contributors

Our family lives in inarguable comfort. While parenting can be challenging, we have never worried about survival or lived through true hardship. Additionally, my husband and I have always been able to take breaks as parents through babysitters and friends and when our children are at school.

All of this means that our children’s efforts in caring for the home are somewhat contrived. I can ask them to wash their dishes before we go to school, but if we are in a hurry and it doesn’t get done, it doesn’t take much time or effort for me to do it myself when I get back from the school drop-off. Similarly, I can ask for their help with the laundry, but since they are at school all day, it is likely that I will end up folding the clothes myself when I have some downtime. This is often an unconscious action! I have to be fully aware and disciplined about saving chores for my children and then following through with asking them to do them. Often this takes more energy than doing it myself, especially if they are reluctant to do it.

But I also know that contributing to housework is good for children in a hundred different ways. And that if I do not hand over responsibility to them, then it will not be theirs to do. It is important to create a “full task transfer” so that if they do not do it, then it is not done. And I need to prioritize my own work and activities, so that I do not have extra time and energy to do their work for them! It is important for us to find a system that works for them and for me.

Finding a Chore System

I’ve tried a lot of chore systems over the years—a lot that didn’t end up working for us. I tried a rotating job chart where I divided household tasks into three parts for our three children, and we changed every month. This was hard for us because I never could establish the right balance of meeting our children’s capabilities (ages 9, 7, and 5 at the time of writing this blog) with being somewhat fair in terms of time and energy. Mostly no one wanted to be stuck on dishes so I had to remember to create a new list every month, and restructure the lists each time. If I missed the list by a week or two, then we were already halfway into the next month, and I had to decide how to handle the uneven time frame.

After this, I decided that we should just trade day by day. The older two would alternate being my helper inside the kitchen or being my helper outside of the kitchen on odd and even days, and the youngest would always be in charge of tidying bathrooms and the mudroom. This worked for a while, and was nice because I didn’t need to keep creating a job chart. But then our youngest started asking why she didn’t get a chance to help in the kitchen, and the job load could end up being quite unbalanced based on laundry and menu, so I decided to scrap this job system, too!

Part of the issue is that there is not a one-size-fits-all system. Every family has different challenges and strengths. Parents who are very organized and good at getting to tasks probably would be suited for the job chart approach. Parents with an even number of children may be able to work with the odd-day even-day approach. The trouble is that our family has neither of those things!

Finally, I asked my husband what he recommended. I was still doing too many of the household tasks, and I needed a better system for structuring chores. First, he observed that there were three main areas of work in the house: Laundry, food preparation, and kitchen clean-up. Then, he suggested that I give each child one of these jobs every week. We would rotate every Sunday. As for the jobs like straightening up the mudroom, tidying the floors, and putting away toys, we would all chip in.

It seemed too simple to work, but that, I suspected, was the genius of it.

Getting Started

We started this endeavor as we start all our family endeavors: With a family meeting. Family meetings are a new concept to me, but I’ve found that if we serve popcorn, keep it short, and make sure everyone has a chance to share, they are a great way of cultivating camaraderie and enthusiasm. They also help our children feel invested in whatever is coming next.

We explained the state we were in: There is a lot to do in our home, and we all need to chip in to make it work. We observed that what we had been doing wasn’t working. And we pointed out that if Mom and Dad were tired from doing too much housework, we didn’t have time or energy to enjoy activities as a family, like baking, cooking delicious meals, exploring the ravine, playing outside, throwing the baseball, and so on. This provided the natural motivation for them to help.

Then we proposed the chore solution. Our children immediately grasped the simplicity of it, and appreciated the fairness of this new system. We made it clear that with their help, our home would be cleaner and easier to live in, and that we would have more time to enjoy life together. We let them ask questions, and mostly they wanted to know whether they got to pick the dinner menu when they were on food preparation. My answer was, “Yes, you get a vote.” (With my oversight, so as to avoid Mac and Cheese every single day.)

I wrote the jobs on a piece of paper on the refrigerator to help us all have respect for the system, and added “Floors, mudroom, bathroom, and toy clean-up: Everyone” just to make sure they understand it is also a task that needs to get done. This way, everyone continually sees that this is now an important part of our home and that the jobs will be rotated fairly.

Laundry, Food Preparation, and Dishes

For laundry, our nine-year-old could get clothes out of the dryer, fold them, divide them into stacks, and distribute them to the individual bedrooms, where each person puts their own away. I’m sure he could run the washer and the transfer to the dryer, but I remember too vividly shrinking some of my mom’s sweaters in the dryer when I was a child, and I was reluctant to leave this possibility in his hands! Our seven-year-old was fully capable of the same, but the clothes weren’t as nicely folded. Our five-year-old got overwhelmed quickly by a big pile of laundry, and tends to need me to sit with her while she folds, helping her fold larger clothes. I also helped her carry the large laundry basket upstairs and manage the bigger piles of clothes as they go to everyone’s room. If I had a younger child, they would be my “assistant” in this category—helping me fold, making a stack of rags, sorting out the clothes into piles, and carrying individual items to bedrooms. Even a two-year-old can participate!

For food preparation, I was interested to observe that our seven-year-old accomplished more than our nine-year-old. This seems to have less to do with age and more to do with a willingness to make mistakes. Our seven-year-old happily made quesadillas in the toaster and shrugged if they burned or baked cookies and forgot the eggs. This was a very important insight! And one I would not have been able to make without this simple framework for our chores. With this knowledge, our seven-year-old was a handy sous chef, and she was also independent in the kitchen to prepare meals. I made sure she checked in with me for all stove and oven related activities, knowing she tended to pay less attention to detail! For our nine-year-old, I continued to prompt him to think for himself, to interpret recipes on his own, and emphasize a friendliness to error (“Looks like cookies baked with twice as much butter still taste pretty good!”). Our five-year-old tended to be more of a “sous chef” in the kitchen as I prepared the meals. And this worked for younger children and toddlers, too, who are extremely capable of many activities in the kitchen, including setting the table, chopping and peeling fruits and vegetables, and mixing ingredients.

The dishes are straightforward, although, again, I was interested to see how individual personalities reveal themselves! Our nine-year-old was very independent with dishes, and I am impressed at how he would persevere with very dirty pots (eggs in a cast iron skillet defeat even me!). Our seven-year-old was very competent practically speaking, but needed help understanding standards—what a clean pot actually looks like—and I frequently needed to remind her not to empty a dirty dishwasher! Our five-year-old was independent with this, also, but needed help with the dirtiest pots and putting dishes in the dishwasher efficiently. She also tended to become overwhelmed by a full sink. For children younger than this, I would assign table-clearing tasks (one dish at a time!), and put them at the sink with a safe stool. If the sink is filled with a little water and dish soap, they can scrub the dirtier dishes, which may need another scrub from a parent when they are done! All ages are capable of emptying the dishwasher, although the littlest ones may only put away the child-size dishes in the low cabinets.

How We've Been Doing

My suspicion was correct. The genius of this plan is in its simplicity. Our children respect the fairness of the division of labor. In fact, they still can’t decide which is the best and which is the worst of the jobs. It rotates often enough but not too often. And it gives me someone to rely on for almost every task I have to do regularly in our home. There is a lot that I can fully turn over to them with various degrees of expectations and difficulty based on their age and skill level.

When these daily jobs are met with resistance, I remind them that we need their help, and that their contribution matters for our family. I also employ phrases like “teamwork makes the dreamwork” and “there is no I in team” which makes our older two giggle, and invites lengthy explanations of what exactly that means with our youngest. When there is a great deal of reluctance, we talk about the fun things we’d like to do next, but can’t get to until the work in the home is finished—crafts, visiting a forest preserve, watching a new documentary series about wildlife, playing games by the fire, having a FaceTime chat with friends or family, and so on. Then we make sure we are disciplined about enforcing this rhythm to life—work first, play later.

Finally, and perhaps most importantly, we thank everyone for their work and celebrate everyone’s contributions, children and adults alike. This is the most genuine way of building our children’s self-esteem and confidence, as they see that the work they do matters, both in the practical maintenance of their home, and also their emotional relationships with the people around them.

Final Thoughts

The newfound emphasis on chores in our home was good for all of us. It relieved some of the pressure for my husband and me, and it is one of the most valuable contributions to our children’s development we can make in our own home. This emphasis feeds our children’s bodies and it also feeds their minds and hearts. Maria Montessori recognized this phenomenon in children, over a hundred years ago, when she observed, “Joy, feeling one's own value, being appreciated and loved by others, feeling useful and capable of production are all factors of enormous value for the human soul.” What better way to do this in our homes than to allow them to contribute and be appreciated for it? Our chore system is working for now, and I am grateful for this opportunity to have established something that can be a part of our household for years to come.

*Note: Five years later, we still have the same chore system but the jobs have changed. Now, the older two do their own laundry, and the youngest is in charge of putting her laundry in the washing machine, and putting it away when it is dried and folded. Then we divided up: Garbage/recycling, dogs, and dishes for the children to cycle through each week. After our oldest started high school and was gone for 12 hours a day, our younger two began trading between garbage/recycling and dogs as one job and dishes as the other during the week. And our high school freshman is in charge of all the jobs on the weekends when he is not at sports games or studying at school.

Montessori Graduates Shine in High School Talent Show

Mon, 19 May 2025 15:01:30 GMT

I attended the Lake Forest High School Talent Show for the first time in February (2025). I’d been interested in it for years—watching talented young people with the courage to perform before a crowd is one of my favorite things to do. But it wasn’t until this year, when a friend with a child in the talent show actually procured tickets for me that I finally got around to going. The show runs three nights in a row, and we attended the second night. I brought my own ten-year-old daughter who has a special interest in singing and performing with me.

As we settled into our seats and watched the show begin to unfold, I was struck by three things, in quick succession. First was the positive, welcoming community that made up Lake Forest High School (LFHS). There were cheerful parents working the concession stand and selling raffle tickets. There were enthusiastic teenagers, gathering in groups and excitedly finding their seats.

Second was the immense array of talent already apparent just a few acts in—The MC’s who entertained the audience with skits and banter between performances, the pit band who played a variety of songs during downtime, the entertaining short videos that interspersed the live performances, and, of course, the extraordinary talent of the participants themselves. We saw various bands, a pianist (“And hockey player!”, more than one person pointed out to me) whose fingers flew over the keys, two girls who tap danced across the stage to Hamilton, a young woman who belted out an opera song that almost took the roof off the school, and many other incredible feats of talent and courage.

Third, and most personal for me, were the Montessori alumni I saw that night. They were scattered throughout the crowd, supporting their peers. I saw the dark french braid of a sophomore who I’d known in the Young Children’s Community at Forest Bluff School. I noticed the wide smile of one of the most cheerful Primary students I’d ever known, and I overheard the happy laughter of a confident sophomore who’d graduated from eighth grade and was now surrounded by new friends.

But the Montessori alumni who struck me the most that night were the Forest Bluff graduates I saw on the stage, participating in the talent show itself. There were three young women—a sophomore assisting with the live production, a junior who performed as a drummer in two acts and the pit band, and a senior who performed in several acts and served as the stage director for the entire production. These students are all markedly different in their temperaments and talents, and were supporting the show in vastly different ways, but they were all integral to the performance. They were all contributing to the experience for hundreds of students, parents, and community members, sharing their work ethic, skills, and inborn strengths.

Two questions began to form as I watched them work together to create this two and a half hour feat—How did Montessori play a part in what these students were able to do tonight? And—How was Montessori able to serve these different young women in ways that allowed them to find their roles in the same shared experience?

Fortunately for me (and for you!)I know all three girls personally. I reached out to them individually and asked them if (in exchange for a coffee or tea of their choice) they’d be willing to sit down with me to tell me more about what they did for the show, what the experience was like for them, and what role Montessori had played in preparing them for this work. They all responded quickly and cheerfully—happy to discuss their experiences with the LFHS talent show and their Montessori education.

The Sophomore: Supporting the Live Production Through the New Media Class

The sophomore and I sit down first at her house on a chilly, sunny day. I bring her a pink drink from Starbucks and we chat at her dining room table—her younger sister and dog meandering around us while her brother sits in the other room doing his homework. I start by asking her what exactly she did for the performance, as “live production” is something I only vaguely have a sense of.

“I’m in a class called New Media,” she tells me. “There’s an optional project to do the live production for the talent show. That means we provide the filming for the large screens that are on either side of the stage. I helped with a camera on the stage that was getting close ups. It makes the performance more interesting for the audience because they can see the faces of the performers up close. It shows the emotions of the people onstage.”

I immediately understand the benefit of adding this aspect to the talent show. My daughter and I had been beneficiaries of it—our eyes glancing between the performer on the stage and then to the screens on either side as we watched the hands of musicians, and saw the expressions on the performers faces.

This young woman took the New Media class last year, as a freshman, but she didn’t do the live production. This year she was excited to participate, and enjoyed helping with the camera.

“There were five cameras,” she says. “And two people on each camera. The more experienced student is in charge of the camera, and the less experienced one is the helper. Next year I’ll be in charge of the camera.”

I ask her about the work they did to prepare for the show.

She shares, “There was a week of prep. We ran through it a bunch of times. Our teacher sets it up to be mostly student run, because there are seniors who have been in the class for four years and have strong leadership. So I learned mostly from the older kids.”

It impresses me to think that the students at LFHS were given so much responsibility for enhancing a live performance in this way. The school trusted the class, the teacher taught and then trusted the students. It is also impressive that the New Media students themselves had the confidence to do this work under pressure and in front of an audience. I ask the sophomore where she thinks she found the confidence, as a young 15-year-old, to move around on stage, interact with the performers, and be a part of producing a show for a full audience three nights in a row.

“In the upper elementary at Forest Bluff [ages 9-12] they gave us a lot of opportunities. During Covid, the third years in the upper elementary wrote a whole play for all the students in the elementaries [about 60 students] to perform. We wrote the script, we wrote the songs, we performed in it, and we filmed it.”

I remember this accomplishment, as well—how incredible the performance was, and how good the filming actually was, even without considering the fact that much of the work was done by children. Even just four years later, she reflects on it and recognizes how unusual that experience was: “When I look back, I can’t believe how much we did when we were 11.”

This is a remarkable amount of responsibility for elementary students—a true testament to what children are capable of when they are prepared and supported properly. It also gives rise to incredible confidence when they are able to have a successful experience with this much responsibility.

I ask her what else she remembers from her Montessori days, and she recalls the plays her class put on in the Secondary Level—one each spring which they perform first for the elementary students in the afternoon, and then for all their parents, siblings, and other family members in the evening.

“The Secondary Level plays were really big projects, and we had a lot of room to do whatever we wanted. We chose the play, we ran auditions, we did a lot of scheduling and logistics. Eighth graders are making most of the choices, and seventh graders are learning so they can execute when they are older.”

It is clear from both of her examples that the responsibility, freedom, and sense of ownership were all formative in her development as someone who was able to do what I saw her doing at the talent show in February. The freedom she had was not in name only—she and her peers had leeway to create shows and perform them for live audiences, experiencing feedback, consequences, and appreciation that they had earned through their own actions.

With a better understanding of how her Montessori experience supported her abilities to do the specific work of the talent show, I am now wondering how it supported her personally. I ask her what she thinks was unique to her education that allowed her to be confident and to take risks.

“I had a lot more confidence than a lot of people who were doing this for the first time. I believed in myself. I think this is because I learned how to fail in Montessori. I learned how to take it well and it didn’t scare me. People make mistakes all the time, but in Montessori, we had regular support from adults showing us how to recover from those mistakes,” she tells me.

I tell her I can see how this would have helped her feel more okay with taking a risk and trying something new. She agrees. Then I ask her how her Montessori education helped her to be a good team member—an essential element of putting on the talent show.

Her answer comes immediately: “I think I’m a good team member because I listen to other people. I try to collaborate rather than push my own ideas. I always want to combine perspectives. Forest Bluff helped because it was such a small school. You got to know the people, and no one had the same perspective. You learned that everyone had a different perspective, and no one thought the same, and that this was a good thing. At a larger school, you can just find people who have the same interests and opinions as you. When it’s smaller, you are forced to collaborate and then you get to learn more.”

This is a great deal of wisdom for a young woman just a year and a half out of middle school, and I am suitably impressed. I have known this sophomore since she was an infant. I have watched her grow from a quiet child into a self-assured 15-year-old with the poise to help run a live production for a large event, and I tell her how proud I am of what I was able to witness and what she accomplished. She gives me a smile and takes her pink drink, as I close up my computer and reflect on the lovely woman she is becoming.

The Junior: Drummer for The Pit Band and Her Own Band; Tech Crew

The junior and I meet at a busy coffee shop on a chilly, cloudy day. She arrives a few minutes early on her bike. She warms her hands around the chai latte I ordered her, and begins explaining what a “pit band” is to me—a term, I admit, I have never heard of before (I have a lot to learn about live productions, it seems).

“The pit band is made up mostly of people who are in the marching band. We play music to open the show and then between the acts,” she shares. “We practice a few times, and some people write original music for us to play and also transcribe songs for their instruments.”

She adds, “I was in the pit band last year, too. This year there were people from every grade which was awesome. It means that there will be leaders in the future as the freshman get older.”

What I had observed that night was this young woman and her bandmates working seamlessly on stage for the entire two and a half hour performance. They sat behind the acts on an elevated platform, and she played the drums skillfully and expressively for every single song. It seemed as though their job was to provide entertainment and music for all prolonged pauses, and I lost count of the number of songs they played throughout the night.

Her explanation is simple, and doesn’t call attention to the fact that this soft-spoken young woman sat in the very middle of the LFHS talent show every night for three nights. I have also known her since she was a baby, and I was, in a word, amazed by her confidence and competence in such a central position of the performance.

We also talk about her own band, which formed a year ago. They were the final act of the evening, and when I ask her what her favorite part of the event was, she shares this: “My favorite part was getting to close the performance. It was really special and I looked forward to it each day.” This band has performed in about four public venues before this one and she tells me that they practice about five times before each one. It is a serious endeavor for a high school student, and a responsibility that she manages with grace and joy.

It is at this point that I learn that she also was in the tech crew. I ask her what that involved. She tells me that this is the third year that she’s been in the tech crew, and then I ask what this year’s duties entailed. She says they build the stage and design the lights and sound for the show. Also: “I went to school every Saturday in the weeks leading up to the show from 10-5. Then we stay after school every day until 6pm.” My eyebrows shoot up to my hairline at this schedule, and I ask what she was doing for all that time, as I know she also is a diligent student. “We watch the rehearsals for the different acts and we give feedback. We give them ideas for how to elevate their stage presence, how to work together more as a band, what kind of lighting they might want.”

This kind of feedback would require a lot of skill and experience, as well as emotional intelligence. Now, I ask her how her Montessori experience served her, and she begins listing traits: “Montessori gave me flexibility. The drama performances taught me how to act backstage. The group work prepared me for doing your own part within a group.”

I pause to ask her to elaborate on flexibility. Why did it matter for her work on the talent show and how did Montessori help with her flexibility?

“You have to be flexible because the schedule changes a lot. We are coordinating a lot of different schedules to set up rehearsals. You also have to be flexible with other people’s ideas and be willing to revise how things were done in the past—rather than be set with how you originally thought it would work.”

In seeing the vast number of people who performed during the show and the countless others who contributed backstage and to the live production, I have somewhat of an understanding of how many different ideas the students were trying to work with.

She goes on: “Montessori helped with my flexibility because, throughout the day, you have to be flexible. You’ll be doing your own work, but you have to pause to have a lesson from the teacher. You also have to be flexible in your work with other people. If you’re making a chart [for a research project] with other people, you all have to agree on how to lay it out. You have to be flexible with other people’s ideas from a young age.”

Over the course of our conversation, she has mentioned several times that the show is student led, as well as the mixed ages of the participants. I ask her how Montessori affected her experience with both of these aspects of the event.

She reiterates: “The talent show is student led. We have to do a lot of planning ourselves. We write the music. We work in a group without instruction.” She goes on to connect this to what she remembers from Montessori: “It was a lot like the Secondary Level trips. There is some supervision, but the students are making all the decisions.”

At Forest Bluff School, the 7th and 8th graders go on three 8-14 day trips per academic year. The students are divided into committees—for example, gear, food, safety, and transportation. Within each of those committees, the students do research and prepare the class for the excursions while also holding each other accountable for finishing their jobs. As this young woman understood, the teachers supervise, but the students make most of the decisions.

Now, I ask her about the multi-age component of the event, and what it was like for her. “I care a lot about being welcoming to younger students. In Montessori, I remember that moving up a level was scary. But the older students were always very welcoming. It gave me a clear role model for how to be an older student. You learn how to work with different kids because you aren’t limited to your own grade.”

It is heartwarming to hear about how much she cares about this event and the people of different ages who come together to put it on. It is also inspiring to see her level of comfort with playing on stage for so many people. I take a moment to tell her how much I enjoyed it, and how much I loved watching her perform and seeing her Montessori peers participating too.

She smiles, “It’s so fun to work with other Montessori kids during the talent show. They know how to act around a stage. They know how to work in a group. I can always tell that they were Montessori students.”

Our conversation comes to an end, and we walk into the cold air. She is heading to badminton tryouts at school after we talk, and I can see the racket sticking out of the back of her bike. A young woman of many talents, indeed.

The Senior: Stage Director and Performer

The senior and I meet on a bright, warm day. We sit in the sun drenched corner of a coffee shop and enjoy our chai teas. She, too, arrived early, and is heading to an interview for a summer internship after our conversation. I begin our meeting by asking her to tell me more about her role as Stage Director. She and a peer welcomed the audience at the beginning of the show, and I spotted her several times throughout the evening in various acts, including a performance of “Closer to Fine,” but I did not know exactly what her duties entailed.

“I was the Stage Director. The teacher who is in charge of the event approached me and asked if I would be the director. I helped him figure out roles for different people—social media, graphic design, lighting, filming. My job was to oversee that each team was doing their job, and to be at each rehearsal and give feedback on costumes, lighting, and the acts themselves.”

I ask her how long she was involved in the event before taking such an enormous leadership responsibility.

She shares, “I’ve been involved all four years. My sister told me to get involved as a freshman, and I did tech crew and was a part of an acapella group that year. Then I was in a band for sophomore and junior year and was in a couple of acts each time.”

Even with those years of experience, this seems like a huge leap to make, and I ask her what prepared her to be responsible for a huge undertaking. She refers to the same experience as the junior that I spoke to: “We are given a blank slate with every talent show. We have to create something from start to finish. The committees in the Secondary Level helped me a lot with that—having something that you are responsible for. And not only are you responsible for carrying it out, but you are also responsible for deciding what you have to do—setting the steps that you have to take. That really prepared me for the responsibility of something high caliber being in your hands.”

She makes an important distinction here that I take a moment to absorb. There is the responsibility of doing the work, and there is also the responsibility of deciding what work will need to be done in the first place. This sounds daunting. I ask her what it was like to be given that “blank slate.” What gave her the confidence—and motivation—to do the work necessary to put on the show?

She responds, “In general, Montessori gives kids a certain agency. Everyone feels very responsible for themselves and also responsible for the people around them. There are unlimited leadership opportunities in Upper Elementary and beyond. There are so many opportunities at such a young age for you to feel that you have power. It’s not fake power. You’re actually working towards something. You’re cleaning the classroom for yourself at the end of the day. The committees in Secondary Level—the students have certain jobs they’ve created for themselves. You’re more likely to meet goals that you’ve set for yourself or that your peers have set rather than teachers.”

I can attest in my experience with children that they are more interested and motivated to do work that they have decided needs to be done rather than accepting directives. She had a more complicated role than I initially understood when I saw her on the stage, and it is clear that she managed it beautifully. My next question asks her what about Montessori allowed her to be a good team member for the large group of students involved in the talent show while she also held all of this responsibility.

She tells me, “Secondary Level helped me to be a good team member, especially with the trips. If you’re going to the woods for two weeks to build an amphitheater or canoe 30 miles a day, you become a real team. You do so much planning and you do actual work on the committees. And then when you’re on the trip you fall into a new set of groups based on people’s strengths, so there is flexibility too. For example, the people who wake up early might start to get the food ready. This was like the talent show. We have the committees we set up in the beginning. But then we step into all sorts of roles, when we see what the needs are.”

Her reflection reveals a combination of vision and flexibility—both necessary features of a good team member and a good leader. It is difficult for adults to manage this balance, let alone teenagers!

During our conversation, she has made casual mentions of giving performers feedback or of asking volunteers to step into other roles. I pause to formulate my question. How is she able to guide and give feedback based on what she sees in a way that honors where they are but that leads them towards where they need to be?

I expect her to need to think about an answer, but she doesn’t hesitate: “I was an assistant in a Primary classroom at Forest Bluff last summer. So often, you see a child so close to the goal they want to meet. And it would be so easy to just go over there and say, ‘This is Equatorial Guinea and it goes right here [in the puzzle map].’ But, instead, you sit with them and let them trace around it [with their finger] until they can get to it themselves. You welcome the struggle. Montessori welcomes the struggle.”

She goes on, “You don’t learn from being told. [When I was in the classroom as an assistant teacher] I saw how effective it is to have a teaching conversation where you are both trying to figure out the answer together. One person having the answer and just giving it to the other person—that’s not learning. For the acts in the talent show, it’s more fun if we try to find something together. Obviously, you have to sacrifice some ideas that way. But collaboration is better.”

Her answer momentarily startles me with its perception and wisdom. I am taken aback by this young woman’s understanding of herself and her experience, and how it fits into the greater social world and the gifts she will bring to it—gifts she already is bringing to it.

We continue our discussion about her plans for next year and she walks me through the application process for a major in musical theater. It is complicated and rigorous enough that, I confess, I do not fully retain all the information. Suffice it to say, there is a lot of organization, time, energy, and willingness to be brave and vulnerable. She seems confident that something will work out, and after spending 45 minutes with this incredible young woman, I can safely say—I am too.

Final Thoughts

As I read over my interview notes, it strikes me that each young woman has shared many similar themes—their ability to work in a group, their ability to collaborate, their flexibility, their responsibility, their confidence. And I am impressed again, by the way that these common gifts served them for such different roles in the talent show. I am also struck by their common traits, even within their varying personalities—their confidence, their poise, their ability to reflect on their experiences, their kindness in giving me their precious time, and their conscientiousness in our meetings.

I was a Montessori student myself, and then a Montessori teacher, and now a Montessori parent (for almost 15 years!), so I have witnessed this unfolding for children for decades and seen the way that this kind of education allows each individual person to become the fullest version of who they are. It does not “make” children who present the same way or have the same specific skills. But it gives each child tools for making use of their talents and for pursuing their interests and passions in ways that are useful and fulfilling.

Even as none of this should surprise me on paper, I am still always taken aback when I see the promise of Montessori fulfilled in spectacular young graduates. And I am grateful, once again, for a place that provides children the opportunity to become comfortable with who they are, and confident in what they can do.

Montessori Adolescent Program FAQs

Wed, 23 Apr 2025 16:09:18 GMT

At Forest Bluff School, the Secondary Level is a two-year program for adolescents, in which they continue their self-formation through more rigorous academic study as well experiential learning that includes service and wilderness trips. The Secondary Level has all the hallmarks of a Montessori adolescent program, with a focus on independence, responsibility, self-directed learning, community and collaboration, and practical life skills.

Social and Emotional Development

How can I expect my Secondary Level child to change as they enter adolescence?

Students enter a new developmental plane when they become adolescents. Dr. Maria

Montessori described adolescence as “the time when the child enters the state of

adulthood and becomes a member of society” ( From Childhood to Adolescence ). At such

a transitory time between childhood and adulthood, they are also quite vulnerable and

deeply emotional. They are working to discover who they are in relation to their peers, to

their parents, and to the other adults in their lives. Therefore, they might try on different

hats and worry more astutely about how they are perceived by others. David Elkind, a

child psychologist and professor emeritus at Tufts University, describes this

hyperawareness as the “imaginary audience.” Adolescents feel that their peers are

constantly watching and judging them, as if they are on stage all day every day.

At this stage, they have an entirely new set of needs and characteristics. They need to

feel that their work is valued and relevant, that their contributions to the community are

seen and appreciated, and that they can be trusted with more responsibility from adults.

Our model is one of side-by-side work, such that we facilitate large-scale, adult-level

projects (e.g., the trips, Holiday Boutique, etc.) so that they understand what it means to

function within an interdependent society. All of this work allows them to build a

foundation of inner confidence and trust in themselves in the world that will serve them

for the rest of their lives.

Why is the class so small compared to conventional school? Do adolescents need more social

exposure at this age?

Our program is intentionally small so that students hone their ability to successfully

navigate social situations. In a larger community, a student might have the opportunity to

ignore a problematic social situation and never learn from it, whereas in our program,

they must work to reestablish trust and camaraderie in real time. This is especially true

because the adult-level work we do in the program necessitates trust and collaboration

between all members, adults included. By utilizing conflict resolution and communication

strategies, students practice the quintessential skills of working alongside people who

operate differently from you.

Why is this program so different from conventional middle school?

The Secondary Level prepares students not only for high school but for life. In addition to

learning the academic skills required by high schools, the students have myriad

opportunities to develop their “soft skills,” concentration, and executive functioning.

Some, but not all, of the soft skills they develop, which are difficult to develop consistently

in other environments, include goal-setting, organizational skills, decision-making,

communication, teamwork, resilience, patience, problem-solving, financial management,

critical thinking, adaptability, stress management, time management, leadership,

Academics

What math content is covered in the curriculum?

Mathematical studies at the Secondary Level prepare students not only for high school

but also for mathematical competence in everyday life as engaged members of society.

Students explore a wide range of mathematical concepts through independent and group

study, didactic lessons, and practical integration with economic production and exchange.

In Math Seminar, students present on topics in Geometry, Algebra, Statistics, and Logic.

Additionally, they work through a textbook at a pace determined by their individual

learning goals. For most students, high school-level Algebra I forms the core of their

mathematics study at the Secondary Level, though they also have the opportunity to

explore high school Geometry, Trigonometry, Statistics, or Pre-Algebra based on their

individual needs, pace, and learning profile.

How do students learn about literature at this age?

We build upon their love of reading by analyzing literature and seeking deeper meaning

from texts. For example, students participate in regular book discussions, during which

they identify and discuss elements of literature, such as symbolism, themes, tone, point

of view, rhetorical devices, etc. Example texts include A Tale of Two Cities , The Odyssey ,

The Pearl , All Quiet on the Western Front, The Alchemist , and selections from Shakespeare.

We also read aloud to students for the last half-hour of the school day.

What writing do students do?

Writing is a daily requirement for our students. They write structured periodical responses

to an article of their choosing, personal reflections, essays/analytical responses in

conjunction with book discussion books, and independent study projects (ISP), which are

long-term, formal research papers, to name a few examples.

When topics such as history, civics, art, and literature are taught, how do students learn to

evaluate point of view and nuance?

Students learn to analyze historical events through multiple perspectives and develop their understanding based on their reading of direct, primary sources. Our formal seminar is an essential tool in allowing the cohort of students to develop their own unique perspective on historical artifacts and documents. During Formal Seminar, readings from multiple and often opposing perspectives are presented. The students will read various primary sources and then come together for a student-driven discussion analyzing the text and developing their own conclusions.

How are periodicals chosen and handled for class reading?

We subscribe to a range of periodicals to expose students to a wide variety of

perspectives, as well as keep them abreast of current events. Students regularly analyze

the effectiveness (and potential bias) of an author’s presentation of their ideas in a

structured, thesis-driven periodical response. These responses include an introduction,

summary paragraph, analysis paragraph, and conclusion. The periodical responses

function as miniature, formal essays.

What exactly are ISPs and how do they function in the classroom?

The Independent Study Projects (ISPs) constitute a series of three formal papers that

students write during their two years in the Secondary Level. These thesis-driven

research papers require the students to write a proposal for their chosen area of study,

do extensive research via academic databases, local libraries, as well as reputable online

sources, and then develop an evidence-supported thesis statement. From there, students

generate notecards to track the information from their sources, create a formal outline,

make an MLA Works Cited page, handwrite a rough draft with in-text citations, edit and

type a final draft, bind the essay into a book with original cover art, and finally present the

topic to their peers using a visual element and a twenty-minute presentation.

Do the students have homework?

In the Secondary Level, work at home includes academic study, reading, household

chores, and self-enrichment. The standard for homework is two hours of concentrated

work each night. We recommend at least one hour of reading, with the other hour

devoted to personal enrichment, household contributions, or school work, depending on

the needs of the student. Personal enrichment can include developing a skill, such as

playing an instrument, or studying a topic of personal interest. The overall goal is to

create a routine at home focused on bolstering capacity for concentration, while also

developing a skill or ability. The use of high stimulation media or technology has proven

to have dramatically negative effects on students’ ability to concentrate and perform well

across all areas of their life. It is for these reasons that we strongly discourage all

engagement in the consumption of short-form, passive media during those two hours.

Independence and Accountability

What happens if a student misses a deadline? How is accountability handled?

We design the classroom such that there are natural consequences for missing

deadlines. For example, we often assign research projects that culminate in a

presentation to the class. If a student is unprepared for that presentation, it is quite

obvious to everyone in the room. Additionally, we communicate with students directly if

we notice a missed deadline and work with them to schedule a new deadline. In some

cases, we might modify their choices of work until that missed assignment is done.

We understand that certain times of year can be busy for students, and unusual

circumstances can arise, so we encourage students to ask for an extension if needed.

Self-advocacy and communication are essential skills in any work environment.

Do students use journals or planners?

In the Secondary Level, students plan their day using a weekly / monthly planner. This is

different from the Upper Elementary classroom, in which students record what they did at

the end of the day in a journal. Instead, Secondary Level students start their morning by

setting goals for themselves and tracking deadlines in their planners. Planning how they

will use their time helps develop strong executive functioning and prepares them for

managing their work endeavors through high school and into their adult life.

Journals, on the other hand, are used for periodical responses, creative writing, personal

reflections, note-taking, etc.

What are the checkpoints for students when they are doing independent work to make sure they

are getting work done?

We observe students closely to see how they are spending their time and what work they

might be avoiding. We check in with students regularly and schedule longer meetings

with them to discuss their goals and work habits.

Do the students really do two hours of homework every single night?

Two hours is the standard we set for work at home. Students will need varying lengths of

time to form this habit. We know that their high school experiences will require at least

two hours, and likely more, for homework, alongside extracurricular activities. To best

prepare them for this reality, we work to develop the habit of quiet, concentrated work at

home. As parents, you will need to help your students form that habit by enforcing

boundaries and emphasizing it as an important value in your home.

What is the accountability for getting homework done if a student resists the two hour work

period at home?

Collaboration between teachers and parents is critical if this situation arises. Adolescents

are apt to push back against boundaries. We view the parents’ job at home to enforce the

habit of a quiet, concentrated work period, rather than to manage what they work on. Still,

if a student is struggling to build the habit, please reach out to us for support and we can

help identify strategies and logical consequences. For example, perhaps they cannot go

to a friend’s house until they participate in their work period for a set period of time.

Parents should feel comfortable holding strong boundaries in this area, as we know they

will need a developed work habit going into high school and beyond.

Preparation for High School

Are there tests and quizzes?

Tests and quizzes are one form of assessment that we use in monitoring student

progress. In addition to being an assessment tool, the students are introduced to tests

and quizzes so they can become accustomed to the process and be better prepared

when they encounter them in the future. We help students develop study strategies that

work for their individual needs. Tests and assessments function as mirrors to learn how

to better study next time, not as definitions of a student’s value.

Do students learn how to take tests?

Yes. We introduce a variety of study strategies and help students determine the

strategies that work best for their learning style. Additionally, students get ample

repetition and practice through their work in the classroom, so the tests are celebrations

of what they already know, as opposed to opportunities to memorize or cram the

information into their short-term memory.

How does this program prepare students for high school?

The work of Secondary Level prepares students for high school both academically,

socially, and through the refinement of executive functions. Academically, the students

are challenged with high school level mathematics, literature analysis, key skills and

regular presentations of their knowledge. Socially, the students are presented with myriad

opportunities to refine their “soft skills” and social-emotional development. Executively,

students manage their time, build and manage profitable businesses, set learning goals,

and work closely with us to bolster their capacity to accomplish their goals.

What does the transition to high school look like for individual students?

Students that graduate from the Secondary Level program are prepared to transition

strongly into any high school they choose to attend. Our alumni and their new teachers

have reported excellent transitions into high school and beyond. Many students have told

us the hardest part of the transition is figuring out how to use the combination lock for

their new high school locker.

What is the timeline of high school related activity?

This can vary depending on the school, but we recommend thinking about your student’s

choices for high school in seventh grade and communicating those ideas to us as soon

as you know. We recommend working in partnership with your student to find the best fit

and limiting their choices to three schools to avoid overwhelming the student.

Certain high schools require standardized tests, such as the SSAT or HSPT. If any kind

of standardized test coach is of interest to your family, beginning those sessions in the

summer or early fall of their eighth-grade year is recommended. Standardized tests are

generally administered in October, November, and December of their eighth-grade year.

Depending on the school, application deadlines fall in December, January, or February of

that same academic year. Decisions for high schools typically arrive in March.

Are all students prepared to enter public high school, or do teachers sometimes recommend

smaller private schools for certain students?

Due to the rigor and scope of the Secondary Level, those that complete the program are

well prepared to enter not only the local public high schools, but also many other

excellent private school options. We are happy to make recommendations for each student to guide them towards a high school that will best suit their needs if your family is exploring options beyond our well- regarded local public schools.

What is the process for making placement decisions, particularly for a child who may have opted

out of taking a high school placement exam, such as the PreACT 8?

The PreACT 8 is the placement exam offered by Lake Forest High School (LFHS) in the

fall of a student’s eighth grade year. While our students tend to do very well on this

standardized exam, it is not required by LFHS. Instead, we work closely with the LFHS

admissions team to recommend placement for students choosing to enroll there. Our

recommendations are the largest determinant of where they are placed. These

conversations typically happen in the spring of their eighth grade year.

Experiential Learning Trips

Why are the trips so important?

Montessori education can be framed as a succession of increasingly robust stages of

independence that help the children actualize skills and aspects of their personality. In

the Secondary Level, these trips represent the ultimate stage of independence that they

can achieve while in a pre-high school learning environment by providing them with

difficult, adult-level work.

Only when students are away from the family and overcoming challenges with their peer

community can they truly experience the individual valorization (i.e., seeing their own

innate value positively affecting the community) that comes with completing a trip

successfully. This gives individual students the experience of working with peers to meet

the needs of the group and, in turn, the group meeting the needs of the individual, all

outside the protective shelter of the family environment. They gain a level of confidence

in themselves that will be ingrained in their personality for the rest of their lives.

The trips are an essential component of the program because they give students

extensive opportunities to build resilience and confidence, as well as develop their

executive functions and planning skills. Additionally, through these trips, students

overcome challenging circumstances by working together. This collaboration creates

deep bonds of trust and respect between members of the community that is leveraged for

positive community collaboration throughout their work year-round.

What are the dates and locations of next year’s trips? When do we receive that information?

Students and parents receive our Secondary Level calendar in their summer packet,

which includes all of the trip dates. Once the fall trip dates are scheduled, we will

disseminate that information to parents the preceding spring. The locations and details

about each trip are discussed with parents at Secondary Level Parent Evenings

throughout the school year.

When will returning and incoming parents receive information about important trip details, such

as location and activities for each trip, packing lists, and estimated cost of packing list

procurement?

As budding adults, the Secondary Level students are entrusted with much of this

information as the trip approaches (while the timing of this varies by the trip and other

logistics, we typically begin preparations about four weeks before we leave). They are

then responsible for communicating those details to their parents and showing them the

packing list as an added level of responsibility. We also discuss those details with parents

at the Secondary Level Parent Evenings, which fall about one or two weeks before the

trip. We are always available to answer questions by phone or in-person.

Home Life and After School

Should my child be doing organized sports and physical activities at this age, and, if so, how do

you recommend fitting it in with school, homework, and socializing?

Regular exercise is an important part of adolescent development and so all students are

encouraged to prioritize their physical well-being every day. Team sports can be one way

this is achieved, but we encourage parents to be discerning about the team culture in

which the students participate.

Team dynamics that have a dependency on social media for communication, toxic

competitiveness, or culture of teasing should be avoided. These types of team cultures

will present obstacles to your student’s social-emotional development, negatively affect

their academics and concentration in school, and the work of others in the classroom.

Overscheduling can also present obstacles for students so be sure that whichever

extracurricular activities are participated in, the student has enough time to complete their

school-related responsibilities while staying well-rested and avoiding burn-out.

How are contributions to the home stressed and expanded upon in the Secondary Level?

As a student ages, they should be given additional responsibilities at home. The specific

responsibilities may look different for every family, but it is important that parents expect

their students to contribute in meaningful ways at home. Students who engage actively in

the home tend to demonstrate better time management and executive function skills.

Additionally, now that your student is participating in trip planning, making lunches for the

class, etc., they are more than prepared to engage in that kind of work at home. For

example, perhaps they plan a trip for your family or cook dinner twice a week. This kind

of parallel work in the home and in the classroom is highly beneficial.

The Social Life of the Elementary Student: Part II

Wed, 05 Mar 2025 18:10:05 GMT

Adapted from a presentation by Upper Elementary teacher Regina Sokolowski
See Part I for a discussion of the social goals and unique abilities and characteristics of the elementary child.

How Adults Support Social Development

So what can we do as adults? We need to recognize that the elementary child's essential work and focus is navigating their social world—it is so new and exciting! It will be what they will talk about and process the most at home. Their academic work is now routine to them. Also, these social situations occur within their academic work time because their academic work is collaborative work.

When we respond to emotional outbursts or frustrations, we need to maintain a level of calm, and we need to exude confidence in their abilities to figure things out—because they can! When we hear stories from the children about their peers or about struggles they have, remember that they are still refining those skills. They are testing things out, experimenting, and looking to us for guidance.

Because of their incredible intellectual capabilities, it is easy to assume that it translates to their emotional and social capabilities. We sometimes expect them to behave as an adult would in those social situations. They are children. They are not adults. I have heard many parents in the larger Montessori community say things like, “We treat our children like adults in this house.” While I understand how honoring their independence and capability can lead to this mindset, it is critical that we remind ourselves that they are still children. They need grace, patience, and leadership as they navigate this whole new realm.

When we respond to their challenges there are two extremes that we want to avoid:

● Overindulging actually makes them feel like a situation is much more alarming than it really is. By being overly involved we actually communicate to them “You are not able to figure this out on your own.

● On the other hand, we don’t want to be dismissive because then they feel like we don’t care and that they are not important.

Conversations at Home

When your child shares an event that happened at school with you, it is helpful to first respond warmly but neutrally: “Interesting” or “Wow” or even “Oh?” It can be tempting to insert our own adult judgments and experiences on the situation, but it usually isn’t necessary or even useful for their own development. Children are often simply looking to be heard, and when we react with bigger emotions than they have, we undermine their experience.

Keep in mind that your child is—quite naturally—only sharing their side of the story! This is not a decision to deliberately obscure the truth. They are still cultivating their ability to deeply understand other people’s sides of the story. They may tell you that a friend said something unkind and, unintentionally, leave out the fact that they took the friend’s pencil without asking right before. When parents allow ourselves to attach too firmly to our child’s narrative, we take away their ability to integrate other people’s points of view.

When a child comes to me, I frequently ask: “Are you telling me to inform me, because you need my advice, or because you need me to get involved?” Most of the time, it’s just to inform me. Escalating the conversation with my own emotions, advice, or involvement will only reduce their hard-earned sense of autonomy. It is our role as adults to continue to bolster their confidence that they are capable of learning about social interactions. We never should abandon them, but we can be sure to remove ourselves from the center of their emotional and social experiences.

There will be times when simply telling you is all that they need to do. If it seems as though the conversation needs to continue, remember that what you say and do matters even though they might pretend like they don’t care, or it may seem like they are not even listening! Instead of beginning by directly telling them what to do, or telling them what you are going to do, try sharing how you had similar struggles at their age and how you overcame them (you can also share a story about a family member or someone you know went through this). This story-telling helps your child see you as human and helps them realize that someone they admire endured—and survived—the same challenges they are experiencing.

Once your child has finished sharing with you, remember how high their emotional resilience is at this age. Do not “interview for pain” afterwards! If they have moved on, let them move on. It is unlikely that they will need a follow-up conversation initiated by you. If you continue to show them with your words and actions that you are there for them when they need you, and that they can come to you without fear of judgment or escalation, then they will tell you if the problem persists.

How is Social Development Supported in the Montessori Elementary Classroom

Sometimes people ask, “Do you have an empathy curriculum?”

There is no separate specific empathy curriculum because supporting social-emotional development is interwoven into how we do everything in this classroom: We honor and convey respect to the child in every interaction.

By design, this environment is a social laboratory—they build their tool kit through organic interaction. We expect and desire social challenges and allow the students to work through social conflicts with empathy and kindness. We want them to work through these social experiences here, where the stakes are low, in order to learn the skills for when the stakes are high.

I am constantly in awe of elementary children’s ability to be direct yet compassionate. If there is an issue, they typically address it head on, rather than stewing or talking behind peoples’ backs.

Occasionally, we will carve out 5–10 minutes for a mediated conversation between children, but by simply allowing them the space and providing the coaching to handle their problems directly, most issues get resolved very quickly. Sometimes, because they already have the framework, they even conduct these mediated conversations among themselves.

What is the format of this?

● Each side explains their perspective without interruption

● Then they repeat back what they heard (sometimes with the teacher’s coaching)

● Each side shares what they need moving forward

● The other party expresses if they can agree to that, or if the request needs to be modified

Most importantly, we keep guiding the children back to their work! At this age it is their academic work that provides them with experience of collaboration, learning about others’ strengths and gifts, practice expressing themselves and their needs, and the process of teaching others.

When to Contact Your Child's Teacher

While many social conflicts and complaints are a normal part of development, there are times when it is important to connect with your child’s teacher for additional support and insight. One such example may be if you find your child is coming home with the same complaint over and over (sharing that another child has been mean to them or teasing them, for instance). In this case, there may be a true underlying issue that the teacher needs to address in the classroom, or perhaps your child may need help understanding their interpretation of the situation. Sometimes students don’t have the language or emotional nuance to understand the difference between “mean” and “direct.” Or perhaps they do not have a perspective on their role in the situation. In these kinds of conflicts, a conversation with a teacher can serve to bring awareness to what is happening and how children are interpreting the events in the classroom. The teacher can also give you language to help your child process the experience at home so that it results in social growth.

It is also important to contact the teacher if your child is coming home talking about issues of race, sex, religion, or other issues of a sensitive and personal nature. This is an age when children begin to grow in their awareness of these topics, and they may come up between students in the classroom. When the teacher knows that these conversations are happening at school, they are able to maintain respectful boundaries and discussion, protecting children who are uncomfortable and redirecting children who may need guidance. Similarly, if the teacher hears that these conversations are happening at school, they will contact the parents to make sure that they are a part of the discussion with their child. These topics are highly individualized for every family, and your child’s teacher will respect your family’s values.

Finally, it is also helpful for your child’s teacher to be aware of significant life changes at home. This may be an extended out-of-town trip for one parent, a trip to the emergency room, a move, or the death of a family member or pet. Children are sensitive by their very nature, and these kinds of events will affect their social behavior and experiences. When the teacher is aware of changes at home, they are better able to support and understand behavior at school.

Final Thoughts

Your children are capable, confident, and resilient. They are in a sacred stage of childhood where they are gathering skills for the relationships and social experiences they will have for the rest of their lives. It is important to remember that having social challenges is a natural part of this age. In fact, it is essential for their development! They need to interact, experiment, and get natural feedback from their peers. It is tempting to intervene, but this is a safe and loving environment for them to explore and learn.

They need to learn that when they steal someone’s pencil that person might say something unkind. They need to learn that if they pester a friend that friend may choose not to work with them. They need to learn how to interact with peers who are very direct with language, who are competitive, and who don’t always do their share of the clean-up. They need to learn this now in a place where there are observant adults who will support their emotional development as well as their independence.

Our world is not getting any simpler. With social media, the internet, and ease of international travel, relationships are increasing exponentially. They are increasing in number as well as exposure. We interact with friends in person, on the phone, over text, over email, and over various forms of social media. Given the realities of our new adult world, it is more important than ever that our children develop sensitivity and nuance in their social interactions. They need to know how to work with a myriad of different people, and they need to understand changes in emotional temperature and shifts in perspectives for the people around them.

The Montessori approach lays a deep foundation for a positive and productive social life. It provides an organic, concrete framework for exploration and growth. It helps children come to know themselves and their peers with wisdom far beyond their years. These children, who will someday be adults, are the people we need to tend to our future and to the beautiful, complicated nature of humanity.

The Social Life of the Elementary Student: Part I

Fri, 14 Feb 2025 19:55:09 GMT

Adapted from a presentation by Upper Elementary teacher Regina Sokolowski

It is important to take the time to reflect upon our children—their immense capabilities, their confidence and their resilience, and how we can best support them.

Who is the Elementary Child?

In Montessori, we refer to the elementary years as the “Second Plane” of development. Montessori actually used the term “introvert” to refer to the first six years of life and “extrovert” to refer to the ages of 6–12 years. By introvert, she meant that the child was focusing on individual construction, and by extrovert she meant they were focusing on their social construction—turning outward to the wider society.

Children begin their social construction in the 6–9 (Lower Elementary) class. In the 9–12 (Upper Elementary) class they come to explicitly understand the importance of cooperation and how their actions have an impact on people in the wider community.

Academically, this is a time to deepen their learning. This is not a place where we cross off a checklist from some adult-driven agenda or curriculum. True understanding and a deep love of learning comes from experiencing a concept with as many senses as possible—hence the materials! And true mastery is gained only by teaching another person.

Social construction is not a separate process from academics; in fact, it is their academic process. This is how elementary children learn. Their drive to be social with one another motivates them to learn. They learn from each other, and they often concentrate best when they are focused on work with a peer. The Montessori elementary curriculum reflects this time of life. The materials for these ages are largely designed for groups, and the work is meant to be collaborative.

The elementary years are dynamic and fun! These are young people with immense academic potential and physical capabilities, yet there is still an innocence that makes it enjoyable and uplifting to be around them. In fact, this stage has been called the Golden Age of Childhood. This is a time to savor with your children! You are both building the foundation for the transformative adolescent years.

Our Goals for Education

In a conventional school, the direct goals for education tend to involve the transmission of specific knowledge to students. There are academic benchmarks for each grade, and a school, teacher, and student are assessed on how well the student retains the information for a test. While most adults working with children in any educational system have social, emotional, and personal goals for their students, Montessori—in addition to rigorous academic lessons—is special in making these goals explicit for children, as well as creating a curriculum designed to allow children to meet these goals.

The explicit Montessori social, emotional and personal goals are:

● Preparation for Life

● Confidence

● Self-Awareness

● Self-Advocacy

● Adaptability

It is also helpful to reflect upon the eight characteristics that Paula Lillard Preschlack (in her book The Montessori Potential) has observed in Montessori graduates:

● Engagement

● Focus

● Organization

● Curiosity

● Courage

● Collaboration

● Respect

● Resourcefulness

In order to understand how to support elementary children so that they can embody these goals and characteristics, we need to know more about them!

The Unique Abilities of Elementary Children

There are two special abilities of the second plane child to keep in mind as we guide them through this importation period of self-formation:

Reasoning Mind : Elementary children are able to think logically and make reasonable judgments.

Imagination : Children of this age are capable of imagining, creating, organizing, and carrying out incredible ideas, but also can fall into boredom and even unhappiness if these minds are not being challenged.

The Unique Characteristics of Elementary Children

Beyond these two abilities, Maria Montessori identified “characteristics of the second plane.” A true understanding of these abilities will help us guide all of our interactions with these children.

Social Construction

In the primary level, while there are, of course, other children in the classroom, most of the students’ work is individual. In the elementary they become interested in each other in new ways and begin to explore collaboration.

This social construction begins in the Lower Elementary where they are learning the very basics of peer interaction. Their social construction intensifies in the Upper Elementary. The child begins pushing away from their family. The role of the peers becomes increasingly important, and their work is increasingly collaborative.

You may observe that children want to create groups and clubs, and develop secret codes, passwords, and even secret languages. All of these actions come from the natural urge to understand how groups work and to identify themselves with a group.

Justice and Conscience

In Lower Elementary there is a lot of “tattletale” behavior, where the students are checking in with adults to ask, “Is this behavior okay? How much should I care? Should I do something about it? Are you going to do something about it?”

In the Upper Elementary the students feel a deeper sense of responsibility to one another. They feel more independent, and therefore want to work through conflict and transgressions themselves.

Because they are so concerned with “fairness,” they can get very upset when people do things they are not supposed to or differently than they expected! As a way of helping students understand their peers’ behavior, we use the lens of compassion for understanding: People do unkind things when something does not feel right inside. We often use the phrase, “Everyone is fighting a battle you know nothing about.” And we remind the children, “We are all doing our very best given our capabilities and individual situations.” Language like this helps them integrate their sense of justice with their increasing social awareness.

Emotional Resilience

For an elementary child, an emotional breakdown is often over within the hour, or even within a few minutes! A child might need to work through a social conflict with their friends at school and won’t even mention it at home, or they exhibit strong emotions and tears at home and are fine the next day at school.

Hero Worship

At this age children are captivated and inspired by famous leaders, athletes, authors, as well as their older siblings, cousins, coaches, and parents. We want to be sure we give them positive role models and give them opportunities to be positive role models to younger children. We are so lucky to be in a place where the children’s peers are not simply confined to their grade. Multi-age relationships within the classroom allow them to experience having and being a role model within their very classroom.

Part II (coming next month) will discuss how adults can support the elementary child's social development.

"Follow the Child": Part III

Tue, 28 Jan 2025 16:39:39 GMT

The Third Plane of Development: 12-18 Years

The First Three Years of the Third Plane: 12-15 years

Major changes take place as children turn twelve and enter adolescence. Aside from the obvious physical changes of puberty, young teenagers are emotionally volatile, vulnerable, and sensitive to criticism. They are young adults now and want to be contributing members of their society. This is a delicate time, as they are not truly children anymore, but they are also definitely not fully functioning adults. As parents and teachers seek to “follow the child” at this age, they need to find the balance of providing leadership and boundaries, while also giving teenagers the responsibilities and independence that they can handle as they begin their journey into adulthood.

One of our Secondary Level Teachers captures this balance: “They are still children in some ways, but they aren’t the same as when they were nine, ten, or eleven. Our job is to guide them to adulthood.” The adolescent is a young adult, and needs to be treated as such, with emphasis on both “young” and “adult.” These years are the bridge from childhood to adulthood. Teachers, parents, and mentors are the guides.

So, what do we need to do to follow the child in adolescence? The formula is the same as it always has been: Provide boundaries, cultivate their independence, observe what they truly need, and encourage their interests.

The boundaries that you set at this age are founded in your family’s values, the rules of the communities they are a part of, and the laws and ethics of their society. These are the expectations you will come back to when they inevitably transgress. “Your teenager will shock you,” our Secondary Level Teacher reminds us. “You have to be prepared. Do not overreact. Remove judgment. Elicit their thought process first and let them explain what they were thinking.” Unlike the elementary child, you are no longer introducing them to the concept of morality, or the existence of your family’s values. Now, they need to consistently be a dynamic part of those conversations—Not because they get to determine what those values are, but because they are older now. Wiser. And are capable of more deeply engaging in a conversation about why a value is in place and how their actions have violated it.

Your job is not to change the value or soften the boundary as a result of the discussion. It is to understand what motivated them to break the rule, and use that as a starting point for a conversation so that they better understand their role in your family and society at large, and why living a value driven life matters. You can, to some extent, head these challenges off by looking ahead and bringing these matters up with your child—What to do in dicey situations, what to say during certain kinds of conversations, what not to do. But trust that your child will make many mistakes at this age—some of them will be mistakes that you have explicitly discussed! This is a normal part of their development. An important part of this time in their lives involves fully integrating values into their lives, and there are many social, emotional, physical, and physiological obstacles they need to work through as they do that, with you as a guide.

Along with being firm and clear in your values, following the adolescent also means honoring your child’s entrance into a new chapter in their lives. They are ready for real work, real responsibilities, and a real voice in how that work and those responsibilities are performed. One of our Secondary Level teachers shares, “We let their voices be a part of classroom decisions, within the areas where they can have control. Our role as adults is to prepare the environment and set expectations, but there is a lot they can make their own choices about. For example, our expectation is that the classroom needs to get the jobs done every day, but they have freedom in how we decide to do the jobs.”

This kind of buy-in gives them a sense of ownership, and they are a part of the conversations that assess how the job systems (e.g.) are going. They evaluate the functioning of the systems they had a part in creating, and they live with the consequences. Then they are a part of the solution when they need to make changes. All of this responsibility supports their maturing independence and sense of self.

Adolescents are so capable, and—even if they initially resist being given more responsibility!—take a deep sense of pride in contributing to their family and community. Our other teacher shares, “At this age, we work alongside them, and give them work that we know they are ready for based on their maturity and the responsibility they are demonstrating. We constantly challenge ourselves to give them more than we think they can handle, and let them rise to the occasion.”

At this age, they are ready to work alongside adults, rather than having adults do work for them. It is meaningful for them to feel as though they are able to contribute in the same way that teachers and parents are contributing. And to that same end, we, as adults, need to recognize their competence, and let them “rise to the occasion” so they can feel the fulfillment and dignity that accompanies a job well done.

At home, following the child in this way will take different forms, depending on the activities and structure of your family. They can take complete control of a dinner meal (within the boundaries of the nutritional expectations you provide), they can plan an outing to the city (within the boundaries of the budget and time you allot), they can book their own orthodontist appointments, and they can research locations for a family vacation. There is so much they can do.

In that same vein, they can find ways of pursuing and exploring their own interests and intellectual curiosities. Whereas before, they may have needed more guidance in finding resources and activities in their areas of interest, now (with your oversight and frequent check-ins), they can find trusted experts, local classes, and access to information and experiences in areas that interest them.

Finally, as with all the years before, you will follow your adolescent by observing them closely for what they are telling you with their behavior, actions, and words, and for what they need. In this new stage of development, they speak a different language—one that you will need to listen closely to and learn. And, despite their size, competence, and desire for independence, they need you just as much now as ever, to guide them, to love them, and to let them grow.

The Second Three Years of the Third Plane: 15–18 years

Children graduate from our school at age 14, and this is where our in-depth discussion of following the child ends. High school encapsulates the remainder of the third plane of development, where teenagers become increasingly independent and increasingly competent in the management of their own lives. That being said, before the age of 18, they still depend on their parents for fundamental needs, and it is still important for parents to maintain important limits for social behavior, safety, family requirements, and expectations. Parents also are still needed for wisdom and expertise, as they possess those decades of experience in this world that give them perspective and knowledge about the future that a teenager simply cannot comprehend. Following the child during these years is a continuation of the first three—providing boundaries, encouraging interests, observing what children/teenagers are saying with their behavior, and inviting them to do real work to take care of their lives and their home.

The Fourth Plane of Development: 18-24 Years

Once your child is eighteen, they enter the fourth plane of development. They are now truly adults, and the law—for the most part—recognizes them as such. Many will move away from home for much of the year to attend college, where they provide for themselves in a practical manner, planning meals, scheduling doctors appointments, choosing courses and majors, and managing their lives without even the possibility of oversight from parents

who may live in another city. They are resilient, capable, and have a sense of their place in the world. They have an abundance of independence and the potential to handle it.

At this point, following the child is best done from backstage, but a parent’s job is not over. Modern brain research tells us that the brain is not finished maturing until age 25. This means that your child still has 6–7 more years where they are operating with a still developing brain, and can benefit from your guidance and wisdom. At this age, there are only so many things a parent actually has control over and can set real boundaries for, but parents should be prepared and available to lend their love and perspective to them. If you have been able to cultivate a relationship of trust with your children over the past eighteen years, you can hope that they will turn to you. They also will make use of other trusted mentors and adults in their lives for that same kind of sagacity when they are faced with decisions and challenges. These are fulfilling and fruitful years to witness as your child becomes a full adult in the world.

Final Thoughts

Our school’s co-founder Paula Polk Lillard reminds us that a true leader is a servant. As leaders for our children, we are, in fact, their servants. However, we are not there to serve their whims and impulses. We are there to serve their true needs. And these needs can only be revealed by observing them carefully and closely. She tells a story of coming into a classroom with a young child who had been having behavioral issues in the past year. When I asked what she did to help that girl, she said, “First, I just observed her. For about a month, I made sure she wasn’t affecting anyone else’s classroom experience, but my priority was observing her and understanding why she was having issues. Only then could I know what it was she needed in order to choose productive behavior in school.”

This is a woman with decades of experience with children. But, faced with a new challenge, she did not make assumptions or bring her own agenda to their interaction. She did not give this child free rein in the class. She knew that her first step would be to “follow the child”—not by giving this child permission and freedom, but by observing her and providing the specific boundaries, guidance, and support that this specific young person needed.

We can be reminded of this when we interact with our own children and consider what Dr. Montessori meant by her call to follow the child. We can remind ourselves of our goal for our children—to develop their inherent gifts and to become a person within a community of persons. And then we can utilize this lesson, over and over again, as our children grow: Provide boundaries to give them security and confidence, observe them closely for their needs and interests, and then encourage them in their journey towards independence and a life of generosity, meaning, and fulfillment.

See Part I and Part II for a discussion of the First and Second Planes of Development.

"Follow the Child": Part II

Fri, 17 Jan 2025 16:55:55 GMT

See Part I for a discussion of the First Plane of Development.

The Second Plane of Development: 6-12 Years

The First Three Years of the Second Plane: 6-9 years

After the age of six, your child undergoes many changes as they enter the Second Plane of Development. Among other qualities, they will become more social, more imaginative, and more independent. Learning when to follow them—and when not to—involves understanding their new capacities and what they need from us in order to learn to trust themselves in the bigger world that they are gaining awareness of.

As children leave the more literal perspective of the Primary, they begin exploring new territory with their peers and their imagination. They are spending time in the gray area and checking back in with their parents and teachers, asking, “Is this okay?” It is important that the adults in their lives have an answer to these questions, and can establish a sense of morality—a sense of right and wrong—for their children. In this realm, we cannot follow our children in much of what they are exploring, because we need to be the leaders. They need to first know the morality of our culture and society before they can trust all of their own desires, and we can provide them insight into this.

Our Lower Elementary (ages 6–9) teacher shares that she views her class as a team, and herself as the team captain. The students’ social natures make them acutely aware of their peers as a group, and they are looking for a social structure within that group. She uses the word “leader” many times as she describes her role in the classroom. “They want leadership,” she says. “They crave it. It is my job to establish our class as a team and help them see that they can trust me, and that we are in this together.”

She observes that in our society parents are struggling with confidence. “There is so much more information! There are one thousand answers for every question you ask. This proliferation of information makes it harder to be confident in your leadership as a parent, and this tends to come out in difficulty setting boundaries. The parents’ anxiety is then passed along to the child.”

She goes on: “It is okay to be decisive. It is good for your children. You can be a leader and make decisions with confidence. Jim Fay [author of Love and Logic] says, Even if you’re wrong you’re right. Children are looking for parents to be clear. As soon as you realize you are wrong, you absolutely should circle back and apologize. But your confidence shows them that you are in charge, they are safe, and also that it is okay to make mistakes, repair, and move on.”

We can follow the interests of our Lower Elementary child, but we ultimately need to protect them from themselves. We know so many things that they don’t know about human nature, social structures, physical capacity, and much more. We have decades of experience in the world, and over this time, we have developed values that we hold dear. We can make decisions for our children and for our families that are based on these values. This gives them security. They may share their opinions—having a voice is important!—but giving them too much buy-in just makes them anxious.

Once your child respects the leadership of the adults in their lives, you are able to follow them in their interests and capacities. Now, with increased intellectual ability, their interests go beyond what they see in front of them. While a Primary child’s interests primarily lie in the world directly around them, your Elementary child will dream of things they cannot see or even touch. The scope of their imagination allows them to fully develop their curiosity about concepts like architecture, engines, life at the bottom of the sea, and even the outer stretches of the known universe. Following the child now means supporting them in their exploration. Help them learn how to find books on these topics and encourage their curiosity. Their only limit is their imagination.

Additionally, as you follow their drive towards independence, provide the support necessary for this. The journey towards independence in any area is a process. Observe what they are working on and working towards, observe what their obstacles are—Are they physical? Intellectual? Emotional? And then help build the scaffolding necessary to allow them to progress. Our Lower Elementary teacher says, “Inspect what you expect.” Show them what to do step by step at first, and then allow them to take over the process while you oversee. Once they are successful, you can step back, but be sure to check in regularly to make sure they are still doing the work to satisfaction—contributions around the home, self-care, making their lunch, and all the areas where they are working towards functional independence.

Finally, follow them as you observe what they really need. A child who is roaming around the classroom, touching everything may look like they want more physical freedom, but they often need purposeful work, help with something that is too hard, or an activity that they can reasonably control. The Lower Elementary teacher reminds us to look beyond what is presented: “It often looks like they are asking for permission, but they are really looking for security.”

By first establishing limits that will give your child an understanding of the values of your family and the ethics and morality of their society, you give them confidence in their inclinations and interest, because they will learn to trust themselves. Once you know that this is in place, you can support them in their exploration of their universe, and in giving them the structure and freedom that they need to thrive.

The Second Three Years of the Second Plane: 9–12 years

The Upper Elementary child’s personality and interests are much the same as the Lower Elementary, except now they are further developed and broader reaching. They are capable of great independence and academic achievement. They are keenly interested in their peers and the morality of the community around them. They are competent and trustworthy. In fact, they are often so competent and trustworthy that it can be tempting to attribute more maturity to them than they actually possess. At this age, the most common pitfall that parents make when they attempt to follow the child is that they forget that they are children.

Our Upper Elementary teacher shares, “The biggest point I emphasize with parents is that the mismatch between their children’s intellectual capability and their social capability is so big. When parents see how intellectually capable they are, they translate that into their social and emotional ability.” While it is important to respect the older elementary child’s social perspective and experience, it is also important to recognize that they are not adults and should not be treated as such. She emphasizes, “Even though these children are incredibly impressive, parents have to remember that they are still children.”

The main issue for parents at this stage is that they begin to allow children to make decisions that should be reserved for adults. Just as with younger children, it is good for them to have a voice and feel comfortable respectfully expressing their opinion. But too much buy-in translates to anxiety and insecurity. It is not truly “following the child” to allow them to dictate where they go to school, if the family should move, or how many extracurricular activities they should participate in. Giving children too much power at any age makes them feel powerless.

Children can absolutely participate in conversations, share their opinions, and choose between options that their parents have pre-selected based on their values, capacity, and resources. Understanding how these decisions are made gives them practice for making their own good decisions as they grow. Using their voice makes them feel respected. But, despite your child’s maturity and self-assuredness, they still lack the decades of experience you have in the world. They lack the thoughtful development of values and wisdom that you have cultivated in your life. They lack the ability to understand how today’s decisions will impact their lives years down the road. You understand the world to a greater degree, and you understand your child better than they understand themselves at this point. You can have confidence in your assessment of their needs and how that fits into their community and family, and you can consider their point of view, while also making decisions that are in their best interest, even if they conflict with what they explicitly desire at any given moment.

When your child feels secure in a world where you are the adult and you are in charge, they can relax, and be a child. Just as with Lower Elementary children, following the child at this age means observing their interests and supporting their intellectual passions. Their imaginations and intellect are as strong as they have ever been. They will become enthusiastic about many aspects of the world, both academically and creatively. They may want to learn more about black holes, climbing Mount Everest, coins in Ancient Greece, creating large crochet blankets, or 3-D printing useful items to use around the house. These are excellent productive activities for them.

Following the child also means closely observing their needs. This does not necessarily mean what they say they need. It means observing when they are thriving and when they are struggling—and when they are struggling, taking the time to determine why. Do they feel secure? Do they have too much independence? Not enough? Are they overtired? Overscheduled? Do they need more support? Do they need higher expectations? By observing them carefully, you can follow their true nature—the child Dr. Montessori referred to when she said to follow the child.

Part 3 of "Follow the Child" coming soon!

"Follow the Child": Part I

Wed, 18 Dec 2024 19:31:13 GMT

One of Dr. Maria Montessori’s best known pedagogical directives is “Follow the child.” This call is meant to encourage teachers and adults to look to children for inspiration and instruction on their needs, interests, and development. But this directive is not as clear as it may sound. Even as children carry inherent wisdom, they are still children, with incomplete information, narrow perspectives, and immature impulses. To truly follow them in the fullest sense of the phrase would be detrimental—even catastrophic—to them.

Dr. Montessori herself writes:

Therefore he [the child] must be allowed to act freely on his own initiative in this free environment. This statement must not be misunderstood, however: liberty is not to be free to do anything one likes (Maria Montessori, Citizen of the World: Key Montessori Readings ).

She never intended for children to be “free to do anything one likes.” This is not true freedom, and this is not what following the child means. Dr. Montessori believed in centering children’s true needs in education and family life. She was the first to thoroughly observe children and then devise an educational and developmental curriculum based on these observations. To this end, her approach was revolutionary at a time when children were “seen but not heard,” and expected to submit to adults’ agendas and intellectual ideas—which were usually cultivated in isolation from an understanding of children’s actual needs.

Our society has evolved in the decades since this phrase was introduced. Now, children are centered in families and cultural conversations. Parents revolve their schedules around their children’s activities, and children have a voice in their family’s conversations. Much of this is a positive development. But it also introduces the question of exactly what Dr. Montessori meant when she told us to follow children.

The answer looks a little different at each of the Planes of Development (0–6 years, 6–12 years, 12–18 years, and 18–24 years*). But they are all underscored by the same perspective: Provide the boundaries your children need in order to choose productive ways of being, and then observe your children deeply for their interests and for what they are telling you with their behavior. While it may seem counterintuitive to “following the child,” establishing guidance and boundaries is a prerequisite for being able to see your child’s true nature and needs. Children need an understanding of the limits of their world in order to feel safe enough to be who they are and grow into who they are meant to be.

* For our purposes, we will discuss 18 months through age 14 years most thoroughly because those are the years children attend our school. Part I covers the First Plane of Development.

The First Plane of Development: 0-6 Years

The First Three Years of the First Plane: 0-3 years

When your child is first born, their needs are simple and clear: Food, sleep, hygiene, warmth, appropriate stimulation, and love. Tending to their necessities during this time involves mostly the balance of these demands. You make sure they are gaining enough weight, sleeping at night and for naps, and spending time in sensorial engagement with the world as they are able. You change their diapers, bathe them when necessary, introduce the world to them, and hold them and snuggle them and talk to them, underpinning all of your interactions with them with the deep and unconditional love that parents feel for their children.

Having a baby is an exciting and exhausting experience! It is time-consuming and challenging, and it requires attention, vigilance, and experimentation to determine when they are hungry, when they need to sleep, how they like to be soothed, and how much stimulation is enough but not too much. However, before they are mobile and verbal, determining how to “follow them” is not terribly mysterious. For the most part, if you are able to find a way to tend to their food, sleep, hygiene, warmth, stimulation and love (which is, of course, a lot of work!), then you are able to follow the child as a baby needs to be followed.

Some time in the second year, once your child is moving and talking, a new set of challenges is introduced. Now, they are able to say “No!” and pull their hand away when they don’t want to hold your hand by a busy road. They can crawl or run away from you when they don’t want to have a bath. They can tell you they want strawberries for dinner when you are serving peas and hamburgers. And it is at this point that parents need to reassess what it means to look to their children for inspiration and information, and what it means to be the leader in their family and maintain their status as older, wiser adults.

Our Young Children’s Community teacher reminds us that children are looking for boundaries. “They will keep going until they find their boundaries!” She says. Children find comfort in knowing where their limits are (See our blog Boundaries are Loving: Parenting with Both Compassion and Limits). Even in the classroom, she shares that the first weeks of fall are spent looking for limits. Then, once they know where they are, they can relax and be productive with their activities. From her perspective, there is no “follow the child” until boundaries have been established.

More specifically, she points out that in issues of safety, there is no choice. Your child must hold your hand when you cross a road or walk through a parking lot. At the most, they may choose, “Would you like to hold my right hand or my left hand?” and if they do not make a choice, then you can carry them. It is a blessing to be bigger than our children when they are small and we can keep them safe with our bodies!

In everyday life, there are ways to give choices and allow children to learn to listen to their own desires without giving them the keys to the car, as it were. In these situations, our YCC teacher reminds us that we as adults learn to balance choices on a grand scale: “Parents tend to think globally, as opposed to specifically. Children do not need the universe of options. Two will do.”

For example, many parents of toddlers struggle with eating: “My child only eats macaroni and cheese!” Even so, as adults, we know that only eating macaroni and cheese is not a healthy option for a growing child, and allowing that child to continually dictate what they eat for dinner is not beneficial for them physically or emotionally. Instead, a parent may give them two choices, when it is reasonable for the family to do so: “Would you like peas or carrots with your chicken?” These choices tend to go more successfully when you know that your child will accept one of the items on their dish, but, of course, be prepared to stand your ground when they test your resolve!

In every interaction, it helps your child when you frame their (limited) choices with kindness and cheer. You can keep a smile on your face even while speaking firmly and clearly about all the places where parents of young children often find their struggles: Food, toileting, dressing, and sleep. As a rule of thumb, pare down the choices (“You may hold my hand or I can carry you,” “You may use the potty or the toilet,” “You may wear the red pants or the blue pants”), and then maintain an air of cheerful steadfastness. While your child may push against these restrictions, they will adapt when they realize you say what you mean and you mean what you say!

Of course, there are times when your child may not have a choice. The needs of the family may limit the input your child can have. The expectations of our world may limit the input they can have. This is a good lesson for them to learn also, and your child can adapt to this reality too.

In these situations, express the restriction clearly and compassionately and with limited language: “This is something you just have to do. I know it’s frustrating. It is time to get in the car now.” The longer you engage in these struggles, the more they will come to believe that they can wear you down. It is a kindness to show them where the expectations of their world are, quickly and clearly.

Once your child basically understands what the boundaries in their lives are (with the understanding that children will continue to test them as they grow and as circumstances change), adults can more easily “hear” a child’s internal wisdom and follow their developmental needs. To this end, following the child does not mean letting them choose whatever they want for meals, refuse to hold your hand, demand to wear a princess dress or party shoes to school, or run across the road when it is time to walk to the car. These are the whims of a child who does not understand what the boundaries of the world are.

Following the child means observing what interests them—small insects or beautiful leaves on a walk, joining you in the kitchen for baking or cooking, sweeping the floor, or scrubbing a table. It means watching for their productive interests and inclinations and developing those at times that it is convenient for the family routine. It also means—if you find that you don’t have time to do any of these things with or for your child—considering your family routine and reassessing where your family’s time is spent and what your daily priorities are.

It also means observing what they need. If they are always cranky and cry in the late afternoon, do they still need a nap? Do they need an earlier bedtime? If they consistently make a mess with their books and toys in their room in the morning, do they have too many books and toys in their room? Are they waking up too early? Do they have too many choices? Too few? Do we need to reassess their routine? Or are they simply looking for a boundary? Their behavior is full of information! It is our role as parents to determine what they are telling us so that we can follow their true natures and not their impulses.

The Second Three Years of the First Plane: 3–6 years

At some point around the age of three, children become more fully conscious of themselves as individuals. They know that they are separate beings from their mothers and fathers. They have an idea of their place within the community of their classroom. All of this means that they now realize that they have autonomy, and they are eager to exercise it—for better and for worse! Following older First Plane children involves first introducing them to the boundaries of their autonomy.

Children of all ages depend on boundaries for security. Our Primary teacher reminds us,

“If children feel like they can push back on a limit, then they will no longer believe that the limit is there in the first place. Adults can make exceptions to rules because they have adult brains. For young children, exceptions mean there are no rules.”

Increasingly, at this age, your children are encountering your limits, as well as the limits of their community. If your child attends our school, then there is a dress code. There are expectations of behavior on school grounds. There are guidelines about what they can and can’t bring to the classroom each day. It can feel tempting to “follow the child” by letting them push back against the rules of their school, and many parents have an understandable desire to raise children who are comfortable expressing themselves and don’t simply follow all rules blindly. These are admirable qualities! But a child who doesn’t first know how to belong to an upstanding community will have trouble ever learning how to stand out with both authenticity and integrity.

Belonging is an integral part of being human. The feeling of belonging brings security and self-esteem. The first step is to deeply consider the community you are bringing your child into. Presumably, you have thoughtfully chosen a school that you believe values honesty, kindness, and other qualities that are important to you. The next step is to support your child in integrating into this community. This means accepting the rules and guidelines of the school, and enforcing these rules and guidelines with your children.

Our Primary teacher observes, “Sometimes there are children who regularly come to school not in dress code. Their self-esteem suffers. They don’t feel like they are a part of our classroom. Other children ask them, ‘Why are you in party shoes? Why did you bring your doll to school?’ The other children know and respect the rules, and these children notice they don’t fit in. They are being put at a disadvantage in more ways than their parents can imagine. They feel powerless and out of control and they don’t know why.”

These children know the rules, but they haven’t been taught to respect them. When they are allowed to make decisions that go against their school’s expectations, they think, I can make decisions about the rules at school! This makes them feel out of control because they come to believe that they are in charge, and they know that this is not a safe arrangement. Allowing children to ignore rules of institutions that you respect is not following the better nature of the child.

These same emotional experiences apply to their life at home also. They know that you are the adults in the house. When they are allowed to make decisions that go against the rules and expectations of your home, that power will, ironically, make them feel powerless. It is no favor to our children to be vague or flakey with boundaries or rules. They need to learn how to feel secure in a trusted group first, before they can feel safe growing into the people that they want to be.

To that same end, there is no “follow the child” until your child understands and respects the expectations of your home and their community. Once they know what the limits are, then they can relax and be productive with their interests and behavior. At this time, the same concepts apply to the 3–6-year-old as the 0–3-year-old. When your child expresses intellectual interest in some aspect of the world around them, support them in their curiosity and exploration. When they want to learn how to bake cookies or cut carrots or rake leaves, take the time to show them how to engage in these productive activities. You will notice that your child is seeking greater independence and more complicated work. This is a natural and important development for this age! Where before, they might simply have dumped ingredients into a bowl for baking, now they can be a part of scooping and measuring. Allow them to be more involved in useful work around the home.

Following the child also means that when they are crying or upset or you find yourself fighting the same battle every day, you can look at the environment and routine around them to see if they are expressing a physical or emotional need. Perhaps they are tired or hungry. Perhaps they need more simplicity in their routine. If they understand the boundaries of their home and community, then you can trust that their emotions and interests are coming from their true nature.

Parts 2 and 3 of "Follow the Child" coming next month!

Why Not Just Google It?: Part II

Mon, 11 Nov 2024 19:43:08 GMT

“The child must learn by his own individual activity being given a mental freedom to take what he needs…”

— Maria Montessori , To Educate the Human Potential

Learning to Organize Information: It’s About Building a Thinker

The process of learning to research and report what you found in your own words has many layers, such as flipping through pages in a book, reading for understanding, and organizing the information you find into categories as you write your first—and second—drafts. That alone is a big step, one that young children need to repeat with every paper they craft. For instance, in the previous story from Part I , the first draft two girls wrote had a stream-of-consciousness feel, with random information clumped together in the order they found it (or found it interesting!) along with a few personal reactions (“Isn’t that amazing?!!!”).

As the teacher reads through the girls’ paper with them a few days later, she discusses the sub-topics within it: here is a sentence about body parts, and here’s another one way over here about a body part…but in between are two sentences about where elephants live. On the next page is another sentence about the continents where they live, and still on another page is the types of climates they do best in. The teacher points out that in one place the girls mention that elephants can also live in zoos and how many in the United States are in zoos…so, all those sentences could be moved into one paragraph, without being broken up by the other bits of information about what they eat, how dry their skin is, how they care for their babies, and so on.

The teacher helps the children circle sections and draw arrows to rearrange their content. The girls rewrite the sentences to make a clean draft that presents the information in a more organized fashion. They get it! This process helps children organize their thoughts. By contrast, if the girls had followed a Googled, online document, they probably would have copied the order of that document, and, without multiple sources presenting different orders of sub-topics, they would have skipped this experience altogether.

Keeping it Real

Montessori teachers often find that elementary-aged children cannot produce work as well when handed sheets of pre-chosen content. Perhaps this is because the children did not search for, and gather, the information by their own efforts. Perhaps the information presented this way is too abstract for their ages. Such sheets present words without the layers of context, the time to think, and the physical layout that various collected sources of information offer. Removing these physical layers makes researching too difficult for a young child. And yet, young children are capable of thinking and working through a research process! Just as Montessori makes learning to write words possible with the Moveable Alphabet before four-year-old children can physically write all their thoughts with a pencil, this physical process of gathering and processing information into one’s own words is made possible for seven-year-old children. This is why Forest Bluff teachers deliberately refrain from jumping to sheets of information from computers to teach students how to conduct research.

Consider also that information in and of itself (such as how many babies an elephant might give birth to in a lifetime) is not nearly as important to retain for one’s intellectual growth as the process of gathering information, decoding it, organizing it, and presenting it to others. These steps build a researcher for life.

This emphasis on process is an important feature of how we teach children to do their own research at Forest Bluff School. The first goal is not to acquire the latest or most impressive information—although this will come later. The first goal is the process, with all the excitement and motivation of one’s personal interest to drive the child all the way to the finish line. The teacher does not make any of this happen; the child’s motivation and burning interest does!

What’s Behind It All? Human Development

Just as table washing isn’t really about washing a table, but more about following an order of steps, developing concentration on a task, coordinating movement with thought, and preparing the hands for writing, research (especially in the Lower Elementary Level) isn’t really about mastering any particular topic of study. Research is an avenue for a child to be motivated to practice handwriting, punctuation, spelling, sentence and paragraph structuring, syntax, and social cooperation with peers. Because it is self-directed, it also gives a child time to express their individualism and sense of identity. They remain personally connected to a topic and invested in it.

Researching in this manner appeals to the inherent nature of children ages six to twelve, because they are in what Maria Montessori identified as the “Second Plane of Development,” when they’re on a quest to connect with—and understand—society. Montessori teachers help students to reach local experts, interview adults, and go on self-directed field trips. By connecting children with people in the community––librarians, experts, field researchers, authors of books, and peers—we help children connect with humanity on a basic level. This feeds a need for their personal development, with ideal timing.

If a computer delivers information instead, we actually do the opposite: we distance the child from making this connection with real, human sources. Real connections with others ultimately helps each child to find that actively exchanging with others’ ideas and opinions through face-to-face conversations deepens their understanding, interest in, and knowledge of a topic. A child who experiences repeated positive interactions centered on social conversation finds that talking with teachers, experts, and professors can be comfortable and familiar. Conversations are a terrific way to better understand a topic, even at the university level. One doesn’t have to rely alone on the internet’s search engine.

How Does Research Evolve for Each Student?

To summarize, the purpose of research is to develop concentration, stamina, curiosity about the world, promote sustained interest in a topic, and to connect the elementary-aged children to their society and larger community by talking to librarians or experts in their fields of interest. Conducting research also fosters executive function skills such as time management, self-control (walking to the library, planning ahead), resourcefulness (knowing how to handle something going wrong without an adult), social collaboration, reading comprehension, and writing skills. These abilities grow and expand as the children get older and repeat the process with numerous research papers they produce during their elementary years.

But the steps to conducting research increase and change as the students get older, too. Widening, incremental scaffolding leads to developmentally appropriate use of online sources of information in the Secondary Level. This is when adolescents’ brains develop critical thinking skills that were not available to them when younger. Because their hands flipped through pages of books and over library shelves to take in information for many years, they are now able to sustain their attention to venture deeper into topics in a more sophisticated way. Adolescents conduct semester-long or year-long projects which we call “Independent Study Projects” in Forest Bluff’s Secondary Level. These prepare students for high school and college-level expectations. More than one graduate has told us, “Everyone freaked out in high school and college when they had to write big papers, but for me it was just like doing another ISP in my Montessori days. What’s the big deal? It’s fun!”

The Challenge for Adults

It is difficult for parents and teachers to support children to develop these research skills for themselves, just as it was challenging to help three-year-olds learn to dress themselves, prepare food for themselves, and tie their own shoelaces independently. It takes several years, moves gradually, and requires patient attention, just as all their development does. It would be far easier to just Google information for children, or to show them how to ask Google (or Alexa or any AI platform) to answer their questions. Now you understand everything that is missed when adults give in to that temptation!

One challenge is that, sometimes, information isn’t readily available on a particular topic. It may not be in the local library, in books, or among any experts in the town. Sarah Robbins, a Forest Bluff teacher, encountered this dilemma as a parent when her own daughter became interested in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR). Sarah had to think how best to help her daughter (a student at Forest Bluff School) access accurate information, instead of just Googling it to give the answers to her daughter.

After contemplating what to do, Sarah made a quick little Google search of her own to find some addresses and names of US Fish and Wildlife rangers at the ANWR. She then gave these to her daughter and suggested that she write and send a (snail mail) letter to them with her questions. Her daughter then wrote a letter and mailed it (which gave her practice with some great skills!).

To their surprise, her daughter received loads of information back with a personal note a few weeks later! This experience connected this Forest Bluff student with an actual person (something she’ll never forget), helped her develop more writing skills, promoted the idea of delayed gratification, and gave her the very thought that there are adults with jobs in the Arctic looking after and monitoring wildlife. Can you see how this experience deepened a child’s sustained interest in a topic, gave her confidence, and supplied connection to the real world? This all happened because her mother didn’t simply Google her question. What might have been a ten-minute process became a weeks-long one, but it was far more meaningful, profound, and developmentally rich.

Building a Researcher for Life

If the teacher had told the two seven-year-old girls, “Oh great, you want to research elephants. Here’s a worksheet of the questions to ask and the kind of information you should look for,” and then handed them a template, most of that personal interest and motivation would have fizzled. And rightfully so! For what researcher who has ever made a laudable discovery followed directions from someone else? That’s not how scientists are born. And it’s certainly not how children become inquisitive, persistent, experienced researchers.

Learning to conduct one’s own research, using the “old-fashioned” methods of gathering physical books, reading through them and deciding what to write down, then organizing, rewriting, and presenting that research to others, is a major part of every child’s elementary years at Forest Bluff. Every child learns to do this!

Why don’t we just have them do online searches or hand them printed out sheets of information? Because that’s not the way to build a researcher.

Happily, because this school’s parent community understands why this process works so well, Forest Bluff students continue to learn the old-fashioned way. When they reach the Secondary Level at age 12, their teachers show them how to properly conduct their own online searches, after they have a strong foundation from lots of motivation and experience. It’s a joy to watch this story unfold year after year. By the time they graduate, Forest Bluff students have gotten much more practice in this process than most of their peers from other programs entering high school. Montessori students get the chance to master their process for independent research, from the beginning.

They didn’t Google it. They didn’t even need a computer…Isn’t that amazing?!

Why Not Just Google It?: Part I

Thu, 17 Oct 2024 17:09:04 GMT

“All other factors…sink into insignificance beside the importance of feeding the hungry intelligence and opening vast fields of knowledge to eager exploration.” - Maria Montessori, To Educate the Human Potential

What happens when children use books to learn?

Two seven-year-olds in a Lower Elementary Montessori class say they want to write a research paper about elephants. Great! Go ahead! They discuss with their teacher what to do first: Find information about elephants. Where? In books.

As you read how this process plays out, I think you’ll see why Forest Bluff School—as a true Montessori school—continues to deliver an education that doesn’t necessarily follow the latest trends. In essence, you’ll understand, “Why not just Google it?”

The two young girls begin their search on foot. There are some books around the school building, so they visit neighboring classrooms and various closets of books to look for sources that might discuss elephants. They are on a quest! They have to think about what to look for, which categories, nonfiction versus storybooks…all this takes some thinking, some discerning. They are only seven years old, but they can already tell that a book about mammals might have information on elephants. They find a book about Africa. This seems promising, too. They collect the six relevant books they find and bring them back to their classroom. Then they sit with their pile and start looking through them and reading.

They find a page about elephants and rush off to get lined paper. They start writing facts down in their own words:

Elephants are 13 feet tall. Isn’t that amazing?
Elephants only eat plants. But they can eat wood!
They can weigh 15,000 pounds! Isn’t that amazing?
Elephant brains are bigger than human brains, but they are much smaller compared to their bodies than for humans. That is so interesting!
Elephants are the biggest animals on the earth, next to whales! Isn’t that amazing?

The teacher tries to keep the grin off her face when they show her their first sentences. This personalization of the research is so like these two girls, but she knows they will depart from this style as they learn more about objective reporting. For this early paper, she’ll let them include their reactions.

When the girls have exhausted the books in the building, they are not satisfied. There is so much more they want to know about elephants! Why do some have bigger tusks than others? How do people ride them? How old do they live to be? How many babies can they have? And on and on. To find answers, they could go to the local public library with their parents after school, or their teacher may fetch some books for them herself the next day, to keep their research going. If they were eight years old or older, they would walk to the town’s local library during the day and return with a pile (as is customary in this school). Students ages eight and older learn to use the library’s Dewey decimal system to find books on their topic, and search the aisles by numbers and letters to find the section with their topic. This requires an exercise in alphabetizing, too.

When they start using the library independently, Forest Bluff students get an idea of how information is logically organized through a physical experience: for example, elephants are in the animal section, and this would take these girls near books about other animals. The students would look through the books that focus on elephants to decide which ones will be helpful. Some will prove too cursory for their next layer of research, with just a few sentences on each page. One book may look hard to read, with very few pictures, but they might decide to check it out for the details they’re looking for, and then add it to their growing pile. They’ll plan this walk to the library by estimating the time it takes to walk there and back, and how long they’ll allow themselves to find books and check them out. They’ll need to sign out of the classroom with their teacher, sign in to the library with the librarians, out of the library, and then back into their school.

Can you see all the things that are happening here? How might this scene unfold differently if the girls simply Googled elephants on a computer?

If they had instead searched through a computer, someone—or something—else would have done all this thinking for them:

● Which information to interact with.

● Which answers are the right ones for the questions they have.

● What reading level to present to them (not knowing their abilities, or their capacity to grow in these abilities through their motivation to comprehend the information).

● Where the information fits in the wider context of the world, and how to categorize the information.

Also consider all the physical movement involved in gathering information: walking through their school building, climbing up on a step stool to reach books in the closet, lifting and sliding books back into place in order to leave the closet organized for others, asking teachers in other rooms of they may borrow a book, eventually navigating the local public library, carrying the heavy books back from the library…How about the time this gives them to think while they do all this? To discuss what they want to find? To navigate, to search, to make decisions? To check their watches to make sure they’re back to the school building on time? To discover by experience roughly how long it takes to walk that distance between the library and the school?

So, so many things happen that just don’t happen when you Google information!

Is the Information Accurate? How Will They Know?

Googling may be faster, but online searches skip all the foundational building of a researcher. A student growing up without this foundation is missing out on doing things for themselves, on so many levels. When students use computers instead of walking through these physical and mental steps, too much is being done for them.

It’s true: those books about elephants may have been a little outdated if they weren’t published in the last few years. Depending on the topic of study, some information changes monthly in our world today, as new results are found. But the process of learning how to research is the foundational step upon which all further success depends, and, therefore, it comes first. If a set of encyclopedias is several years old, it still serves its purpose for young children because it presents a reliable, accessible source of collected information that is categorized and logical, and almost every topic you can think of can be located. This is so exciting for curious young minds! A physical encyclopedia is just the right structure and speed to match their capacities and feed their inquisitive nature.

Over time, students develop their ability to discern between accurate information and outdated information by experiences with solid sources, alongside their teachers and peers. At the completion of their six years in elementary and two additional years in the Secondary Level, they emerge as experienced, critical thinkers.

When children begin searching online before they are ready, sources of information can appear too similar for a child to recognize value differences. By contrast, with physical books and periodicals, children can pick up simple clues: the cartoonish pictures versus real photographs of elephants, the year the book was published, the references in the back, the mention of real scientists in the field studying elephants versus a story about an elephant with a name looking for his mommy. When our children see these things, they have the stepping stones to noticing more subtle differences in online searches when they are more experienced in adolescence.

Will They Understand the Internet?

As a side note, you may wonder if your children will be comfortable with the online world if they don’t experience it in grade school. Paula has a great example of watching a very “hands-on” learner—her own son—grow up at Forest Bluff without any technology until high school. The result? Her son became fascinated with computers in college and became a coder, a profession he loves. Like most Forest Bluff graduates, this young man goes on a search every time he wonders about something, which is several times a day. With his inquisitive mind that was nurtured and encouraged in Montessori, he finds “Great Courses” audio recordings on a variety of subjects, watches YouTube videos of various experts talking about their fields, and reads tons and tons of books. His interests range from the history of obscure countries to neuroscience to astrophysics to international politics…almost anything! But Paula’s son is not unusual amongst Montessori graduates. When children hear, “You want to research elephants? Great! Go for it!” from the time they were six and seven at school, their curiosity and excitement about learning just grows and grows. Why not?

And by the way, when Paula asks her 22-year-old son at the dinner table, “How do you know all this incredible information?!” He sometimes answers, “Mom, I just Googled it.”

Part II coming in November!

Boundaries are Loving: Parenting with Both Compassion and Limits

Mon, 02 Sep 2024 19:49:49 GMT

The Truest Form of Love & Compassion

We as a society are called to gentleness. We recall the twin towers falling 20 years ago in New York City and the change that had on our daily lives. More recently, we survived a global pandemic and all of the housing and economic ramifications it brought. We work, and we know what it is to be tired. We are decision-fatigued. Of course we crave gentleness. Gentleness should define our parenting approach. But we need to understand what that means and know that, for our children, it means something very different from what we might think of as gentleness.

Our children’s brains are very different from ours, and they have very little knowledge of the real world. As adults, we can see that beyond the limits we set, there are exceptions, ramifications, and different types of choices depending on mood, day, or many other factors. Because of our experiences, we can see from point A to point B. Beyond that same limit, our children might see nothing.

As parents, we have permission to be “the adults” and also to be gentle and forgiving of ourselves in this process. As parents we won't always be our best selves, but we can interact with our children with love on a daily basis and raise them to be good adults themselves.

We can do so with firm no-nonsense boundaries while also showing them love and compassion. In fact, I would argue that giving them boundaries is the truest form of love and compassion .

Initially this is the harder task. It would be much easier to give in to my children's whims but it would not serve them in the long run. I hope you're able to use this knowledge to raise your children with an easy gentle grace while still helping them learn resilience, strength, and self-control.

Respect

One of my deepest core beliefs, and the reason I became involved with Montessori, is that I believe children need to be respected. I, in turn, need to demand respect for myself.

The way you allow your children to treat you becomes their basis for how to treat others. It teaches them how they should expect to be treated and what they should allow in their own lives. If you are kind and firm but demand your own respect they will embody this.

This can look like :

Respect for your time: “I am cooking now. Would you like to help or would you like to go and play?”

Respect in speaking to you: ”I see you need help with your shoes. Would you like me to give you the words to ask respectfully?”

Say what you mean and mean what you say :

You set the limits of the house in accordance with your values, and, in turn, you make sure you are listened to and thus respected.
You lay down the limits and are prepared to follow through. Keep them simple. Keep them consistent and keep them in line with your family’s values.
You can fall back on a simple phrase whenever the limit has been reached:

“In this family we eat at the table.”

“Today is a school day, and we will need our school shoes.”

“We hold Mom's hand when we walk by the road.”

With gentle limits that don't disappear or change with time and circumstance (once the dust settles, because in many cases implementing new limits will be messy), you will have calm, happy children who are learning self-control, respect, and kindness.

If you model your boundaries at home on the simple tenets of respect for

● each other

● the home we live in

● ourselves

...you will have a calmer and more harmonious home life.

Kindness Is Self-Control

It is kind not to yell.

It is kind not to push and shove.

It is kind to not take from someone's hand.

You would be appalled if you saw your child doing this to another child. You would call the police if you saw an adult doing it to another adult. Remember: We are raising our children to be members of society. If they can't respect and listen to you, how can we expect them to show respect and listen when it really counts?

If we don't teach our children kindness, respect, and self-control, society will do it for us. Society does not love our children nearly as much as we do, nor will it give them the grace and understanding that we would.

Giving Scaffolded Choices

Allowing children to choose strengthens their executive functioning and their sense of self. Choice is a fundamental tenet of the Montessori approach. However, it’s important to note that children should be offered appropriate choices.

It is not appropriate for a child:

● to make a life changing choice such as where they go to school or live.

● to choose something that goes against the rules at home.

● to choose something that goes against their community guidelines in school or in the wider world.

● to make a potentially dangerous choice, such as going out in the cold without a coat or running by the road.

It is appropriate for a young child to make choices within the scaffolding we have set in place . This allows them to make safe and appropriate decisions and thus be successful in their decision making.

What this can look like :

“You may pick an outfit for school from your school clothes drawer.”

“You may choose a cup for dinner from your cabinet.”

“Would you like orange juice or milk with dinner?”

The Power and Compassion of No

You have the power to give your child the gift of no in a respectful and loving way. You can do so in an environment they trust and feel safe in.

It is hard to be vulnerable and face rejection. But we all will in our life. If your child first hears no from you they will not have to hear it for the first time as a teenager from society at large, and in a much more devastating and spectacular way.

You get to set their first limits and you get to set it in the simplest of situations:

“No, we will not get candy from the grocery store” is a lot less scary than, “Miss, you were going 20 over the speed limit.”

Positive Parenting vs. Passive Parenting

You don’t have to use the word no excessively, nor do you need to spend extensive time in direct conflict with your child. In fact, if you make it a battle between you and your child, you will always lose. When you are clear with boundaries, your child will simply come up against a limit that has already been set.

You lay down the limit and are prepared to follow through:

“We had five more minutes at the park but now it's time to go. Do you want to walk or should I carry you?”
vs.
“No, it's time to go,” or “Fine, we can stay until you’re ready.”

“We keep our toys in the playroom”

vs.

“No, you may not have your stuffed toy at the table,” or “You can have an extra cookie if you put the stuffed toy away” .

Self-Esteem

Parenting with gentle intent is not only setting limits on what your child may do, it is also setting limits on what you will do for your child. We make so many of our parenting decisions based on wanting our children to grow up to have true self-esteem and an ability to love themselves and contribute to their community. Given this, it is important to examine what behaviors will actually accomplish this goal.

It is tempting to believe that when we let our children make constant decisions and when we take care of their every need and desire we are showing them love and building their self-esteem. I do not believe this is true. I believe (and research shows) that our child’s self-esteem is directly tied to how much they can do for themselves.

If you are dressing your three-year-old, feeding your three-year-old, and carrying your three-year-old when they don’t want to walk, you are teaching them that they are helpless and not able to fend for themselves in any way. This is not love. This will not build their self-esteem.

The Montessori approach is full of ways to support our children’s independence and encourage them to engage with life on their own positive and productive terms. By taking advantage of these important lessons and philosophy, I know I am giving my children and my students an important foundation for their self-esteem, feelings about themselves, and later success in life. This means that I am, once again, holding firm to expectations for their capabilities and boundaries for my own actions in order to love them as best as I can.

Final Thoughts

Like you, I want to raise my sons and daughter to be both kind and strong. I want them to question a decision they find unjust. I want them to think outside of the box. But at this time, when they are young (ages 9, 7, and 2) and have little understanding of cause and effect, I need them to respect the rules I have put in place, as well as the rules of the society I'm raising them in and the school I have thoughtfully chosen for them. I am not looking to rear my children in some old-fashioned standard of parenting in which I am the adult and therefore more worthy of respect and must be listened to at all costs. However, I am the adult and out of respect for my children I will help them learn self-control through limits.

I teach children differently than I did 12 years ago. I am, in fact, much more tender than I was before. The prevalence of screens and our fast-paced lifestyle have created stresses previously unknown in earlier generations. I am cognizant of this. However I have not strayed from my core belief that children thrive with limits and that these limits make them feel safe and loved. I know I am doing the best that I can for my children and for society when I give them boundaries and care—and infuse both of these actions with love.

Home is Where the Heart Is: Raising Children with Character in a Turbulent World

Sun, 21 Jul 2024 08:29:29 GMT

This piece was delivered as a “coffee discussion” I led with groups of parents from Forest Bluff School, a Montessori school in Lake Bluff, Illinois, serving children ages 18 months to 14 years old. The purpose of these discussions is to give parents ideas for home and explore how to use Montessori’s helpful approach. Anyone can benefit; I hope you will!

What Are We Talking About?

Why is “Home”, “Character” and “Turbulent” in the same title?! Before I dive into how we can raise courageous children, I’ll unpack why each word is relevant:

Let’s start with the word Character : when parents are polled, overwhelmingly they’ll say they want to raise good people. We have many hopes for our children past this, but sending good people into the world seems to be a widespread and basic, parenting goal. Parents want their children to grow up with what they believe is good character!

But character is not a genetic gift, nor is it something handed to a child; rather, it is what we build in ourselves, through our life experiences, through our exposures to what surrounds us. As our children grow, they develop character. And for this, children must have repeated, positive experiences.

Consider this word from the title: Turbulent . We are surrounded by turbulence, whether it be personal and immediate, or remote; wars are happening in the world right now, and that is brought into our daily lives by the media and by social media, mainly through our phones that come with us everywhere, right in our pockets. We complain about this constancy and stress, but one of our main characteristics as human beings, is that we care about others! If someone is suffering, we are drawn towards the story. We seem to have an impulse for sharing experiences and a desire to help one another. We think of our fellow human beings, even when we are not with them.

Caring about others is a character trait, one we want our children to develop. This development happens in positive early environments. In a Montessori school, the curriculum for elementary children explains that humans have 3 qualities that no other creatures have, which set us apart and makes us unique: we have opposing thumbs which enable us to make complex tools with our hands; we have minds that can think in unique ways; and we have a capacity for love that transcends familiarity, because we can feel love and concerns for people we don’t even know. We often wish other humans well, even from the other side of the earth.

There is turbulence, strife, and struggle in every person’s life. Just as when we’re in an airplane, though, turbulence–as rough or as frightening as it may be–does pass in waves. And as with a rough ocean surface, we can maintain a relative calm underneath the surface if we learn how to. Learning to calm ourselves becomes part of us. We learn to do this in childhood.

Another part of our title is Home . Your home can be a sanctuary for your family, a place to return to. You can make it a place to build strength, to receive love, to build optimism, and to create positive language for describing the world and describing other people. This can be done in very basic ways. We’re not talking about anything extravagant or difficult. Through your simple actions and attitudes, home can be a place for your children to build the character needed for navigating through life.

Three Key Messages

Today, I have 3 key messages I’d like to share with you:

The first is that although the world is turbulent, you and your children do have choices to exercise, every day. (For specific suggestions about choices for children, moral development and appropriate limit-setting, see several articles here: paulalillardpreschlack.com/my-writing/ ). We want to focus on giving our children micro choices to experience that having choice is freedom. Now, it’s true that in some things, there is no choice! Those are limits, and we need those limits to provide boundaries. But the choices we have in life, including how to behave, and what to think, and how to work with our feelings, are freedoms that go with you everywhere and into every circumstance. No one is powerless.

The second is that every family needs a source for their moral values . What is that source for you? Is it religion? If so, how do you share this with your children? Is it the natural world? If so, how do you present the lessons of the natural world to them? Is it family stories of heroic actions, and your heritage? You must have a source, a compass to guide you as a family, and to draw on it. This happens naturally when you make a comment, say a prayer out loud, or tell a little story about your grandparents.

And the third message, is that children go through developmental stages when their needs and characteristics differ , so if we want to be effective with our children, we need to adjust our language, our behavior, and our interaction style to match.

This fact is a very helpful, central lesson from Dr. Maria Montessori. Here is an anecdote to point out that children–unconsciously by nature–have drives propelling them to develop; ones which we can support if we recognize them. Imagine for a moment that you are standing in a piazza in Rome around the year 1909 and you’re sitting on a bench next to Maria Montessori. Here is what she says:

"I once saw in the gardens of the Pincio in Rome, a very beautiful child of about a year and a half. He had an empty bucket and a little spade and was busy collecting pebbles from the path to fill it.

Near the smiling child was a distinguished looking nurse, who was obviously well-disposed towards him and who must have been most affectionate and intelligent in her care. It was time to depart, and the nurse patiently entreated the child to leave his work and let himself be placed into his buggy. In the face of the child’s resistance, all her exhortations were of no avail. She finally filled up the pail with gravel herself and then put the gravel and the child in the carriage, certain that she had pleased him. The loud cries of the child indicated that this was not so. His shouts of protest at the violence and injustice which had been done to him struck me . What a weight of resentment filled his heart! The child had not really wanted to fill the pail with gravel; he had simply wanted to carry out the exercise needed to fill it and thus satisfy the needs of his growing body. The end sought by the child was his own inner formation, not the external act of filling a pail with little stones. His lively attachment to the exterior world was only an illusion; his vital need was a reality. Actually, if he had filled the pail, he would probably have emptied it so that he could fill it again many times over until he had completely satisfied himself.…This simple episode is an example of what happens to children all over the world, even to the best and most dearly beloved. They are not understood because adults judge them by their own standards ” (Montessori, The Discovery of the Child, 1967).

Do you see how Montessori upends some of our logical adult reactions? If we re-train ourselves to step back, observe and reflect with the lens that each child is trying to do things for themselves, then we can proceed accordingly. Noticing children’s developmental needs in each stage is the key to helping them build their own character.

Children of all ages must do things for themselves, again and again. They need to build their bodies to function, and their minds. Through their actions, they build themselves as people. We absolutely cannot do it for them. What we can do is set up the environment, choose what we expose them to, guide them, and set an example by modeling with our own actions, words, and daily lives.

Let’s briefly consider just a few needs at each stage of childhood, because these differ between your children’s differing ages.

Different Needs for Different Ages

Early Childhood: Infants to 5-year-olds

Infants and young children need reality and stability, clarity and consistency. They learn from real life experiences, and their understanding comes more easily when we are very literal. For these ages, keep things simple. It’s “black and white” thinking for this early stage. Things are either true or false. Adults are either in charge or they are not, (and they need you to be in charge to feel safe and secure!)

Many adults do not realize that very young children absorb fairy tales, scary images, or violence just as easily and automatically as they absorb true stories, love, and how to be kind. Very young children use everything they are exposed to, to form their understandings of the world and their personalities. What we expose them to, impacts them deeply. They need a sense of security with reality, which comes from experiencing the real, material world around them. Some research has shown that young children are confused by fantastical books and screen images, so try to replace these with content from the beautiful natural world around them, and with true stories with heartfelt themes; remember, they are building character!

Childhood: Elementary-aged children (6-12 years old)

These are the ages when social and moral development becomes a fascination for your children. (And now they can recognize the difference between what is real and what is fantastical; how fun!) At these ages, children need to play and interact with peers. Sometimes, they need to do so without the controlling supervision of adults; this is when elementary-aged children make mistakes, work things out, and really learn how to get along. These are the ages, Maria Montessori observed, for children to study society, culture, and history intensively, because they are so curious about people. While exploring these topics, children need the positive view, such as a Montessori curriculum offers. In the history curriculum, for example, Montessori teachers suggest that we thank the peoples who invented and contributed to our number system, alphabet, clock time, music and arts, the furniture that makes us more comfortable, and so on, in specific stories. Expressing gratitude–in this case towards other societies that have contributed to our lives–becomes a habit.

This is also when children learn, perceptively, about forgiveness; the power of an apology, making lots of mistakes, and learning from them. They need to experience, over and over, how to express thoughts and feelings in words, and how to find understanding with another person, through in-person interactions where social cues come through body language, gestures, facial expressions, and voice intonation.

Adolescence: Young Adults (ages 12-18)

Now the nuance of the “grey areas” in life come to light. For example, you may find a very honest teenager telling a lie if it is to protect a friend, because he chose the code of loyalty over the code for honesty during this stage of his life. These are the ages when children learn that sometimes even adults make poor choices or mistakes, that we’re still learning. Your adolescents don’t need to know everything about your life, but they do need to see you admit your own mistakes now and then, and witness how you remedy these and move forward. You are a living example for them.

Adolescents need emotional support and they still need loving limits. But they are clever enough to figure many things out; they do not appreciate lectures and drills, and we get in the way when we try to tell them things. Instead, we parents must conduct ourselves morally and with character, as best we can. You reveal your moral values through your actions. Please note: everything I have described here refers to children and adolescents who are spending almost all of their time interacting with you and other people in real-time, rather than with screens and with social media. (See Jonathan Haidt’s suggestions for appropriate screen time limits in The Anxious Generation, 2024, or his Substack articles in After Babel).

Do you see how children learn to be independent from us very gradually, in stages? Montessori reminds us that from the first year of life, children are asking us to help them to accomplish things by their own powers : “The adult must help the child to do things entirely on his own, for if the child does not reach the point of ceasing to rely on the help of adults and become independent, he will never fully mature intellectually or morally” (Montessori, Education and Peace, 1972). Our parenting path is eased when we recognize this. Knowing that our children’s full independence from us is their ultimate goal, which will evolve gradually with freedoms and limits that match each age, enables us to successfully foster their character development.

Freedom and Limits

For your children of all ages, freedoms, in the form of choices that you offer them, and limits, in the form of boundaries that you keep in firmly in place, create a balance. This balance allows children to develop responsibility in their actions. The choices you give your children–when and where appropriate–help them to build their character by their own powers.

When you set a limit, feel confident and secure that you are giving your child what they need to live a very happy life! Life has limits. For example, one requirement in your home might be that everyone pitches in when it’s time to clean up. This sends the message that our children are not honored guests in the home; they are part of the family, important members of the team. Psychologist Jim Fay tells a story where his wife sometimes said, “I’ll help!” when a child seemed discouraged about their chores. One day, Fay heard the children all say, “I’ll help!” when their mother expressed dreading her own household tasks. This creates a culture of being helpful; it builds character! For more about this balance of freedom and limit-setting, see articles at: paulalillardpreschlack.com/my-writing/

Creating a Sanctuary at Home

There are physical signals we give our children by how we prepare our homes, and through our actions at home. These can be simple preparations and actions, such as:

Lighting a candle.

Setting a fire in the fireplace.

Settling on the couch to read a book.

Looking at the stars and the moon before bed.

Reading poetry before starting a meal.

Listening to music on a rainy day.

Playing a musical instrument in the house.

Playing a card or board game together.

Making a meal with everyone helping.

Sitting together quietly without any distractions to talk to each other!

These practices and habits reveal our priorities and values, which our children will witness.

Think about your favorite places, and bring your children there regularly. These might be: parks, riversides, lakesides, paths in the woods, open fields, libraries, churches, temples, museums, or someone else’s home. Perhaps these places offer peace and resilience.

The books and stories that you share are also sources of values. Repeat the ones that mean the most to you. I highly recommend children’s classics, especially the ones that are timeless. Find suggested book lists for each age here .

Very young children appear to love rituals. What are your family rituals? Is it church or temple on Sundays? Or walks in the woods as a family? Cooking a meal together? Playing a game every Saturday night? Is it reading together at bedtime every night?

Every day, you are building habits with your family. They can be minimal and simple; anything you can manage to do matters. Putting all the screens, phones and smartwatches away so that we have times without distractions is a key element to building healthy habits and empowering our children to build their own characters.

Optimism for the Future

What has helped me to step away from the turbulence of stressful news going on all around us, is diving into my bookshelf and enveloping myself in certain themes of thought, listening to great thinkers while driving, reading interesting books, and talking to people about meaningful ideas. This gives me a better understanding of what is happening in the world today, and renewed hope for the future.

Here are a few takeaways from some favorites on my bookshelf:

The Road to Character by David Brooks:

“The essential drama of life is to construct character, which is an engraved set of disciplined habits, a settled disposition to do good.”

How Children Succeed by Paul Tough:

When [conventional] educators try to teach character, they are largely ineffective. Studies have shown no significant impact at all from such programs, not on student behavior, academic achievement, or school culture. However, here is what does matter: self-discipline scores are a better predictor of academic and life success than IQ or GPAs. In sum, willpower matters!

The Marshmallow Test by Walter Mischel:

The ability to distract oneself is key. This is an ability we build in childhood and rehearse in adulthood. It’s really about attending to what one chooses to prioritize. Where we direct our attention makes all the difference.

Flow: The Psychology of Optimal Experience, Illuminating the Path to Happiness by Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi:

“How we feel about ourselves, the joy we get from living, ultimately depends directly on how the mind filters and interprets everyday experiences.” Exercising one’s thinking habits to control where our thoughts go, leads directly to happiness.

I leave you with these questions to ponder:

What did you learn from your own parents growing up?

How did your home life prepare you for the outside world you later faced?

What do you hope to pass on to your children?

Montessori and Executive Functioning: Part III

Thu, 02 May 2024 07:59:49 GMT

This is the final installment of our spring blog series, Montessori and Executive Functioning.

In Part I , we learned how a Montessori education helped Forest Bluff alumni to develop skills such as sustained attention, task initiation, organization, time management, and planning/prioritization . In Part II , alumni share how their schooling contributed to the development of their response inhibition, working memory, emotional control, flexibility, and goal-directed persistence . In Part III, the role of metacognition is discussed.

Metacognition: the ability to consider and evaluate one’s own thinking processes

Over the course of the creation of this piece, I had the opportunity to speak to many Montessori alumni. I was struck by how, after seeing the list of traits, each one could so easily speak about their executive functioning skills. Every single one was able to choose a topic to discuss. And despite being in the middle of exams, or homework, or their own full lives, they were able to share organized and concise thoughts about their thinking processes, whether it was task initiation, goal-directed persistence, sustained attention, or any of the executive functioning skills.

In this way, every alumni I interviewed displayed fluency with metacognition. They considered their thinking processes, and developed articulate and thoughtful analyses of their cognitive abilities. Not only were they able to consider these processes in the present, but they also were able to reflect on their childhood experiences, and relate their current thinking patterns to their Montessori education.

Perhaps this is the invitation for me to reveal that I, too, am a Montessori alumni. I deeply appreciate the importance of metacognition. Without an understanding of our thinking processes, we cannot properly evaluate where we need more support, or how to individually structure projects so that we have the best chance of success given our strengths and weaknesses. As I observed during my interview with the young woman about sustained attention, executive functioning traits do not simply exist fully formed in every person. Instead, we need to understand which tools to use when in order to fully utilize our skills. Metacognition makes this possible.

Montessori uniquely provides an environment for developing metacognition. From a very young age, students are making choices and living with the consequences of those choices, giving themselves opportunities to assess their decisions and their approaches to their work. When they are very little, this process is implicit. But after the age of six, they record their work in a work journal—their entries becoming more elaborate and specific as they mature—and then they have a weekly meeting with their teacher where they consider their work progress, and make plans for what they’d like to accomplish in the coming week.

This cycle of freedom and reflection gives students the space to experiment with their work habits, and then assess how it went under the guidance of a trained teacher. They are not simply told what they did right or wrong. They are part of a regular conversation that considers their individual strengths and weaknesses, and then they are given the liberty to begin their next week with new ideas of how to accomplish the work they’d like to accomplish. This lays the foundation for metacognition.

Final Thoughts

As I read through the conversations I had with each of these students and parents, I see three important themes.

Freedom and Responsibility

First, the balance of freedom and accountability (or responsibility, as the Montessori language often uses) is a foundational element for almost every single skill related to executive functioning. Perhaps obviously, in order to develop the ability to make good choices and plans, a person needs a lot of practice making good choices and plans, preferably starting in their childhood. They need to choose what to work on and how to work on it, and also have the space to make mistakes and learn from their choices. Then they need the freedom to choose it again, and to do it differently next time.

No matter how many choices a conventional school introduces to the day, it is virtually impossible for them to replicate the intricate and widespread presence of freedom and accountability in the Montessori curriculum. This is partially because it is not enough to simply give the children freedom. They also need specific, regular, and natural opportunities to get feedback on their decisions, whether they learn from the materials, their peers, or conversations with their teacher. They have to have the freedom to make choices, and the necessary structure to learn from those choices. This is how executive functioning skills flourish.

A Cohesive and Comprehensive Curriculum

Second, Dr. Montessori’s cohesive curriculum supports executive functioning through an entire childhood—from the time the tiny toddler enters the Young Children’s Community until the long-limbed adolescent plans for a semester-long independent study project and prepares a meal for their entire class without a teacher’s help. It does this by gradually expanding the size of the projects while giving children organic checkpoints to assess their decisions and projects. One mother who I spoke to observed the ways this takes place throughout the years:

It goes all the way back to the YCC and the Primary because the children are choosing their own work then, too. They may get out a lengthy activity like table washing right before the end of the day. They set it up and then see their classmates cleaning up their work. They experience the trial and error of what fits into the time they have at their disposal.

In the Primary, they choose their activities and fill their time. In the Elementary, they record the time it takes to do work and reflect on it. Then in the Secondary Level, they make plans for the future.

The children do so many long term projects in Montessori. They not only experience what they did during a certain day, but they also have to manage how to get through a long project. Are they keeping up with their friends who are working on the same project? Are they staying on track for the goals they set for themselves? There’s a constant juxtaposition between the large scale work period and the smaller scale work periods.

These larger scale work periods and smaller scale work periods are an essential element of the Montessori curriculum. Learning to navigate this balance over the years creates an important foundation for executive functioning.

Celebrating Individuality

Finally, and perhaps most significantly, is the respect that Montessori has for the extraordinary individuality of every human being. It not only acknowledges it and supports it, but it also recognizes that our world needs human beings with profoundly different strengths. These executive functioning skills do not all exist fully formed in 8th grade Montessori graduates. The seeds have been planted, so to speak, but it will take time for them all to flourish. Montessori does not produce or polish or make anything in graduates.

The academic and holistic curriculum gives children the gifts of deeply rooted awareness, confidence, and experience as autonomous beings with goals. But, given that every person is an individual with unique strengths and challenges, they all will come to the impressive executive functioning that Montessori promises in their own time. Similarly, each skill will show up uniquely in each person. One graduate will exhibit “sustained attention” in a different way from another graduate. In my interview, our sophomore college student sustains her attention through organization and motivation. Someone else might use other habits to arrive at the same place. The beauty of Montessori is that it provides just enough structure for a person to keep building their own scaffolding as they grow into the world and develop their own habits and goals.

The alumni mother who I spoke to shared her thoughts on this: “It is unusual for a system of education to simultaneously indulge personality discrepancies and also correct for weaknesses. Montessori doesn’t extinguish divergences in students. It allows us to hold on to the best parts of what made us all different while also holding us accountable for the ways we needed to be productive and accomplished.”

Truly, the goal of a Montessori education is not to produce graduate after graduate who all exhibit the same executive functioning skills in the same way. It is to elevate natural strengths and help provide structure and support for challenges. It is to maintain the individuality of each student, and preserve their confidence and love of learning, while also allowing them to develop the tools necessary to thrive in the world.

The goal of a Montessori education is to sustain a reverence for the dignity of every human being, and provide a path for each of them to offer their own essential gifts to the unfolding of the universe.

References

Guare, R., Dawson, P., & Guare, C. (2013). Smart but Scattered Teens. The Guilford Press.

Moffitt, T., Arseneault, L., Belsky, D., Dickson, N., Hancox, R., Harrington, H., Houts, R., Poulton, R., Roberts, B., Ross, S., Sears, M., Thomson, W., & Caspi, A. (2011). A gradient of childhood self-control predicts health, wealth, and public safety. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, 108(7), 2693-2698. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1010076108

Randolph, J., Bryson, A., Menon, L., Henderson, D., Manuel, A., Michaels, S., Rosenstein, D., McPherson, W., O'Grady, R., & Lillard, A. (2023). Montessori education's impact on academic and nonacademic outcomes: A systematic review. Campbell Systematic Reviews, 19(3). https://doi.org/10.1002/cl2.1330

Montessori and Executive Functioning: Part II

Thu, 04 Apr 2024 07:35:55 GMT

This is the second article in our spring blog series, Montessori and Executive Functioning.

As parents and educators have come to understand how important executive functioning is for a successful adult life, it has become the focus of many conversations and goals for educational practices. As more research is conducted on the relationship between executive functioning and educational practices, it has become clear that Montessori uniquely supports the development of these important life skills.

In Part I , we learned how a Montessori education helped Forest Bluff alumni to develop skills such as sustained attention, task initiation, organization, time management, and planning/prioritization . In Part II, alumni share how their schooling contributed to the development of their response inhibition, working memory, emotional control, flexibility, and goal-directed persistence .

Montessori Alumni Reflect on their Executive Functioning

Response inhibition: the capacity to think before you act

I spoke with a college senior about his relationship with response inhibition. “Being able to think before I act is more important now than ever,” he told me. “The stakes are high in college. Our work is more complicated. There is so much to accomplish, and so much involved in accomplishing it. Additionally, with the many freedoms of college, there are also many temptations and distractions. I have to make careful choices.” Response inhibition prevents us from living in a perpetual state of reacting. It allows us to consider consequences and proceed wisely.

He then reflected on how his Montessori education supported this development. “My experience with the science experiment cards in my upper elementary classroom helped me with this skill considerably. Each card would have a sequence of steps which demonstrated a simple science experiment. Failing to effectively do a step would confound the following ones. This impressed on me the importance of being discerning and making sure I was following the steps correctly.”

Students have a great deal of independence with these cards. They choose the experiment, gather the materials, perform the steps, and record the results. They are responsible for their work and the choices they make as they perform the steps, without much teacher involvement or oversight.

Our senior had more to say about his particular experience in Montessori: “Oftentimes, children learn response inhibition through positive or negative social experiences, which teach them things like manners. However, having the space to fail when working on something tangible provided a space for me to learn a different and important non-social aspect of response inhibition.”

There is an important balance of freedom and structure in the science experiment cards—the same balance that is apparent in all of the work choices available in the classroom. This gives children the space to fail, but also provides clear accountability, allowing them to recognize when they have erred. They develop response inhibition as they experience the consequences of their own decisions, and have the chance to make better choices in the next iteration.

Working Memory: the ability to hold information in your head while performing tasks

A college sophomore chose to talk to me about working memory: “At this point in my life, working memory has become crucial to my learning experience and ability. It is a skill that I’ve [really focused on] since going to college.” Working memory is what allows us to consider knowledge in our own minds as we function and produce work throughout our days.

I asked her if she had any anecdotes from her current college experience. She told me, “A specific example from my life is a lab class I took last semester. We were asked to recall notes from the previous lecture while finding tree samples, as well as recall tree identification. We were also asked to learn information while working on the trail and recall it later in the class period, and follow multi-step labs in a short amount of time.”

This class presented multiple challenges to working memory. First, the students had to bring knowledge from the classroom to the field, and then they had to bring knowledge from the field back into the classroom, all without notes. Next, they had to engage in labs that required a specific set of actions to be performed in a certain order. Activities like these are tasks for working memory, which serves what these students will need as they move into the workforce—an ability to relate and retain information in a meaningful way.

She reflected on how her Montessori education served her in these skills: “The Montessori experience inherently lends itself to working memory, because there is a process to almost everything we do. I learned how to remember and executive multi-step processes from a very young age.”

Throughout all the age levels, beginning at 18 months, the children engage in processes for every activity. There is a beginning, a middle, and an end, with many steps, which all must be completed in a certain order for a student to be successful. Because they have the freedom to engage with the process on their own, practicing and exploring through each step, they absorb the order of a process. And it becomes a natural skill for them to look for the logical steps of any activity, as well as the information needed to do the work to satisfaction, all important elements of working memory.

Emotional control: the ability to manage emotions

A Montessori graduate in her 20s spoke to me about emotional control: “My foundation for emotional regulation continues to set me apart from my peers who attended traditional schooling. I attribute my organized way of handling difficult situations and my social skills to the freedom that Montessori allowed me.”

The ability to manage emotions plays an important role in productivity and success in life. Without equilibrium, we are easily thrown off track from our goals or plans, and can struggle to make positive social connections. She went on to share, “My ability to look at social scenarios objectively and tackle obstacles with composure and logic is directly correlated to how my emotional development was supported early in life.”

Emotional regulation can be elusive. While strong feelings are not inherently negative, the inability to manage them is. One of the most powerful indicators of mental stability is the skill of acknowledging emotions without letting them overpower situations.

Our graduate reflected on how she thinks she developed this foundation: “I think my ability to emotionally regulate began with Practical Life activities when I was 18 months old. These activities taught me to follow a logical sequence of steps and gave me experiences with concentration from a very young age.”

I invited her to elaborate on how her concentration led to emotional skills.

“The ability for a young child to maintain this state of deep concentration and stick to a task for extended periods of time lays the foundation for emotional and personal development. These Montessori activities allow each child to reach a state of normalization and, as a result, create self-regulation. When a child is concentrating and in that normalized state they are in complete control of their emotions.”

Normalization is a term that Dr. Montessori used to describe the calm, content state that children enter after they have deeply engaged in productive and meaningful work. She observed that, indeed, normalization led to emotional regulation (For more information on normalization, read our blog What is Normalization?) Having the freedom to choose work that is interesting, and the time to deeply concentrate on this work, allows normalization—and emotional regulation—to flourish.

Flexibility: the ability to revise plans

I met with a mother to talk about her high school daughter’s experience during her freshman year. The concept of flexibility stood out for her as she considered her child: “She did not reveal a great deal of innate flexibility through her childhood.” She credits her Montessori experience with this development. She was not forced into flexibility by a top-down approach. Instead, she and her classmates learned to choose flexibility and how to thrive in an ever-changing world.

A student’s day in a Montessori classroom is not tightly scheduled. While there are specific and precise ways to do activities, and there is an overarching expectation that each student will complete necessary work over a period of time, they have a great deal of freedom to make choices and change plans as their social and academic needs evolve throughout the day. They practice and experience flexibility from their own initiative as they assess what they want to do with what needs to be done, and which peers and work materials are available to them. These freedoms increase as the children approach the Secondary Level—their seventh and eighth grade years.

At Forest Bluff, the ten-day Secondary Level winter trip traditionally alternates between an outdoor dog-sledding experience and travel to Washington, D.C., to learn about American government and history. In 2021, in the thick of Covid, her class had to cancel their trip to Washington, D.C., at the last minute and pivot to a different outdoor trip. Because students are so heavily involved in the planning of these trips, they were the ones responsible for making the changes in logistics and schedules. They were flexible because they had to be. They practiced their skills in the change of plans, and they viscerally experienced the drawbacks and benefits of changing the trip. “They had an entire trip changed,” her mother shared. “That’s real flexibility.”

Her daughter has brought this relationship to flexibility into her high school experience. Now, instead of being overwhelmed or rigid when circumstances change, her mother told me, “She not only can pivot easily, but she sees the benefit of it.”

Goal-directed persistence: the ability to stick with an action or activity in pursuit of a goal

An 18-year-old shared how her experience in Montessori served her ability to persist through challenges in high school. She told me that she viewed them as learning opportunities. Her perspective bolstered her persistence by giving her purpose and confidence.

“One of my first major challenges in high school was the first week of finals freshman year. I was not used to taking tests at all, let alone several per day for a full week.”

When I asked her how she had approached this time period, she told me she believed her Montessori experience actually gave her an advantage in the way she thought about finals. “Instead of viewing the week as a stressful hardship, I saw it as an opportunity to solidify all of the knowledge I had gained throughout the semester.”

Her mental shift allowed her to persist through the week and complete her exams successfully. “Because Montessori cultivated an environment that fostered perseverance and personal growth through challenges, I viewed each test as an opportunity instead of a hardship.”

I asked her how she thought Montessori specifically supported this perspective: “I remember when I was very young, I was struggling to solve an advanced problem I was encountering for the first time on the large bead frame [a math material]. After an hour of not being able to solve the multiplication problem, I became frustrated and impatient. I went and talked to my teacher who encouraged me to view every step of trial and error as part of my journey to success. That motivated me to keep attempting to solve the problem, as I knew that with each attempt I would learn more and become closer to the answer.”

This attitude towards trial and error is an integral part of Montessori, as is the understanding that challenges are an inevitable part of growth and education. Persevering does not simply mean plowing through hardship. Instead, as this high school senior demonstrated, goal-directed persistence thrives when a person has tools at their disposal for making challenges meaningful and valuable.

Look for Montessori and Executive Functioning Part III, the final article in our Spring Blog Series, which explores the role of metacognition in Montessori.

Montessori and Executive Functioning: Part I

Wed, 28 Feb 2024 09:32:08 GMT

Executive Functioning: A set of essential life skills

Research tells us that executive functioning skills are an important predictor of positive adult outcomes. They are the foundation for a productive and well-functioning life. These skills matter more than social class, measurements of intelligence, or even mistakes made during childhood and adolescence (Moffitt, et al, 2011). Executive functioning refers to the set of mental and emotional skills necessary to plan effectively, initiate and complete tasks, and solve problems. Developing these skills is a crucial part of living in a meaningful and purposeful way.

As parents and educators have come to understand how important executive functioning is for a successful adult life, it has become the focus of many conversations and goals for educational practices. Schools have sought to integrate applications into their curriculum, and practitioners offer tutoring and workshops on developing these habits for children and adults. As more research is conducted on the relationship between executive functioning and educational practices, it has become clear that Montessori uniquely supports the development of these important life skills.

A systematic review examining academic and non-academic effects of a Montessori education revealed that (along with other positive effects) Montessori has a positive effect on executive functioning (Randolph, et al, 2023). People who have attended a Montessori school have, on average, greater executive functioning than those who have attended only conventional schools.

Children in Montessori classrooms have up to three hours of uninterrupted work time; they choose what they will do and how long they will do it; they experience regulating their emotions when they concentrate deeply; and, as they get older, they propose projects to work on, determine the scope of the project, and then have time to follow through with all parts of the task. These, and many other qualities of the Montessori approach, all support development of executive functioning.

But what are the skills that make up executive function skills? How do these skills show up in Montessori alumni? And how did their educational experiences support their development?

Executive functioning can be described as including: sustained attention, task initiation, organization, time management, planning/prioritization, response inhibition, working memory, emotional control, flexibility, goal-directed persistence, and metacognition (Guare et al, 2013).

Montessori Alumni Reflect on their Executive Functioning

Sustained Attention: the ability to keep paying attention

A sophomore in college shared with me that she knows her abilities with sustained attention come from her experience in Montessori. She said, “I attribute a lot to the freedom Montessori gave me to pursue my interests and manage my time. Instead of school being a mundane task of listening to a lecturer, I associated learning with exploration and autonomy.” These positive associations ensured that her foundational relationship to her education was a positive one, giving her the groundwork for wanting to engage in work and find ways to complete necessary tasks.

I asked her to describe what this skill looks like for her today in her college experience. She answered, “Even though work can be bothersome, I have the tools and motivation to focus on one task and manage my time accordingly.”

Sometimes parents wonder if their children will retain the ability for sustained attention when they transition to a conventional school, where they aren’t allowed to pursue their interests as heartily. But in her answer to me, our sophomore shares that it has. Even when her work is “bothersome,” she finds her abilities carry through.

I asked her where she thought her skills for sustained attention were rooted now. Did it come from sheer discipline? Did it feel innate?

“I don’t think my focus is innate,” she shared. “Instead, the habits I’ve committed myself to keep me on track. Organizing my day in a planner has majorly increased my focus, a habit that started in Montessori. I write down everything I need to accomplish and prioritize the most important tasks.”

What I found striking about her discussion of sustained attention was my dawning understanding that her ability to concentrate was not a thoughtless ability. She provided a scaffolding for herself with habits and motivation that allow this skill to flourish—habits and motivation that developed in Montessori. In truth, the goal of education is not to grant every child every innate strength. It is to support them as they develop, growing towards abilities with healthy habits and coping mechanisms.

“My desire to get my work done has always pulled me back to my work,” she shared, as she reflected on her words. “I find satisfaction in completing tasks efficiently and choosing how to spend the rest of my day.”

Task initiation: the ability to get started on work that needs to be done

One parent asked her freshman son which elements of executive functioning he acquired through his Montessori experience. “All of them!” he answered earnestly. A gratifying answer, to be sure, but when pressed, he said that the concept of task initiation stood out to him. “It’s not hard for me to start doing my homework or studying for a test. I know that the earlier I start, the sooner I’ll be finished. Homework is hard, but I don’t have trouble getting started.”

He elaborated on how he saw this ability originating. “In Montessori, the teacher is not prompting you regularly to do anything. You need to get started on your own. You are the one who has to remember to start doing your work.” When I asked him what he had been experiencing in those moments in the classroom, he shared, “The teacher isn’t sitting around available to us all the time. She is working with someone else or giving them a lesson. Because of that, the students know that their work is their responsibility.”

A teacher-centered classroom by its nature revolves around the teacher. Students stop and start their work by their teacher’s instructions. But a Montessori classroom is work-centered. For the most part, the students themselves initiate their activity, giving them repeated practice in task initiation. “It wasn’t easy for me to do this when I was in the Upper Elementary,” he told me. “I had to practice getting started. But now that I’m in high school it’s something that I’m used to and can do easily.”

Task initiation plays an important role in high school, college, and beyond. This student went on to tell me more about how he saw this skill serving him in his life: “It’s a really good ability to be able to start something even if you don’t want to. You need to be able to do it to accomplish anything in life.” I asked him when he thought it would be most useful to have this ability, and his response was simple: “Task initiation is useful in almost every situation.”

Organization: the ability to coordinate or arrange in a logical order

A student currently in high school told me that he attributes his organizational skills to his time in Montessori. “In each of the classes, we had personal drawers where we kept all our work. It was our responsibility to keep that area clean and organized, and students took turns checking each other’s drawers. Having that responsibility gently instilled in me the ability to be organized.”

I asked him how he sees that manifesting in high school and he shared, “My work folders are organized. My backpack is organized. My computer tabs are organized. And anytime I notice that something is cluttered, I get rid of the stuff I don’t need. This gives me a reminder of what I need to do.”

In this comment, he reveals to me that he not only is organized, but that he intuitively understands the benefits of it. By keeping his work in order, he is able to quickly identify essential tasks, and save himself time spent wading through items that create noise. This, from a fifteen-year-old boy.

When I press him on his experience with the drawers, I ask him what else he thinks served his ability to be orderly now. Was it just the physical space of the drawers? He acknowledges that the personal responsibility instilled in projects from start to finish would have also played a role. “In high school, the teachers tell us what to do all the time. We don’t have to make many decisions or even plans. In Montessori, we were responsible for so many more parts of our work: what we were going to do, how to get started, how much to cover, when to finish. I think that we practiced organization all day every day in almost everything we did.”

In his comment, this young man expresses the beauty of Montessori. It did not do anything to him or even give him anything. Because of the freedom and responsibility it provided, he developed the skill of organization himself.

Time management: the ability to use one’s time effectively

A young woman shared her experience with time management in high school through an anecdote that occurred at the beginning of her freshman year, in the thick of the pandemic.

“I started high school when Covid really hit. One of the skills I used was being able to independently learn. We spent so much of the year on-line learning, and not in person.” This academic arrangement made it even more important for high school students to be able to manage their work and time throughout the day—ensuring they were both effective and efficient with their assignments and projects.

“Many of my friends did not do well for two whole years. That’s a long time,” she shared. “I was able to thrive because Montessori taught me how to independently learn, and stay on task.” Her independent learning meant that she was making decisions about structuring her time throughout the day, and then making sure that she completed her assignment on her own.

When I asked her how she was able to manage her time so well at such a young age, she said, “I did not need someone constantly looking over my shoulder. That was a skill that I got from Montessori.”

Because the day in a Montessori classroom is not strictly structured, the students have freedom—and the expectation—to manage their time throughout the day. As they get older, they have more and more responsibility for their work, with regular check-ins with their teacher to make sure they are making progress. They develop time management skills as they practice regular independence and accountability.

Planning/prioritization: the ability to think ahead about what needs to be done and in what order

For this trait, I had the opportunity to speak to a mother who attended Montessori school herself and who has two children who graduated from Montessori. This skill was intriguing for her because one of her children has deep inherent skills with the planning and prioritization element of executive functioning, while she and her daughter have inborn challenges in this area.

“My son, who is extremely good with his executive functioning skills, sees life from a hill. He sees everything he has to do for the next three weeks. He can prioritize and plan easily. His challenge is to not feel overwhelmed by his tasks, because he is able to see them all, but he uses his (multiple!) planners to manage what he needs to do and when.”

She went on, “On the other hand, my daughter and I only see one thing in front of us at a time. The other things are an invisible blur. We know it’s there, but it’s not present in our minds.” This can make it hard to plan, and even harder to prioritize.

I asked how Montessori has served them in their years after graduation—her successful career and her daughter’s successful first two years of high school. Clearly, their inherent challenges have not prohibited them from productivity and achievement.

“The benefit of Montessori was that we learned a lot of coping mechanisms and strategies. Starting in the Elementary, students are recording in their work journal what they are doing, as well as how much time it’s actually taking them to do something. They aren’t predicting how much time it will take yet, but they have to repeatedly reflect on how much time they spent on it and what they got done.”

She went on: “In conventional school, time is managed for you. You are in lockstep with your class. You don’t get to work at your own pace. You don’t even know what your pace is. In Montessori, the students are asked to reflect on their time in a serious way. By the time they are in Secondary Level, they are thinking ahead about how much work they have and how long it is going to take.”

Montessori students are well-versed in planning and prioritization by the time they are completing high school, and use those skills effectively for managing their work. This alumni mother reflected on how apparent this is in an older high school student: “I remember speaking to a high school teacher about a Montessori graduate who was in his class. He said, ‘It’s like he has a sixth sense of how to get work done.’”

Look for Montessori and Executive Functioning Part 2 , the next article in our Spring Blog Series. Alumni share how Montessori helped them to develop important life skills such as flexibility, emotional control, and response inhibition.

Love in Action: Community Service With Your Children

Fri, 12 Jan 2024 09:19:46 GMT

The beginning of the year provides us with an opportunity to practice intentionality and thoughtfulness in our values. We can establish these qualities into our routines, carrying them through our experiences for the rest of the year. Martin Luther King Jr. Day is an inspiration for many families as they consider how they can contribute to their community with compassion and action. January is an invitation to families to think about other people and the needs of the world around us.

Dr. Maria Montessori observed that humans are the only species who can imagine the lives of others and love people whom we have not even met. This capacity is unique to being human and is an important quality for us to encourage and nourish in ourselves and our children. Compassion and the ability to know how to help are two of the most important gifts we can give to humanity.

A Montessori Perspective on Service

There is no one-size-fits-all approach to community service with children. This concept does not belong only to Montessori, but it is a distinctive and persistent feature of the philosophy. A part of considering how best to find ways to volunteer with your children is by first understanding their phase of development. We know from Montessori’s observations that 0-6 year-olds do best with simple, hands-on activities that do not require prolonged efforts. 6-12 year-olds have a greater capacity for abstract work, and they are often motivated by social connection. 12-18 year-olds are ready for independence and deep engagement, and can understand more about why our world has the challenges that it has.

Additionally, every parent must know the idiosyncrasies of each of their children—how much to expose them to in order to cultivate their compassion and desire to help without overwhelming them. Some children can handle witnessing more of the world’s pain and needs, while others will shut down. While this capacity tends to increase with age, it also is individual to each person. A parent can best support their children when they are observant and sensitive to their personalities.

Talking About Service

Parents need to be sensitive to what kind of language their children are ready for when discussing why other families and communities have greater needs for donations than others. For the youngest children, a simple explanation will suffice: “For some families, it is harder for them to pay for the food they need. We are so lucky that we have enough. We can help make their lives easier by giving them food so they don’t have to pay for it.”

This kind of explanation works for a variety of services. Simply expressing that it is harder for other families and that your family is in a position to help creates the idea of a need for service without overwhelming their imaginations.

Older children may be able to handle more information, but parents should proceed cautiously. Children have active imaginations and porous empathy. We want them to love the world and believe in the magnitude of its goodness before presenting the entirety of the world’s problems to them. For the most part, we have the privilege of allowing the children at our school to spend their childhood unjaded so that they develop the capacity for hope. A palpable sense of hope and a belief in how good the world can be will inspire selfless action as they mature.

Ideas for Community Service

Book, Food, or Clothing Bank

These organizations all collect items such as books, food, or clothing and then distribute them to people, families, and communities who need them. Ask around your town or city to find one that has a simple donation strategy. Here in Lake Bluff, IL, where Forest Bluff School is located, Bernie’s Book Bank provides many opportunities for children of all ages to volunteer and contribute. The jobs at the facility range in simplicity. There are accessible tasks for young children, and there are more complex tasks for older children. The staff take the time to share stories about the families who are impacted by book donations, making the work feel meaningful.

For banks that don’t offer volunteer opportunities, it is easy to organize a drive, or to gather items from your house with your family. Older children can design flyers and go door-to-door in their neighborhood, collecting items from other homes. Younger children can help put food, clothes, or books in bags or boxes. They can take part in determining what they are ready to part with from your own home. And they can all help bring the items to the organizations, witnessing the smiles of the staff members and the way that their work becomes a part of greater efforts.

In all of these cases, it is important to gauge the capacity of each of your children. Parting with clothes they have outgrown is easier than parting with books that they may still love, even if they have technically outgrown them. And choosing food at the grocery store will be easier than parting with clothes. Nothing will be gained by forcing them to give things away that they are not ready to give away! If they are resisting identifying clothes or books that they do not need anymore, then leave the metaphorical door open for them: “I can see that you are still attached to your books. I love how much you love to read! I’ll check in another time to see if there are any that you are ready to give to another family.” For this child, they likely will be more receptive to a food bank. They can help you pick out their favorite kinds of canned or boxed food (or fresh food if your bank accommodates that), and then practice being generous in this way.

Cookie, Lemonade, or Hot Chocolate Stand

These kinds of stands tend to be more suited for older children, who can decide what items they will sell and help choose a charity or organization to donate proceeds to. Let them follow their passion and interest, and, to the extent that they can handle it, let them guide the research on what is important to them as they determine who to help.

The children can make signs, set up the table, prepare the food or drink in the kitchen, and then be responsible for managing the sales. Make sure they know how to tell passersby what they are raising money for! Point out to them how much people love donating for a worthy cause. Pro tip: If you have Venmo or Zelle, you can print a QR code for people to use to buy goods. This will help them catch people who do not carry cash on them.

When they finish their sale, invite them to participate in officially donating, whether it’s via check or on-line. Talk about who or what the charity serves, and when the donation acknowledgement letter arrives, give it to them so they can see the impact. Feeling pride in their work and knowing that it actually counts gives them confidence and motivation to do it again, perhaps in other ways, as they age.

A younger sibling can participate in the activity, too. Even as it may be more abstract for them to understand, it still feels good for them to know they are a part of it. Parents should exercise caution not to take over too much of the project. Let them make little mistakes or do things differently from how you would do it! If it’s your work, then it’s not theirs. Children are extremely sensitive to adult agendas and judgment, and will likely feel defeated or deflated if the activity becomes yours.

Helping Neighbors

Remember that not all community service has to be organized. Wherever you live, you have neighbors who can use assistance or help at different times. You may have an elderly neighbor who may need help shoveling their driveway, raking leaves, or bringing their newspaper to their front door. You may have a neighbor who has recently had surgery and may appreciate a home cooked meal or a grocery bag full of fresh fruits and vegetables. You may also have a neighbor with younger children, who your older child can read to or play with while their mother or father prepares dinner or washes the dishes. The possibilities are as endless as the lives of the people you know!

The beauty of learning to serve this way is that there are many options for children of different ages and abilities, as well as different spans of time and seasons. Learning to ask, “How can I help?” provides a foundation for community, friendship, and empowerment for the rest of your children’s lives.

Final Thoughts

With all the demands of the everyday world, it can be easy to let community service slip to the bottom of our to-do lists. There is, simply, so much to do. But it does not need to be complicated or perfect. It does not need to be extensive or precise. Simply speaking about it as a value, and then finding a simple, regular way to contribute to your community or your neighborhood sets the example for your children that we all exist in a web of interdependence. It shows them that we all have something to give. We can help our neighbors take out their trash, we can share cookies with the family across the street who just had a baby, and we can always add three extra cans of food for the local food pantry when we go to the grocery store.

We do not know exactly what kind of world our children will inherit as they enter adulthood. But we do know that when they step fully into it, we will need them to want to do something to make it better. This is one of our tasks as parents—ensuring that they are not helpless or hopeless. We want them to know that there is always something they can do, and that they can always be a force for goodness. The service we do with them now may look like a small tool, but it is a mighty one. It gives them hope, and it gives us hope too.

Including Children in Holiday Family Traditions

Wed, 22 Nov 2023 06:57:16 GMT

Children love family celebrations! Whether you celebrate Diwalli, Rosh Hashanah, Eid, or Christmas, our traditions and rituals are important ways that we pause to celebrate life. They are times to gather with others, share food, reflect with candlelight, perhaps sing or listen to music, dance, and tune in to our emotions. I say this last part because holiday family traditions, whether they be spiritual or not, evoke feelings of peace, joy, sorrow, memories, or some kind of emotion that can serve as a connection with others, with nature, with our creator or be a chance to check in with oneself as an individual. Involving our children of all ages in our holiday family traditions--or creating them anew as a family--is an important way to help our children create a sense of connection with others and meaning in their lives. These are opportunities to connect our children to all that is good in humanity.

Dr. Maria Montessori said: “ That humanity which is revealed in all its intellectual splendor during the sweet and tender age of childhood should be respected with a kind of religious veneration. It is like the sun which appears at dawn or a flower just beginning to bloom. Education cannot be effective unless it helps a child to open up himself to life. ”

Knowing that young children are absorbing the sounds, smells, sensations, and sights around them, we can joyfully surround them with the music, dancing, foods, and traditions of our celebrations. For older children, who are ready for a deeper understanding of symbolism, participating in creating the ceremonies of our holiday family traditions gives them a special role.

Music and Dancing in Holiday Family Traditions

Young children take great delight in dance, music, and special foods. When I took the Assistants to Infancy Montessori Training in Denver, our trainer had us walk to the park every Friday, spread out a big potluck lunch with ethnic foods we had made, and dance--yes, dance--a Greek dance as a group. We would inwardly groan as we were instructed to throw our arms over each other’s shoulders in a big circle; as the music on the recorder began, our group of 25 would begin the simple, graceful dance in the grass under the large oak trees. Within a few minutes, we would be smiling, laughing, comforted somehow by the familiarity and togetherness of the act.

By the end of the two-summer course, I came to understand what our trainer wanted us to absorb: ritual celebrations with food, music, dancing, gathering with people, are important parts of being human that all cultures practice, so we need to welcome children to join in. Whatever traditions you choose for your family, be aware of how the youngest members of your family are absorbing the experiences and developing a deep love for them.

Candlelight in Holiday Family Traditions

When our son was three years old, the only time he saw our town after dark was the one night of the year he was kept up—Christmas Eve.

“Lights! Lights! Lights!” Stanley would shout, pointing at the Christmas decorations on so many of our neighborhood’s lawns, all the way home. It must have seemed so spectacular to him, as if the world was transformed for just that night, since he was fast asleep at dusk all the other evenings of the year.

It is a fond memory, one that still makes me smile. Our son’s wonder and delight was infectious. What is it about lights? I always loved seeing our Hindu neighbors’ front bushes strung with lights around late October or early November for Diwali, and enjoyed the beautiful Menorah candles in our hallway at school during Hanukah. Even putting a candle out on a table or standing around a campfire or a fireplace warms our souls, somehow.

Have you ever noticed that most of the major religions of the world celebrate with lights? In our Elementary Level classrooms, we marvel at such similarities between our religions, and we actively seek out how human beings celebrate all over the world with many things in common. Candlelight, chanting, dancing, singing, preparing and sharing food, and prayer: these rituals transcend our beautiful differences, pointing to something truly human that bonds us together.

Suggestions For Involving Your Children in Your Holiday Family Traditions

Adolescents come to holiday family traditions with memories and an ability to pitch in and take on parts of the heavy lifting that they have watched the adults do for so many years. Plan with them ahead of time and invite them to take on some larger responsibilities, asking what they like to do most. At Thanksgiving, Christmas, or other holiday feasts, they can help with the shopping and maybe even cooking a turkey themselves or making a certain part of the meal. They can help with some of the planning and decision-making. If you are traveling, invite them to lead the family through the airport, plan some of the trip, make calls to arrange transportation, or to look out for a certain family member, such as a grandparent. Adolescents may also be interested to research a holiday like Thanksgiving, and share with the family what they learn; we might be inspired to express our gratitude and appreciation for those who lived before us in new ways.

Elementary aged children often love to help with decorating the house. My mother used to put me in charge of creating decorations for the dinner table, for instance. We would collect a pile of cardboard, colored construction paper, colored pencils, markers, glue and tape. Our own two children once made an entire set of chairs and a table one inch high out of brown construction paper, complete with miniature plates, and everything they imagined the first peoples in America to celebrate their harvests may have had at their feasts. This was our centerpiece on the Thanksgiving table. At Christmas, they would make decorations again, and make personalized creations for each table guest.

Children under the age of six are wonderful sous-chefs. They can help to wash or chop food, shuck corn or pull the ends off green beans, and scrub potatoes. They may be helpful in bringing out the pots and pans you ask for, line them up on the counter in the order of use, clean them in the sink when cooled, and collect the odds and ends that are needed for the meal, like mixing bowls, wooden spoons, timers, or meat thermometers.

The point is to give them things to do and include them in holiday family traditions whenever they are around. If they participate in the kitchen, they are building memories with you; if they wander off, just enjoy your peaceful time alone! Invite your children with a welcoming spirit. If you are relaxed and enjoying your own time in the kitchen, your children will internalize that preparing this meal is a special tradition.

Keep Holiday Family Traditions Simple

With infants and little children , it is the awe, the wonder, and the magical feelings of peace and of closeness with others that will imprint on their little souls. Keep this in mind: less is more.

They will get more out of a cup of hot chocolate on the couch with you after a walk in the snow than many of the hyped-up activities we think we “should” drag them around to! I used to love sitting on the couch and reading the beautiful Christmas picture books we had collected over the years as a family. Even elementary-aged children love to revisit their old favorites. Some families enjoy re-reading Dickens’s A Christmas Carol each year to the elementary-aged children and adolescents, or bundling up for a morning walk on the vacation days. Whether it be playing music through the house or lighting candles in the evening, do so with the intent to slow down and savor the moments.

Gifts and Presents

When it comes to giving, many families have found pleasant ways to include their children in preparing food for others or serving someone in need. If you are purchasing gifts for your children, take into account their developmental needs and interests, and again, the most meaningful gifts are often the most simple. To help you in your quest to find useful and meaningful gifts for Montessori children , see the following suggestions made by our Forest Bluff Directors, and remember that less really IS more when it comes to meaningful gift giving!

Young Children's Community (Ages 15 months - 3 years)

Books ( YCC booklist )
Ride-on toys
Magnetic blocks
Wooden toys
Blocks
Push wagon
Brio Train set
Shape sorters
Stamps w/ink
Wooden puzzles w/small knobs and realistic images

Glue Stick
Crayon Rocks
Children's scissors
Stacking boxes
Nesting bowls
Simple jigsaw puzzles
Bead stringing
Tableware
Cleaning tools ( broom, mop, apron, Swiffer, etc .)
Ironing board ( child-sized ) w/travel size iron

Primary (Ages 3 - 6 years)

Books ( Primary Level booklist )
Schleich animals
Wooden doll house
Tea set
Dress-up materials
Magnetic blocks
Wooden blocks (large set)
Marble mazes
Tinker Toys
Lincoln logs ( classic wood )
Magna-tiles
Board games

Shut-the-Box ( game )
Color Connect ( game )
Simple memory games
Puzzles ( 24-200 pieces )
Tangram Set
Color Cube
Terrarium
Cooking utensils ( child size )
Magnifying glass
Globe
Paper dolls
Colored pencils ( high quality )

Elementary (ages 6 - 12 years)

Books ( Elementary Level booklist )
Atlas of history
No Checkmate ( Montessori version! )
Chess set
Four in a Row ( game )
Mastermind ( game )
Compass
Binoculars
Microscope
Chemistry set
Reading lamp
Journal/diary
Office supplies
Desk
Calligraphy set
Scrapbook
Acrylic paint set
Origami
Spirograph
Model kits
Project Materials ( cardboard, duct tape, etc .)

Carpentry equipment
Tool Box Set
Globe/Atlas
Starfinder
Telescope
Kinex
Erector set
Snap Circuits Jr ( or Pro )
Circuit board
Sewing Box
Knitting set ( needles, yarn, patterns )
Needlepoint
How-to books ( knots, Morse code )
Cookbook
Plants/animals to care for
Gardening tools ( shovel, work gloves etc )
Sports equipment ( roller skates, fishing pole, archery, baseball, sled, ice skates, cross country skis, etc .)
Skating, swimming, violin, etc.

Secondary (ages 12 - 14 years)

Books ( Secondary Level booklist )
Biographies and science books such as The Innovators by Walter
Isaacson
Guidebook for your local city
Board games ( adult level )
Cards ( and a book of card games )
Jigsaw puzzles (1000 pieces )
Local topographic map
Historical map ( of your town or region )
Paint supplies ( acrylics, brushes, canvas )
Sketching Set ( pencils, charcoal etc )
Sewing box
Sewing machine
Needlepoint

Wood carving ( whittling knife etc )
Saw/mitre box
Models ( more intricate )
Orienteering books/compass
Snow shoes
Winter goggles
Sleeping bag
Camping backpack
Headlamp
Pocket knife
Camera
Membership ( Botanic Garden, Museums, etc .)

For all Ages

Bird feeder
Craft ( embroidery, sewing, etc .)
Art materials ( quality )
Musical instruments ( with quality sound )
Trip to farm/historical site/museum

Magazines ( National Geographic, Cooks Illustrated, Smithsonian, Scientific American, Chicago Wilderness )
Tickets to play/musical/concert/sporting event ( Don’t forget about local high school or college performances! )

Reflections on the Gift of a Montessori Education

Wed, 01 Nov 2023 06:46:29 GMT

A Montessori education is a unique gift that parents are able to give their children. If you are at our school, you have experienced what this beautiful environment is like for families. Recently, a family with four children who have experienced many different schools over the last decade joined our school. Their mother wrote a moving letter about what the transition to Forest Bluff has done for each of their children. It was a meaningful message that inspired the teachers, founders, and administration, and we share it with you here.

Dear Forest Bluff School teachers, founders, and administration,

I wanted to write to thank you for the overflowing Blessings you have given our family.

Traditional School versus Forest Bluff School: Same tree, different soil.

It matters to God what we do with this life.

In our family we can trust our children to God and know our role as parents will change alongside them over time. A dinner table question we ask regularly is: “Was there a moment today when you felt like you were the best version of yourself?” One challenge that has come up is: How can we ask our children to be their best selves when the schools they attend do not know how to offer an environment that inspires them to find that version?

As a military spouse, moving is a frequent part of our lives. As a Montessori guide, I continue to learn how important the prepared environment is, and we work to create a homebase that accommodates and inspires our changing needs. As parents with young children, we have been able to control what is essential inside the home. I spend a great deal of prayer time thinking about landscape. Landscape is different from a prepared environment. It is something we encounter rather than create. Landscape includes the past, the present, and the future. We have been blessed to have four healthy and joyful children, but often the landscape makes the planting and growing season extremely difficult.

The analogy I keep visualizing on our journey is: same tree, different soil. As we move about, we have encountered blessings in different ways from the world around us, but the schools consistently fall short with providing the essential minerals for each of us. Paula Lillard wrote: “The key to all this positive self-formation is the establishment of the proper surroundings.” We have long awaited to find a school that not only saw our children with the dignity that we saw in them, but also allowed our family to learn and grow alongside them. Same tree, better soil.

The greatest gift of attending Forest Bluff School is the invitation to dive deep into a fertile soil that knows the essential needs of the living things who encounter it. It helps close the gap between how you are acting and who you want to be. Paula Lillard also wrote, “When we learn to observe and recognize these powers within children, we gradually begin to see the many ways that we inadvertently put obstacles in the way of their full development into a mature child by age twelve and a mature young adult by age eighteen. It is the prolonged work and concentration, freely chosen by the children and thereby reflecting their innate interests, that produces this transformation in personality and behavior.”

I observe that Forest Bluff raises intellectual virtues ahead of skills and knowledge.

Our oldest came home from the first day of school and shouted, “It feels like I am on summer vacation because I can finally work!”

In the FBS landscape children have “freed up the energy within them to explore and discover the world around them” (Paula Lillard and Angeline Lillard).

This allows the children to enter a state of flow. It looks like the children are on a spiritual retreat. I am witnessing these phenomena firsthand on school grounds.

E.M. Standing wrote, in the introduction to the Child in the Church: “I believe that God gave me this method in order to advance the kingdom of God.” I can see this in our community. I can see this in the FBS soil. We can all be like this, given the right environment.

There are hardly words to thank you for inviting us to experience this landscape. It is making a difference in our inner and outer work. John O’Donohue discusses “The Inner Landscape of Beauty.” He shares that landscapes awaken each of us and act like a “huge wild invitation to extend your imagination.” Our experience for the last four months at FBS has felt like this kind of awakening. I want to give examples of how FBS has helped change each of our children in the past months.

Our Oldest Daughter

Before Forest Bluff School:

Since birth, our oldest has been a brave, sensitive, and fiercely independent child. Raised with a “Montessori Mindset,” she was accustomed to living in a prepared environment, but she struggled with the culture of schools we enrolled her in on our journey. The main challenges she faced were a rigid environment and adults who focused on her weaknesses while discouraging her strengths. Constant testing put her on edge, raised her anxiety around learning, and placed her in competition with her peers. Her strengths, such as independence and cooperative/group learning, were discouraged by the factory model and empty vessel system of traditional education. If you asked her what she was studying or what book she was reading, she would say, “I don’t know.” Reading has been challenging for her and as time went on, we found her unable to enjoy reading because every ounce of her energy was being used to tackle 2-hours of adult-dependent homework (often on screens). By 11-years-old, our daughter was a ball of stress that could only find “flow” at home with the family.

At Forest Bluff School:

Within the first day of joining the Upper Elementary classroom, a weight was lifted and our daughter appeared lighter in heart and mind. She kept asking me if she was working hard enough because the stress had melted away. She was free to move, choose, and dive deep into her interests. Within weeks she was waking up and announcing the work she wanted to accomplish during the day and finding space to do chores that far exceeded our family’s expectations. For the first time since we could remember, she had available energy. The 60-minute independent reading requirement at FBS was new to her. In many ways, she didn’t know what to read and how to begin. Then the most amazing thing happened, there was enough time and space in her day to escape into the world of stories. She has always been the first to story time at our daily family read-aloud but she has never gotten “lost” in a book on her own. Within one month she was setting personal records of reading 100 pages in a day! This love affair is one that has to be found. FBS gave our daughter permission to make time to fall in love with reading.

Our Oldest Son

Before FBS:

Things have always come easily for our oldest son—walking, reading, and general problem-solving. Watching him develop has reminded me of a lecture I attended called “Good at Doing Things: Montessori Education and Higher Order Cognitive Functions” by Dr. Steven J. Hughes. He was just good at doing things. He was soaking up the Montessori home and all the activities like a little “model” on the Montessori Psycho/Motor Timeline Chart. We decided to homeschool him because of our military lifestyle, the pandemic, and financial challenges. When we arrived in Illinois he started at a local conventional school. It was fascinating to watch him move from a Montessori learning environment to chrome books, spelling tests, and a “busy” day without solid concentration. He went from creating timelines and maps that thrilled him to being required to use a math website called Freckle. Freckle is an online program that placed him in direct competition with his classmates and moved the focus from learning mathematical concepts to winning and being first in his class. He cared more about his external development than his internal one. It was a paradigm shift that was changing his priorities and focus from self-formation to conforming to an educational model that doesn’t encourage critical thinking.

At FBS:

Our son explained his transition to FBS as “freedom to work.” He announced how awesome it was to finally get the time and space to learn. One aspect of child development that challenges him is his desire to “go with the flow.” Now that he is at the age of Moral Formation, surrounding him with positive adults, peers, and a learning environment will help prepare the soil for healthy growth. He finds joy in the work at FBS, and our family appreciates the environment to inspire and nurture our virtuous boy into a well-rounded young man.

Our Younger Daughter

Before FBS:

Our younger daughter’s first experience in a school setting was her first-grade year at a local conventional school. For the first 6 years of her life she loved our Montessori homeschool. By the time she arrived in Illinois we were living in her 7th house, and adaptability was part of her character. She adapted to the surroundings beautifully at her new school. Unfortunately, it was obvious that she was becoming accustomed to a new set of priorities and expectations that were different from our home. She was given a punch card to get up to two punches per day for “good behavior” and she spent most of her day doing worksheets. She prided herself on her daily accomplishments of two punches and 100% on all her spelling tests. While she was seemingly thriving, it was clear to see that her “accomplishments” were based solely on extrinsic rewards that celebrated her obedience to authority and rules, rather than creativity or critical thinking. This excitement soon fell short when she was home sick. Her teacher sent home 21 pages of worksheets for missing one day of school. It became crystal clear that her days were spent churning out busy work, without any freedom to follow her interests.

At FBS:

Arriving at Forest Bluff was like a homecoming for our younger daughter. She felt free to explore, concentrate, move, and find meaningful work. She began to feel seen as an individual with unique gifts, interests, and endless creativity. It was a true homecoming for her. Her dignity was restored and her passion for learning was reawakened.

Our Youngest Son

Before FBS:

Our younger son is the youngest in our family. I have read that there are eight common characteristics of the youngest children:

Attention Seeking.
Manipulative.
Spoiled.
The “Family Pet”
Rule-Challengers.
Affectionate & Charming.
Easygoing and Carefree.
Persistent.

Our son was 3 years old when we arrived in Illinois, and he was on his way to being a poster child for a typical baby of the family. When he began in a conventional school for the first time, it felt great to know that he was able to head into a classroom and be kind to others. We were thrilled that he was able to cooperate with societal norms despite his spoiled nature at home. It was exciting to see him leave the nest and do good things in community. As the year progressed, my Montessori heart saw he was regressing in his ability to think on his own and explore his interests. He was bringing work home that looked like adult crafts, and much of his day was playing “make believe.” We made a routine when I picked him up: we would go to a nature preserve and then head home for “school.” We researched, practiced sounds, and explored the world around us. He was hungry for all of it. All was well, but the three hours of preschool was clearly daycare.

At FBS:

Our younger son felt like a gamble when it came to our transition, but he courageously accepted the midyear change. It was hard to imagine him giving up the “good life” of goldfish, lollipops, and dress-up. I wasn’t sure how much he would allow himself to enjoy FBS if he was so used to adults doing most of the heavy lifting for him. It took one week for him to understand the thrill of hard work. He saw that FBS had an environment that was made with the precision to meet each need or interest of his. He was blown away by the kindness of his guides and the design of his new surroundings. He had found the school he didn’t realize he needed to help recenter his greatest gifts. Soon he was coming home as if he had been at a retreat rather than a birthday party. He found his new favorite place.

Thank You

I want to thank you and your school from the bottom of our hearts for changing the trajectory of our lives. We are merely pilgrims on this journey here. It often feels that we can never be the people we are supposed to be when we move around so often. We find ourselves in places that are not home, but we must find belonging. There was a lecture at the AMI refresher course in 2021 titled, “Becoming and Belonging.” As we are becoming and belonging, your family and school have offered us a well-lit path, and we can never truly articulate the depth of this gift. We can promise you that we will cherish it and use the experience with gratitude throughout our days. Dorothy Day encouraged us, “to make the kind of society where it is easier to be good.” You are doing just this. I now look at our family at Forest Bluff and trust we are on a well-lit path. I hear the words of St. Catherine of Siena, “Be who God meant you to be and you will set the world on fire.” Thank you for inviting us into your landscape.

With Love, Light, and Gratitude,

Our Family

Ready for School!

Tue, 12 Sep 2023 06:37:53 GMT

“When my 18-month-old daughter walks into that Montessori classroom, she seems to stretch up taller,” an astonished Forest Bluff parent once told me.

For sure, many children do exhibit pride and self-confidence when they are supported to be appropriately independent, from both home and school. We talk a lot about how and why Montessori’s approach has this effect at school. But what about the support from home? As your family makes the transition from summer to fall, and returns to the school routine, there are important ways to support your children to get the most from their educations (and from this stage of life).

I’ll call this approach RAISIN so you can remember the main points: Routine, Activity, Independent self-care, Sleep, Intellectual curiosity, and Nutrition. We’re “RAISIN” these children together! Let’s explore each of these points:

Routine

We recommend providing some quiet downtime after school each day, and a period of physical activity: reading and playing outside. Afterwards, invite your children to participate in simple household tasks such as preparing meals, cleaning, laundry, or any other contributing role and preparing for the next day, before dinner. Every day does not have to be the same, but having a general routine supports us all, and routine is especially important for young children who need reliable consistency to develop a sense of order and an organized mind.

Activity

More than ever, many children are being restricted from moving and are living fairly sedentary lives. This is unhealthy on multiple fronts. Being active—crawling, pulling up, walking, running, climbing, tumbling, rolling—in playful ways should be part of every day. Every time I see a child in a wagon or a stroller when they could be walking, it gives me a pang! Of course, there are times when doing this is practical, but as often as possible, encourage your children to do the walking, pushing, pulling, and carrying. Traveling through an airport is a great time to let everyone in the family bring their own belongings along. Recently I saw a father with three children, each pulling their own rolling suitcase and carrying a tiny backpack. The youngest child was probably about three years old. Smart, smart man! Those children looked happy and capable.

Besides playing freely, activity can be in everything your child does around the house: raking leaves, sweeping the patio, watering plants, helping you organize the garage or basement, cleaning a cupboard in the kitchen, scrubbing the tile floor—you name it! These activities are actually fun to children, as long as they get to do it with you and you’re cheerful about being together. Short and sweet works well.

Independent Self-Care

It is natural for children to want to do things for themselves. This is where they get their self-esteem from, so don’t miss any opportunities to support them to do things for themselves. This can mean putting themselves to sleep at night after you give your last snuggle and close their bedroom door; it can mean setting up the kitchen so that they can reach their own dishes and set their own low table for meals; it can mean supplying child-sized cooking utensils so they can prepare meals alongside you every day; it can mean setting up accessible spaces where they can keep their own shoes and coats, and providing a basket with two choices of outfits for the following day so they can dress themselves on their own. We tend to do entirely too much for children, treating them like dolls to dress, feed, wipe and prop up. But this gives them the messages that they are incapable! Although they are born without these abilities, our job as parents is to show them how to care for themselves as soon as they can physically do these actions. I believe that nothing could be more joyful than sharing your children’s growing independence with them. It is so much fun!

Sleep

The importance of a good night’s sleep is finally gaining attention in the medical and science literature. This is not only critical for mood, the immune system and physical growth, but for mental development as well. It is crucial that we help children to develop a reliable sleep schedule and to get adequate sleep. Do everything you can to prioritize this, especially as you transition from summer life to the school routine. This means slowing the family down after dinner and getting everyone into bed early. Maintaining an evening reading habit helps this tremendously!

Intellectual Curiosity

Fostering intellectual curiosity can be enjoyable and meaningful for your whole family. You don’t have to be “brainy” to have fun learning new things or to take an interest in the world around you. This mainly means modeling for your children and conversing with them, observing your surroundings and wondering aloud. You might study an instrument, read a bit of history, find out about an insect, plant or animal, look over the atlas together, and read books—lots of books!

Reading cannot be overestimated as the primary mode of educating oneself about the world and developing a habit of intellectual curiosity, empathy for others, and imagination for creative thought. Read aloud to your children until they can read to themselves—every single day—and then keep reading aloud to them! Reading is our Forest Bluff School “homework” for a reason: it’s the best way to help your children build their minds and interests.

Remember the days of sitting around the dinner table talking (without phones, screens, or distractions)? We highly recommend cultivating this habit in your family. On weeknights at least, this custom meets many criteria at once!

Nutrition

The more I learn about how food affects our health, mood, energy, and metabolic system, the happier I am that my husband and I gave our children only healthy eating choices when they were young. Breakfast, lunch, dinner, and snacks consisted of vegetables, clean meat, either rice, beans, wheat bread or potatoes, and fruit. We simply didn’t have junk food or high sugar foods around. We didn’t bring it into the house. When we went out, we gave them choices from a menu, but we narrowed the choices to healthy, balanced meals. It did not feel mean or strict because we knew this was the way to give our children the best start in life—both physically and in building habits and tastes. We ate the same things in their presence, and we chose things we loved to eat. (For a sweet treat, ice cream was on our list, of course!)

The same was true when it came to preparing our children for the day and giving them choices for making their lunches. True fact: children are MUCH more likely to eat their lunches at school if they make them themselves, and they will eat just about anything when they are at school! This makes it the perfect place to supply only healthy food!

Having been a teacher for years, I observed how what children put into their bodies affects their energy level and, especially, their ability to concentrate and learn. It is worthwhile to learn some basics about nutrition when you are a parent, so that you can pass the basics on to your children. Food choices and healthy eating need not be negative. Examine your own attitudes about food so you can pass on positive messages about nourishing one’s body to feel great throughout the day. This is your chance: while your children are young.

Final Thoughts

As you return to school this fall, think of these practices, and please ask your Forest Bluff Directors for help or ideas in any of these categories. They are so knowledgeable and have so much personal experience with families. We’re here to help you in the most important task of your life: “RAISIN” your children with joy!

Is it Time for the Montessori Movement?

Thu, 17 Aug 2023 06:29:39 GMT

Montessori vs. The Conventional Model

Anyone who has seen a Montessori school understands that it is fundamentally, startlingly different from a conventional education. While students complete their experience at a Montessori school with similar academic abilities as their counterparts in conventional schools, they go about these acquisitions in a completely different way. A Montessori education is, at its core, a child-centered education. This does not mean that children do whatever they want while they are at school. It means that the approach assumes that the child is an active agent in their educational experience, and that they will construct themselves, given the right structure, guidance, and materials in their environment.

The formal schooling that is familiar to American culture today originated hundreds of years ago in monasteries. It further solidified its methodology in the late 1800s and early 1900s when industrialization was introduced to the United States, and schools began to depend upon the “factory model” to produce good workers en masse. Since then, study after study in the field of child development has confirmed that this is not the ideal way for children to learn. Yet, when universities, schools, and lawmakers propose improvements to the educational system, they simply add on to a system that is already not working well, by (for example) increasing testing, making rewards even more compelling, and dividing children into even more pronounced groups by ability and age.

Where Do We Go From Here?

In Dr. Angeline Lillard’s new article, Why the time is ripe for an education revolution , which was published in Frontiers in Developmental Psychology, she argues that this is a cultural moment when the educational system ready for a paradigm shift - one that would move away from a fundamentally teacher-text-centered (TTC) base and towards child-environment-interplay (CEI), which recognizes that “A child develops into an adult by constructing an elaborate representation of self and world, and learning to interact with and exercise agency in that world. This development occurs in a dynamical, non-linear fashion across childhood” (Lillard, 2). The CEI model is supported by modern research and is an ideal fit with Montessori.

Lillard supports her argument by comparing today’s cultural climate to the factors at play in the 1500s when astronomers moved away from an earth-centered view of the universe to a helio-centered view of the universe. While there were recognized flaws in the previous understanding of the universe, it wasn’t until certain cultural elements were present in the 1500s that civilization as a whole was ready to transition to the realization that the sun was at the center of the universe. Just as in education, simply knowing that something isn’t working often isn’t enough. Human nature is compelled to continue to make adjustments and explanations for what already exists rather than leaping to a brand new perspective.

As it was 500 years ago, Lillard believes that the world is ready to make the leap to a new approach to schools. The time is ripe for an education revolution. And Montessori is ready for it.

The Leap of Faith: An Interview with a Montessori Alumni Parent (and Teacher)

Fri, 09 Jun 2023 06:18:12 GMT

A Montessori education can feel like a bit of a mystery for parents. With no testing, no grades, no classroom volunteers, no weekly emails with photos, it’s natural for parents to wonder, “What’s going on in there?” While Forest Bluff School offers opportunities for parent education with tours, book discussions, evening events, a yearly parent visit in the classroom, and an invitation to always call a teacher or member of the leadership team with questions or concerns, it is undeniable that choosing a Montessori experience for your child requires a leap of faith.

Few people are better equipped to talk about that leap of faith than Sarah Robbins. Her experience with Montessori in general and Forest Bluff in particular is multifaceted. She is, first of all, a parent of two Forest Bluff graduates, who both attended from the age of one through eighth grade. Her older daughter attended the local public high school and is now a freshman in college, and her younger daughter is currently finishing up her freshman year at that same high school.

Sarah herself taught at Forest Bluff directly after her Montessori training. She taught for five years in the 9-12, three years in the 6-9, and then moved to New York, but traveled with the Secondary Level class on many of their trips. She moved back to the area in 2006 with her husband and older daughter, and taught the Secondary Level for ten years with her husband. She is currently in her seventh year teaching in the 6-9 again. Sarah has encountered hundreds of the Forest Bluff graduates of the past 30 years, and taught most of them.

I myself am a graduate of Forest Bluff School, and while I have experienced it as a student and as a teacher (although for a much shorter period than Sarah), I have still not witnessed the transition from eighth grade to high school as a parent. While I intrinsically have faith in the process because I lived it, Sarah offers a perspective that goes beyond the student experience. She can speak about the concerns and questions of parents who are watching their children navigate this unfamiliar education. And she can bear witness to the hundreds of different students she saw make their way through the Montessori program and find fulfillment and productivity in their lives.

When I sit down with Sarah, on a dreary Saturday morning inside of a bustling coffee shop, and we discuss the premise of this interview, she immediately turns to a metaphor Dr. Montessori used to share. “It’s like when you plant a bulb,” she says. “You water it and fertilize it and wait for it to grow. And the temptation is to keep pulling the plant out to make sure the roots are growing. But every time you lift the plant out of the ground, you interfere with the growing process. You have to just let it grow.”

Dr. Montessori used to tell this story as a caution for overeager parents and teachers, who were tempted to continually check on a child’s progress—quizzing them on where they are in the process and what they know. This reassurance is relief for the adults but interrupts the child in their growth. Every time the plant is pulled out, the process is interrupted. We must have faith, trust the process, and, rather than scrutinizing the roots, watch for the blooms. That is how we know the child is growing.

What was it like to bring your daughter to Forest Bluff as a parent for the first time?

“It was great,” Sarah says. “All the things that I had been missing were there. A community is so important when you are raising your child—especially when you are doing it differently from the cultural norm.” Sarah says that she was calling Haley Tate (Young Children’s Community Teacher and current Assistant Head of School) regularly before coming back to the Midwest, and writing letters with Paula Lillard (Founder of Forest Bluff and current Head Emerita). Most of what she received from them was “perspective taking,” as she calls it. “Older people who come before us share wisdom with us—the wisdom that comes from being a part of the community where the parents are deeply committed to this way of raising children.”

Our school is small, and because of the emphasis on the continuum of a Montessori education, parents encounter each other again and again throughout the years, sharing knowledge, experience, and perspective. Sarah was on the receiving end of this wisdom for many years, and at this moment I think to myself (not for the first time) how lucky I am to be on the receiving end of her wisdom.

Not only do parents learn from each other, but in a place like Forest Bluff, she says, the parents and teachers work collaboratively together over the course of three years to support the children. They ask again and again, “How can we help this child who is a part of both of our lives?” Sarah shared how grateful she is that her daughters had teachers who were so positive about them. “They saw my children in a different way. They helped me to reframe my struggles with them.” These gifts allowed her to continue to see the best in her daughters and support them in their development.

Did you ever have any doubts about a Montessori education?

“Yes,” she answers, right away (in case anyone thinks that Montessori teachers don’t have their own concerns). “There were times during their experience when I had natural doubts about whether it was working.” There were times she worried when she couldn’t see academic abilities improving. There were times she worried about what they were accomplishing and if they were making enough progress. Just like the analogy with the plant that Sarah shared at the beginning of our conversation, it is clear that she, too, was tempted to pull them up by their roots to make sure they were growing. Faith is not always a constant. Trust must be earned and re-earned, through conversation and reflection. “In the end, I kept them at Forest Bluff because, no matter what I was worried about, I knew it was worth it.”

How did you decide that staying at Forest Bluff was worth it?

“By the time I had any questions of my own, I had already seen hundreds of students graduate from Forest Bluff. I saw children who I personally taught—many of whom had their own distinctive challenges—who were doing beautifully in high school and college,” Sarah tells me. This is a place where her unique seat in the audience was able to give her faith to carry through. Seeing child after child graduate and excel in their own individual ways helped her to see all the ways that this could work out for her girls. And gave her the confidence to believe in the program.

“It’s important to keep in mind,” she says, “that whatever my daughters didn’t learn or didn’t get is an integral part of their journey too.” In the areas where they didn’t excel, they learned how to make up for that and get the support they needed. “They have an ability to talk to adults realistically. They believe that adults are there for support and to work collaboratively. They know how to get help.” Ultimately, this will serve them for the rest of their lives. No one excels in everything. Everyone needs to learn how to objectively assess their strengths and weaknesses, and seek support when they need it.

“Montessori is an education for life,” Sarah says. “It is so much more important for your child to develop the skills that you don’t see right away. Scrubbing a table isn’t really about scrubbing a table. It’s about concentration, process, hand-eye coordination. In the same way, doing fractions is only kind of about doing fractions. It’s about developing a mathematical mind, learning how to work and problem-solve, learning how to work with other people, learning how to check your answers and get help when you don’t know.” For all these reasons, Sarah stays committed to a Montessori education for her children and for the children she teaches.

What are the ways you’ve seen Montessori come to fruition for your daughters after graduating?

Sarah shares that she has seen Montessori allowing her children to blossom not just in their areas of strengths, but in their areas of challenge. “My older daughter had a struggle with one of her high school teachers. She was having trouble in the class. Her solution was to go and talk to her teacher every day. One day she came home and said, ‘Mom, I think she’s just lonely. Her ankles hurt and she doesn’t have anyone to talk to. She’s an interesting person and she’s traveled everywhere.’” While it is perhaps beside the point, Sarah shares that her daughter ended up with an A in the class.

This same child, who did not love math in high school, went to college and said, “I miss math. I’m going to take a math class. I miss using that part of my brain.” As in the previous example, while perhaps beside the point, she got an A in her college calculus class. Sarah reflects that because she hadn’t felt graded or judged during her formative years, she didn’t have ideas about what subjects she could or couldn’t do. She learned holistically as a child, and when options in college opened up for her, it was natural for her to be drawn back into that way of life.

“Both my girls are willing to try anything. Nobody ever told them they couldn’t do something,” Sarah tells me. Because of this, they both feel they can try new things. The Montessori environment gave them confidence and proactiveness. It gave them the feeling that the world was meant for exploring and learning.

How does the Montessori classroom encourage a child to explore and learn?

“When I think about my class, I know I could show them so many things, but there is tremendous value in their own exploration. We have to leave them time for it. Otherwise we get in this mentality of cramming things in. We say, ‘Wouldn’t it be cool if you could show them mammoths virtually?’ But they stop wondering the minute you give them answers. It’s not theirs anymore.”

This line gives me pause, and I take a moment to reflect on it: “They stop wondering the minute you give them answers.” So much of the Montessori approach, and the idea of an education for life, is wrapped up in this quote. How much joy, motivation, and curiosity is wrapped up in the idea of wondering? And what happens when a child is in an environment that encourages them to pursue that wondering?

In Sarah’s classroom, as in all well-functioning Montessori classrooms, children wonder. Then they devise research projects, math problems, or sentences to analyze, that satisfy their wonder. They have to organize themselves and their peers, define the edges of their project, and work until they have an answer. Then they have to assess whether their wondering has been satisfied by what they have accomplished. And what is lost when they are given answers? Or when teachers “cram things in”?

Sarah goes on: “In the classroom, I show them the lessons, but I can’t make them learn things.” Of course, it is her role to show them lessons, to guide and encourage, but, as a master teacher, she recognizes that the learning ultimately comes from within. All she does is set the stage, again and again and again, until the children themselves are ready to learn.

What can we do as parents to support our children in becoming functioning, productive adults?

“Front load your parenting,” Sarah says immediately. “The work you put in now to give your children an environment where they are independent and responsible for themselves will pay off when they are in high school and college. Teach them how to cook now. Teach them how to do laundry now. You don’t want to be teaching your child how to take care of themselves on the drive to college. Save that time for other conversations.”

Then she makes an observation about a trend she sees happening at her daughter’s high school. “At her high school, there are days when school starts later. I see some parents working themselves up asking, ‘Why didn’t we know that school had a different start time today?’ Their children are in AP Calc! And they can’t get to school on time by themselves!”

This anecdote highlights one of the main differences between a conventional education and a Montessori one. “It’s the difference between being propped up from the outside rather than built up from the inside. Traditional education scaffolds from the outside, but Montessori builds from the inside. That’s why we can’t see it.”

Sarah has brought us back to the anecdote about the plant again. The roots are growing. It’s our role as parents to keep watering, keep tending, keep parenting, with the knowledge that our children are building themselves from the inside—where we can’t see it. An AP calculus class won’t prove that they are growing up. Knowing how to get themselves to school on time will. It’s our leap of faith, believing that when the time comes for them to go to high school, college, and beyond, they will be able to care for themselves.

How do you think Montessori shapes the way children see themselves?

“Taking the leap of faith is telling your child—ultimately, it’s on you. Both of my children came into this world with the understanding that their life is their own. I am here to support them and lovingly guide them, but I want them to have a feeling of self-agency.” Sarah adds with a smile, “It all starts with the floor bed.” (The Montessori bedroom for the young child is set up with a low futon on the floor rather than a crib, so that infants can explore a child-safe room rather than waiting for their parents to get them out of bed.)

This way of supporting children affects how they view themselves and their capabilities. They see themselves as having autonomy and purpose in their own lives. Sarah goes on: “With a Montessori experience, children practice making choices and being agents of their own learning from the time they are born. They know what they like, and what they don’t like. They have an identity and agency to move forward. That doesn’t necessarily happen when you’re never given choices. When they are doing things, they are building their identity. Everything they do is purposeful in some way. It’s all about the environment. If they are sitting in front of a screen, or learning passively, they’re missing out on making choices. Those are the choices that are leading to their development. Whether they choose to spend their free time baking, knitting, building forts outside—it all becomes part of them and their competence.”

When children have this experience repeatedly through their childhood years—both at home and in the classroom, they inevitably develop the sense that they have agency and a developed identity, and that the world is there for them to engage with and learn from.

Sarah tells me, “Conventional school takes children out of their natural state by constantly keeping them from following their instincts. When that happens for years and years…” She trails off, but the implications are clear. A child who is supported in following positive natural instincts will see themselves as the agent of their lives. They understand, as Sarah said, that their life is their own.

How does Montessori shape how we see our children?

“Parents today see this world of opportunities for their children—they can be math geniuses, fluent in another language, have an Etsy account where they sell their handmade goods, or be sports stars. It’s enticing to think that you could give your child everything. Or that they could be all these things. Parents are being sold this idea of their children.” She adds, “We have to resist.”

Then she goes on: “We have to see our children for who they are—with all their strengths and challenges—and help them make the most of themselves in their world.”

This is a different way of viewing children: “We can either see them as a product or as a person. They are going to be who they are. It’s their task in this world to be just who they are. Not someone else.”

Montessori provides an environment where the goal isn’t a shiny, flashy end product. The goal isn’t a child who’s been crammed full of as much knowledge and information as the teacher can get in there. It isn’t a high school student who takes AP Calculus but can’t—or won’t—set their alarm to get to school on time.

Sarah shares another analogy with me: “I heard somewhere that the question isn’t really whether the glass is half-full or half-empty. It’s whether there’s enough water to satisfy your thirst. To me, this is how I want to view children. I don’t need to view them as more than they actually are, or less. I want to view them as enough—as they are.” The Montessori approach allows us to see children as they are—with their strengths and challenges—and encourages them to develop and make the most of their strengths, while also being honest about their challenges. We can see them realistically, and they can see themselves realistically also, which allows them to thrive, try new things, and get the help they need when the situation calls for it.

Final Thoughts

In the days that follow my talk with Sarah, it is this last analogy that stays with me. It’s easy to swing between being too hard on our children and being unrealistic about their strengths. It’s tempting to dream about all the things they could be, and then try to find ways to make them be all those things.

But what if I imagine that my children are neither half-full nor half-empty? What if I understand that they came into this world with enough ? Then, my role as a parent is to provide them with a learning environment that allows them to come into the fullness of who they are. It’s a space where they follow their natural impulses to learn and explore. It’s a place where they challenge themselves and develop themselves. It’s a place where they view themselves realistically, have an understanding of their strengths and weaknesses, and have no fear about trying new things.

Montessori is this place. It requires a leap of faith, yes, as we are not provided regular opportunities to scrutinize our children’s roots. But what it gives is much more. It gives our children wholeness—the unique wholeness of who they are. And a sense that they are, in the end, enough .

There’s Hope for Humanity!: Montessori Around the Globe

Tue, 09 May 2023 06:15:55 GMT

When You’re Feeling Discouraged…

When you ingest the popular news these days, you may feel very down, anxious, angry or helpless. I know I certainly do. But when I turn to see the natural world around me, the beautiful people, and especially children, I am instantly reminded of the good in the world. Maria Montessori’s vision of children’s education–and the more peaceful world she proposed would result–always inspires me and gives me strength. Lately, I have learned of some very exciting initiatives happening all around the world because of Maria Montessori! These programs are being enthusiastically embraced and are growing steadily. Any involvement with Montessori–even if it be just mentioning it to others, raising your children with a Montessori approach at home, or sending your children to a Montessori school–includes you in this path of making the world a better place!

Maria Montessori’s gravestone reads: “I beg the dear, all-powerful children to join me in creating peace in man and the world.”

A Worldly Purpose at Work

Maria Montessori’s approach of education plays an instrumental role in helping troubled communities recover equilibrium. Every issue our societies face, including climate change, injustice, violence, or scarcity of resources, can be addressed by raising children for the future who are more aware, who care, and who are confident and well equipped to make a difference with a positive path. Montessori students learn to believe in themselves, to find and trust the good where it can be found in humanity, and to respect and work with others. They are strides ahead of most adults, in many ways.

Maria Montessori herself did tremendous humanitarian work during her lifetime. She advocated for women’s rights, for the rights of infants and children, and for those less fortunate, including institutionalized and marginalized children. Such humanitarian work was revitalized by her granddaughter, Renilde Montessori and the Association Montessori Internationale. This work continues today through some growing initiatives that are making great impact in traumatized areas.

Sowing Seeds for Change Across the Globe

The Association Montessori Internationale has a division called Educateurs san Frontiers that trains teachers and helps them to make their own Montessori materials in their remote villages so that they can begin teaching with Montessori’s approach. These supported individuals have built their own schools out of local materials and are now independent and thriving. In one example, a Montessori school was started in displaced person camps in Kenya, transforming their community from squalor and helplessness to empowerment and joy. To learn more, see this amazing Montessori program called Corner of Hope .

The Corner of Hope school in New Canaan, Kenya is thriving and has become a community center. A second location has opened at a nearby location at the request of the community in Kisima. Corner of Hope has become a model for analysis and replication.

In April, I attended Montessori’s Annual Global Meeting in Delft, The Netherlands, and learned about other programs the Association Montessori Internationale has begun:

One is called Montessori for Dementia , which offers an effective and humane way to treat elders in residential living communities. In this program, caretakers learn how to support elders with dementia to exercise their memory with Montessori materials and cards, to retain their mobility with Montessori’s practical life activities, to find purpose by serving others in daily communal acts such as setting the table to eat a meal together, cleaning their surrounding environments, and caring for plants, themselves and each other.

Another is called Community Rooted Education (CoRE) , by the Indaba Institute and AMI. AMI teacher trainers and humanitarian partners have been helping people to serve their own communities by imparting Montessori principles of respect, fostering independence, and restoring dignity and sense of purpose through activity, specifically in severely distressed areas in South Africa.

In Mexico, the Association Montessori Internationale’s EsF through Montessori Mexico has helped transform orphanages, areas where violence has been high, programs for those with disabilities, adolescent communities and state prisons where women, men and children are living. Where they have had little to do and no hope or agency, they now are able to care for themselves, assist each other, build beautiful environments for living and work with Montessori materials for practical life and learning. This movement is rapidly expanding with great enthusiasm.

Another AMI program helping children internationally in orphanages and traumatized communities is called Montessori Sports . When supported with good sportsmanship and positive coaching, sports can serve children’s needs for self-expression, sensory exploration, self-actualization, and offer a way to learn about oneself, learn how to work with others, and to learn how to care for your body for life. In one girl’s orphanage in Africa, the soccer team–coached locally with AMI’s Montessori Sports program–became like a lifeline of support for the girls.

Initiatives in the United States

More locally in the United States, a Montessori organization called Montessori Partners Serving All Children (MPSAC) empowers people to begin Montessori schools in their own communities, honoring–rather than diminishing–their indigenous cultures. This organization is based in the AMI Montessori Training Center of Minnesota .

Spreading the Montessori approach has made a tremendously positive impact on the children and adults in numerous communities around Minneapolis/St. Paul. Specifically, Montessori supports indigenous and immigrant families to continue their culture and language, to celebrate their heritage, and to simultaneously learn about the culture of their surroundings, so they can thrive. Through the Montessori schools these communities have created for themselves, children develop Montessori’s fostered traits of resourcefulness, the ability to focus their attention with confidence, and to collaborate with those around them.

See inspiring videos of people from the Hmong community, Latino community, Shakopee Mdewakanton Sioux community, families living without a permanent home, and those from the American Indian Childcare Center.

A Wholistic Approach for Life

Montessori’s approach in these situations works , because Montessori responds to the child’s call, “Help Me to Help Myself!” and extends it to the adults, as well:

-It values, respects and employs each person’s gifts

-Children (& all humans!) share some basic, universal qualities & needs

-We prepare the best environment

-We model moral behavior, grace and courtesy

-We offer freedom in balance with responsibility

-We observe first, then respond to what we have observed (then repeat this pattern indefinitely)

-Montessori encourages and supports self-agency and empowerment

-Montessori is a wholistic, yet practical approach that can be implemented anywhere

Can you imagine what may happen as these efforts spread to more people? The Montessori approach–to education and to community life–is spreading and being made possible all around the world. It is gradually growing, and it is empowering children and adults to make positive changes inside themselves, and to their surroundings. As families who are growing with Montessori values, YOU are a part of this–something bigger than yourselves. Your children will be making a difference in the world, because they are learning values that are made actionable every day. This realization is a seed that I hope will give you strength and inspiration!

If you are interested in donating or learning more about the initiatives described, please see the websites provided, or give to the Montessori Global Growth Fund , which supports many of these efforts and more!

Too Young to Share: The Montessori Approach for Moving From Selfish to Selfless

Wed, 19 Apr 2023 05:18:51 GMT

If you’ve been at a playground with young children, you’ve probably heard parents imploring their children: “You need to share!” At best, a child will hand over the toy, with a look of confusion or sadness on their face. At worst (and probably more frequently), they will cling even more tightly to the toy, resulting in a tantrum or a battle of the wills. These scenes play out on playgrounds, in sandboxes, and in homes across the world. It’s a natural and well-intentioned impulse on the part of the parents, who want their children to grow up with prosocial tendencies, and an ability to think about others and make friends.

However, it is also a natural and well-intentioned impulse on the part of the child to hang on to their toys. Children don’t consciously have the same long-term goals as their parents, of course, but they are following a strong internal guide, which does ultimately want what’s best for them. A child under the age of six is “selfish” by necessity. In order to grow up to be an adult who is able to think about others and make friends, they must first go through this phase of development, where they will think almost entirely about themselves.

Planes of Development

Dr. Maria Montessori saw development as spanning four distinct planes: 0-6 years, 6-12, 12-18, and 18-24. Not until age 24 is a person’s brain fully developed. At this point they are considered a complete adult. Modern brain research supports Dr. Montessori’s observation, confirming that rapid brain development ends around age 25.

For the purposes of this article, we will only delve deeply into this first plane—a young child, between the ages of 0 and 6 years. This is an inherently and essentially “selfish” plane. During this phase, children are entirely focused on becoming functioning people, who can walk, eat, communicate, and begin to think independently. Just imagine the tremendous changes that take place between a newborn and a six year old! A newborn can barely hold up their head and can only nourish themselves when their food source is placed right next to their mouth. A six-year-old can run, swim, bike, climb a tree, make themselves a sandwich, and tell you what happened last summer.

The acquisitions that occur in the first plane of development are nothing short of miraculous. Their brains and being are focused on this extraordinary work. Given this perspective, the self-absorption of their work and understanding of the world is necessary and understandable. During these years, they aren’t meant to be thinking about others. They are meant to be employing their mental and physical efforts for their own development.

The Montessori Classroom

If you walk into a Montessori Young Children’s Community (for 1.5–3-year-olds) or Primary (for 3–6-year-olds), you will see how these individual needs are reflected in the classroom. The tables are designed for one child, the materials themselves are almost all designed for one child to use at a time, and most children will be working quietly and on their own. This is how they learn and develop. They need to be able to concentrate by themselves, and follow their own interests and impulses with the materials. They are not ready to incorporate other’s needs and desires into their work.

Dr. Montessori observed that a child before the age of 6 is a distinct being from a child after the age of 6. A young child needs individual freedom to work and explore with activities, unencumbered from the opinions and agendas of their peers. After the age of 6, they become a much more social being. In the elementary classroom, you will notice that the tables seat four, and most materials are designed for groups of children. At this age, social activity motivates them to work. It is a very different plane from the younger child!

Theory of Mind

Modern research supports Dr. Montessori’s claim. Theory of Mind refers to a person’s ability to understand someone else’s perspective. This includes grasping something as concrete as another person’s visual field, as well as the abstractions of other people’s emotions, desires, and motivations. While Theory of Mind starts in the preschool years, the second order of Theory of Mind does not begin until after the age of 6, when children start to be able to predict what someone else is thinking or feeling, or will think or feel, given a certain set of circumstances. These are very sophisticated abilities!

We do not need to worry or feel alarmed if our young children do not yet grasp their friend’s perspective. They are not hanging onto their toys because they do not want their friends to be happy. They are hanging on to their toys because they want to play, and they are developmentally unable to understand their friend’s point of view. This cannot be forced.

Why Do We Care About Sharing?

It can be tempting to think that we will teach our children to share by asking (or insisting). But perhaps the important question is - Why do I want my child to share? Is it because I want them to learn to think about others? Make friends? Be selfless?

These are all important and useful values for a meaningful life, but taking a moment to consider where a young child is developmentally can help us to understand how to actually support them in their journey towards being a prosocial person with emotional intelligence and a selfless nature.

A child who is resisting sharing isn’t resisting becoming a good adult. They are simply following the natural course of their development. These young years are a time for them to be thinking about their own needs. It is a necessity for them. In fact, demanding that they give away their toys while they are playing with them can have the unintended consequence of them becoming even more possessive with their things, or becoming apathetic, suppressing their positive natural urges for concentration and exploration.

So What Do We Do?

One way to verbalize a socially acceptable way of sharing resources is to state to your child, “You are having your turn. You may use it as long as you like. When you are finished, Amelia would like a turn.” Then inform Amelia, “You may have a turn when Teddy is finished. When it is your turn, you may use it for as long as you like.” This gives children words for how something might be shared between friends, giving them space to utilize the toy, and granting them both respect for their desires. And if a child continues to use the toy until the playtime is over, you can tell their friend, “Next time you will be able to use the toy.” There do not need to be any guarantees today.

If a child is becoming emotional about wanting to use a toy, and fixating upon it, then try to distract them with something else. Sometimes this means that they need to physically move somewhere else. It is natural to feel that the most interesting toy is the toy that is in someone else’s hands! Removing your own emotional charge from the situation can help both children feel calm.

The Caveats

While we believe that a young child is rightly focused on their individual development, and should not be forced to share, it is extremely important to note that this does not mean that they are allowed free reign of any environment. In the classroom, we say that a child’s rights end where another child’s rights begin. This philosophy applies outside of the classroom, too.

Children may not take someone else’s work. They may not disturb, distract, or destroy someone else’s work. They must abide by the routines of the day, and the expectations of their family and community - both for their safety, and for (a reasonable level of) peace and harmony. You are the adult. You are in charge. Other people’s emotions and thoughts matter. Protecting your child’s individual development does not mean they can trample on someone else’s.

Final Thoughts

At this age, not sharing is not a moral issue. It is developmental. Your child is following important and natural urges when they resist giving away their toys. Sharing is a point of arrival. Sharing means that a child feels safe and secure, and that they understand someone else’s perspective. It means they understand how someone else feels and why they want the toy. It means they are motivated to connect with others and want to build and maintain friendships. At best, forcing sharing too early only creates insecurity. At worst, it creates the expectation that you can demand that other people let you play with their toys. Children usually remember and imitate how you treat people more than they remember how you demanded that they treat others!

The journey from “selfishness” to selflessness will not happen overnight. It will not happen in six years either. It is a journey that will take all of childhood and beyond. Keep this goal in mind and consider how you can support this value for your child: Patience, grace, and respect for where they are in their own journey.

Preparation of the Parent: The Work of the Heart

Sat, 04 Mar 2023 05:04:49 GMT

Teacher Training

Becoming a Montessori teacher is no small task. For each age level, there is a year-long, intensive training course. Students sit in a lecture-style format, taking notes on all aspects of the Montessori philosophy, and then learning how to use each material in the classroom, along with all the variations of their use. Students spend time each day practicing using the materials, and then they create their own set of albums from their notes with all the presentations and variations possible for the entirety of the curriculum, complete with comprehensive notes and illustrations. At the end, there are both written and oral exams, administered by international examiners who travel to the training center especially for this purpose.

However, all this academic work is not the heart of Montessori teacher training. In fact, Dr. Maria Montessori refers to this time as the “Preparation of the Adult.” The true purpose of the training is to change the hearts of adults - to change the way adults see children and interact with them. Only by changing their hearts can they truly be ready to work with children. Dr. Montessori wrote, “A Montessori teacher must be created anew” (Montessori, 1946/1963, p. 67). The adult who leaves a training program must be a new version of the adult who entered the training program. They have new academic and practical information. But, more importantly, they have a new perspective of children and the world. Dr. Montessori was clear: “It is not so easy to educate anyone to be a good teacher… we must make a long study. Conversion cannot come to everybody. Our conversion must be in the heart” (Montessori, 2012, p. 26).

This preparation of the adult is an essential element to a Montessori experience. It is perhaps the essential element to a Montessori experience. Without a truly prepared adult, a classroom is simply a room full of beautiful didactic materials.

Parent Training?

What does this theory of preparation mean for parents? Surely they are not intended to take an academic year to prepare themselves to become a parent. And what if they already are parents? Is it too late?

Of course not.

This bears repeating: Of course not.

A parent is not a Montessori teacher. Even Montessori teachers aren’t Montessori teachers at home with their children. When Paula Polk Lillard writes about learning how to support children at home, she says, “[The] parent, in becoming a teacher instead of a servant, still remains a parent. She might best be described as a ‘mother-teacher’ with an emphasis on mother, rather than a ‘teacher-mother’ with the teacher role dominating the relationship” (Lillard and Jessen, 96).

A house is not a classroom, and a child is not a student when they are at home. Lillard explains, “[Home] is a harbor for both parent and child and it is important that there is a softening of expectations there” (Lillard, 96).

So, if parents do not need an intensive training course to become a parent, and if it is never too late to be the parent you want to be, how can mothers and fathers think about their own preparation? Dr. Montessori’s belief in the importance of the preparation of the adult is still relevant, even though it takes on a different hue for parents.

The Preparation of the Parent

There are many books on how to be a Montessori parent. There are many good books on how to be a Montessori parent. There are blogs, social media feeds, consultants, lectures, and podcasts. All of these sources of information will give great ideas on what to do at home with your child: activities, books, things to buy, things not to buy, language to use, ways to discipline.

And even as these efforts matter, the most important part of your child’s environment is you. Who you are matters more than what you set up for your child or do with them. Who you are will infiltrate what you do, how you do it, what you say, and how you say it. Your heart is the most important part of your child’s world. Taking care of who you are is the most profound way of affecting your child’s development.

Does this mean you have to be perfect?

Of course not.

This bears repeating: Of course not .

In fact, a perfect parent does not prepare a child for an imperfect world. We are meant to be mothers, fathers, and caregivers who have many flaws. We are meant to struggle and fail and try again. And our children are meant to witness this.

So how do we prepare ourselves? How do we work on who we are?

For parents, the preparation is a continually evolving one. We become parents exactly how we are, and then we maintain a willingness to examine ourselves, to work towards being who we want to be, and, when we fall short, to begin again.

Preparing ourselves as parents is unique to every individual. Some people need time alone reading, some need walks with friends, some need time talking to a trusted professional, some need vigorous exercise, some need to spend time at a fulfilling job during the day.

Every bit matters. It can be easy to imagine your “ideal day,” and assume that because it is impossible to go for a walk, do yoga, meditate, eat a healthy meal, and get a good night’s sleep while caring for your family and working, it means that you are unable to prepare yourself as an adult. This is not the case. Every bit matters. Even taking a five minute walk while a spouse supervises breakfast, or meditating for seven minutes in the car after school drop-off, or calling a friend for a ten minute chat after bedtime helps.

A question to ask yourself might be, “Where am I saying ‘yes’ too much?” Is it in relationships with friends? Is it with extra commitments at work? Is it with domestic responsibilities? Stepping back even slightly in that category will create an open area. Making this space in your mind and in your day for the importance of tending to your mental and emotional state will have a cascading effect throughout the days, weeks, and years ahead.

All of these efforts provide a way to manage stress and anxiety, and create an openness to ideas and feedback that generally match your parenting philosophy and allow you to examine your preconceived biases and thoughts about human relationships and development.

When you do the work to take care of your own mental state, and when you are able to observe your thought patterns and reactions, you will inevitably show up how you want to show up for your children.

Final Thoughts

Adults in children’s lives have tremendous influence on the world they will grow up in. Dr. Montessori recognized that the adults themselves were an intricate part of a child’s environment. She believed that teachers must prepare themselves for this responsibility - not just with an academic training, but with a preparation of the heart.

Parents do not take a training course before welcoming their children. There are no lectures, no practice, no exams. There is simply a baby, placed in the arms, and the attending responsibilities and joys that accompany them. A parent’s preparation is different from a teacher’s. This preparation happens every day, in and alongside the activities of life.

The work we do on our hearts - the work that moves us towards who we want to be - is the preparation we do as parents. When we tend to our inner world, whatever that looks like for us, we move towards who we want to be for our children. When we make space to examine our own anxiety, fears, personal stresses, expectations, and prejudices, and when we find even a little freedom from those thought patterns that hold us back, we prepare ourselves for our children.

Raising children is one of the most challenging and rewarding journeys we will embark on in our lives. There is so much to do and so much to learn. It is consuming, both practically and emotionally, and when you’re in it, it is hard to imagine what it will be like when it ends. But the truth is that it will end. The years with infants, toddlers, young children, and adolescents will end. These beautiful, challenging people, whom we spend so many years with in our homes, will eventually leave, as adults, ready to forge their own paths in the world.

Our hearts shine on everything in our children’s world - our homes, our words, our values, our choices. And when we picture our children as adults, and we imagine all the things we dream for them, who we are will matter more than anything we do. The work we do for our hearts will give our children the light they need to grow, straight and true to themselves and their fullest potential.

References

Lillard, P.P. , & Jessen, L.L. (2003). Montessori from the start . New York: Schocken Books.

Montessori, M. (1946/1963). Education for a new world . Madras, India: Kalakshetra.

Montessori, M. (2012). The 1946 London lectures . Amsterdam, the Netherlands: Montessori-Pierson Publishing.

The Montessori Potential: A New Book for Parents, Educators, and Policymakers

Sun, 05 Feb 2023 04:36:38 GMT

Our former Head of School Paula Lillard Preschlack says with a laugh that her older sister Lynn Lillard Jessen convinced her to begin her Montessori journey by enticing her with bowls of ice cream and asking her, “What else are you going to do?!”

More than twenty-five years later, we can all be grateful that Paula didn’t choose something else to do! Paula spent almost three decades taking three Montessori trainings, teaching at the Primary and Elementary age level, leading Forest Bluff School as a Head of School, raising her own two children in a Montessori home, working with parents, reading countless books on development and Maria Montessori, and continuing her own education through conferences and conversation with other educational, developmental, and Montessori experts. She also continued to write and give talks in order to share this information, as well as her knowledge and observations, with this special community.

After twenty-five years at Forest Bluff, Paula has moved to the next chapter of her life, writing a book on what she learned about Montessori in action. On February 7, her book “The Montessori Potential: How to Foster Independence, Respect, and Joy in Every Child” will be released to the public! This book is a culmination of her work so far, not only sharing the theory of Montessori, but offering lively anecdotes and engaging conversation that bring the theory to life.

Her book serves as more than just an explanation of the Montessori curriculum. In it, she describes how it actually works, with examples from real classrooms, and what triumphs and struggles schools face every day as they implement this approach. Her insights into Montessori’s practical application are invaluable. It is a call to action for parents, teachers, administrators, policy makers, and all interested community members. Paula shares, “This book is for educators, reformers, concerned citizens, and parents, who want to learn how to recognize authentic Montessori education and to learn how—exactly—the approach works so well for children.”

Paula’s book walks the reader through the essentials of the Montessori framework, what an ideal Montessori school looks like, why authentic Montessori matters and what challenges it faces, how Montessori is integrated into public schools, and what Montessori looks like for parents at home. Her entertaining stories about real life students and teachers make these important points accessible and memorable.

Order Paula’s book anywhere where you buy books, and join her for a virtual book launch on February 7 and for a book signing at Gorton Community Center with Lake Forest Book Store in Lake Forest, IL, on April 28 from 5-7pm. Check her website for virtual and in-person speaking events across the country this year, or contact her to speak at your school or community!

Paula’s book plays an important role in bringing the potential of a Montessori education to the greater world. Nora Flood, the Education Lead at Wend Collective, writes, “This is the most comprehensive book I have read that illustrates the history of, framework for, and power of the Montessori approach. Preschlack’s writing has helped me understand, and in turn articulate, why every child deserves a Montessori education!”

Michael G. Thompson, coauthor of Raising Cain and The Pressured Child , writes, "In her passionate and beautifully written new book, Paula Lillard Preschlack explores not only the potential of the Montessori approach but also the potential of children to grow into fully engaged and joyous learners. In a time when we see children as fragile and in constant need of our anxious supervision, Preschlack sees them as independent, adaptable, and resilient. Educators and parents and politicians need to read The Montessori Potential to remind themselves of what children can do if we create learning environments for them that unlock their strengths."

Links

Order your book from The Lake Forest Book Store or Amazon

Virtual book launch

Gorton book event (sign up for her newsletter for a free invitation)

Interview with Julia Volkman of Maitri Learning

Paula’s website

Paula’s Soundcloud site for a variety of talks

Newsletter for educators

Supporting Independent Play: Montessori at Home for All Ages

Sun, 15 Jan 2023 07:59:37 GMT

These years in the pandemic have been challenging for us all! As communities have gone in and out of restrictions, and families have endured periods of isolation and quarantine after positive Covid tests, children’s ability to play independently has become even more crucial for the functioning of a household. While independence continues to be an important developmental goal, the pandemic has highlighted how essential it also is for the practicalities of daily life.

Dr. Maria Montessori’s educational method supports this endeavor. Children learn to operate independently in the classroom, thinking for themselves, planning their day, and caring for their bodies and the environment. Her philosophy applies to home life, and serves children in this setting too. No matter what age your child is—from infancy through the teen years—there are simple approaches you can take to encourage their journey towards independence.

Infancy (birth to seven months)

Of course, babies depend heavily on their caregivers! A hungry baby must be fed, dirty diapers must be changed, and tears must be soothed. But there are small steps you can take to support your infant to become more and more their own actor in the world.

While babies go through phases where they need more time in their parents’ arms, they usually do not need to be carried all the time. Watch for moments when your infant is awake and alert, and set them down on a play mat or soft blanket. Place a few developmentally appropriate toys around them, or hang a mobile above them. Sit near them, doing your work, and offer a few reassuring words to let them know you are nearby. Then let them engage in their environment on their own terms. Don’t feel as though you need to jump up the second they begin to fuss. With a little observation and patience, you may find that they work through these feelings with their own efforts—finally reaching that toy, or soothing themselves as they find their fingers.

Gradually extend the time they are playing with their toys on their own, pushing them a little bit to encourage their independence, while also realizing that some days will be better than others, and that there will be times when they need more engagement from you! Giving them time and a little space will nudge them along this path, setting the foundation for more and more time in their own playtime.

Crawling Babies and Toddlers (eight months to three years old)

Children this age are busy and active and require constant supervision for their own safety! But, given the right environment and activities, they can spend time occupying themselves without depending on you for entertainment. In these situations, your presence is necessary to keep them safe but isn’t necessary for their amusement.

Once your little one is moving, take a look at your house and do what you can to make the rooms they play in as safe as possible for their own exploration. This means removing furniture they are likely to climb on, relocating small and breakable items, covering up outlet plugs, and adding gates to areas where it is not safe for them to go on their own. There is a balance here because you do not want your house to become so child-proofed that everything is inaccessible and there are no natural consequences, but you also want to be able to look away from an especially active child for a few minutes without endangering life or limb! This balance will be unique to every family and home.

Within the spaces where you’d like them to play independently, set out a few toys— but not too many! Put most of the toys in storage and then rotate what you have out to play with. This prevents your child from becoming overwhelmed by choices and mess and also keeps them interested in what is available to them.

As with the infant, sit near them with your own work, and keep one eye on them for their safety, but allow them to play independently. It’s okay for them to become a little frustrated with their activity. Repeat gently to them that you are not available to play right now but that you will be in 10 minutes (or whatever the right time frame seems to be!). Meet your child where they are, and push them just a little bit towards more independence. They will gradually adjust to realizing that there are times when you are close but busy, and they can entertain themselves.

Young Childhood (three to six years old)

The young child has many of the same needs as the toddler—a safe environment, limited toys, and nudges towards independence—but by this age they have usually developed a bit more of a self-protective mechanism and aren’t as likely to injure themselves with too much freedom. Because of this, they can have a little more space to explore and a little more physical distance as you encourage them towards solitary activity. But, as always, be observant of your own child and your own home, and start with a situation that keeps them safe.

By this age, they also have a slightly more developed sense of time and will tend to respond more positively to: “I am busy right now. You can play and I’ll be available to be with you in 10 minutes.” They also may respond to challenges that give them a little structure but release you from constant engagement: “Can you collect all the balls from the living room in one basket?” Or “How many toy animals do we have in this room?” Their environment and choices can grow as their abilities grow. With practice and support, the young child is very capable of extended independent play!

Elementary Children (six to twelve years old)

Ah, the elementary child! Perhaps the golden years for independent play. During this stage, children tend to be sensible and competent. They enjoy playing on their own and are usually able to avoid trouble. They have wonderful imaginations and ideas for creative endeavors. Keeping appropriate items and activities within their reach will do much to satisfy their desire for activities—glue, construction paper, scissors, duct tape, wood, pipe cleaners. You will be amazed at what they can make!

For these trustworthy children, the most common obstacle to independent play is, “I’m bored!” It’s a common refrain in most households and can be tempting to solve with the parents’ own ideas or new toys or activities. However, when parents offer their children answers for their own boredom, they simply create a self-perpetuating cycle.

Instead, try this: When your perfectly capable and inventive elementary child tells you they are bored, tell them, “Oh, good! Boredom almost always comes before concentration and creativity. I can’t wait to hear what you do next.” Then return to your own activity. Their boredom is their problem. Not yours!

If the boredom epidemic in your house is particularly stubborn, you can also always resort to saying, “Ah, what luck. We have a kitchen that needs to be mopped, and I was hoping someone in the house was bored enough to do it.” Soon enough, they will learn that telling you about their boredom always results in chores.

Adolescence (twelve to fifteen years old)

After several years in the elementary stage, many parents can begin to think they are home free. Alas! This is not the case. Once your child is twelve, their development takes on what can look like a regression of sorts. Just like the early years, when parents need to keep an eye on their toddlers’ physical safety, now they are watching out for emotional and social safety—allowing them to make mistakes but protecting them from permanent damage.

While they are still incredibly capable, they may need well-timed, compassionate, side-by-side guidance, as their changing brain diminishes their executive functioning and foresight capacity. This is a time of immense (and often confusing) physical and emotional change. Adolescents benefit from an adult who will discreetly supervise their activities but still has genuine trust in their teenager’s ability to make good choices.

An adolescent may seek independence by withdrawing to their room or requesting to run loose with their friends. And while this is developmentally appropriate and beneficial to some degree, once again, the adults in their lives need to be mindful of checking in with them with some regularity. Their emotional and social lives become more complicated in these years. Just like during the infant years when they may stumble down the physical stairs, these young adults now rely on their parents to help them when they stumble down emotional stairs!

Independence at this stage means supporting your child in their own interests and activities and encouraging their self-reliance, but being careful not to abandon them to their emotional and social world. Your quiet presence and gentle check-ins keep them secure as they grow.

Final Thoughts

Children of all ages benefit from the same principles as you support their independent play at home: A safe environment, appropriate activities, encouragement, and check-ins. Along with these principles comes the flexibility necessary for any endeavor with human development. Children will differ from day to day for reasons both seen and unseen, and the adults in their world must keep their eyes on their goal, while also accommodating the reality of the moment.

Your children’s independence will serve your family, but it also serves them in their lives. Your family life will develop breathing room, as your children come to see themselves as individuals in the group—individuals who bring their own strengths and gifts to the whole. And your children will come to know themselves, recognizing their own capabilities and interests. They will grow in confidence and competence, preparing them for the world outside of your family.

For more information about the importance of independent play, see our post Self-Directed Playtime is not Wasted Time.

The Montessori Sensorial Materials: Part II

Fri, 16 Dec 2022 22:42:14 GMT

What Do Children Do with Montessori’s Sensorial Materials?

Imagine you are watching a four-year-old boy carry a wooden box with a red lid to a table. Then, he goes back to the shelf of Sensorial Materials and brings over a matching box—this one with a blue lid. (These are called the Sound Cylinders. Each is filled with about one ounce of grains of sand ranging from very fine to coarse, in subtle gradations so that each cylinder makes slightly different sounds when shaken).

The boy removes each lid and slides them underneath each corresponding box. He carefully lifts eight wooden cylinders out of the boxes and lines them up in front of each box: the ones with blue tops in front of the blue-lidded box and the ones with reds tops in front of the red-lidded box. He mixes these identical red and blue topped cylinders around, and then lines them up again by color in two columns. He is now organized and ready to begin the game.

He lifts a red-topped cylinder with his left hand and shakes it by his left ear. He then lifts the first blue-topped cylinder with his right hand and shakes it by his right ear; back and forth, he compares the sounds. He decides that they do not match, so he places the blue-topped cylinder in the back of the row of “blue cylinders” and moves on to the second blue-topped cylinder. He does this until he finds one that sounds the same and places this pair in a new column.

He does this with all the cylinders until he has a double column of matching pairs. He checks them one more time, comparing carefully, his eyes soft as he focuses all his attention on the very faint sounds. When he determines he is correct, he mixes them up, deciding he wants to do it again. After the second time through, he puts the materials back on the shelf and moves on to another activity.

This game introduces this young boy to a systematic way to compare qualities and keep the choices already tested in logical order. It gives him an option when he wants to compare other things in life and familiarizes him with an organized way to do math problems or eliminate options when looking for an answer to a “problem” of any kind. Equally important, it helps children to refine their sense of hearing and their capacity for concentration through an entire process. As a bonus, little children think such games are very fun! They love the challenge and the sensorial exploration.

What Characteristics Identify Montessori’s Materials?

There are certain qualities that Dr. Montessori’s Sensorial Materials share. They each isolate a sense or quality to bring the child’s attention to it. There is only one of each material to eliminate confusion. And by “…removing as far as possible all distracting factors…[this] enables the child to engage in an inner and external analysis that can help him to acquire an orderly mind” (Maria Montessori, The Discovery of The Child).

Each sensorial material is:

A materialized abstraction
Progresses from general to specific
From familiar to the unfamiliar
Involves physical movement
Isolates a difficulty
Is limited in certain ways so that it draws in the child’s focus
Serves as indirect preparation for something else (learning to read, write, or do arithmetic)
Contains an inbuilt control of error
Provides a key to the world
Has a specified place in a sequence of presentations

Arguably the most exciting thing about the Sensorial Materials are the games that the teacher teaches the children to play with them. There are matching games (where we connect two items with identical qualities), grading games (where we put objects or qualities in an order based on gradation of that quality), and language games (where we name, and sometimes label, qualities as we discover them).

The games are very important because they help children exercise and further develop their memory-building capacities. When we build memorizing techniques in a game-like fashion, we get better at memorizing information and are better able to hold foundational facts in our minds. Here’s a surprise for you: Montessori children are not more intelligent; they’ve just received many more opportunities to develop their minds than children typically get in other educational settings. The games we play with the Sensorial Materials every day is one of the key ways this happens.

What A Wonderful World!

The knowledge the children gain through this specialized set of Montessori materials relates directly to their experience of the world around them. Children have a repertoire of categorized information at their fingertips and the language to identify and name their experiences in the world:

“This is hot. This is cool. This is cold. This is tepid.”
“This feels rough. This feels smooth.”
“This is heavy. This one is heavier. This is long, that is longer, this other one is the longest.”
“This is sour. This is sweet. This is bitter.”
“That is loud. This is louder.”

And even more specifically:

“This is Poland. This is Mexico. This is Bhutan.”
“This is the flag of Iraq.”
“This is an obovate leaf. That one is hastate.”
“This is a pentagon. That is a hexagon.”
“That is lavender. This is fuchsia.”
“This musical note is a C. This note is an F.”

This vocabulary frees the child from ignorance and opens the world to them. Young children explore the world with their senses by nature, and they have absorbent minds which capture immense amounts of vocabulary and information in an almost photographic fashion. Montessori’s approach provides a perfectly matched pathway to developing a sophisticated and exacting way to identify and categorize the qualities in one’s three-dimensional experience of living. Montessori’s materials take abstract qualities and put them into concrete form for children to explore, become familiar with them, and then to identify and call them by name.

One might say that because of their experiences in the classroom with the Sensorial Materials, the child sees the world for the first time with all of its detail. Because of the Botany Cabinet of leaf shapes, the child really notices the various shapes of the leaves on the trees she walks past. Because of the Geometry Cabinet, he notices that a doorframe is a rectangular shape. A child sees that their hardboiled egg is an ovoid, that there are soft and rhythmic sounds of different notes in a song played on the stereo, that the world has so much detail, and every piece of it has a place, a name, and a relation to all else. Suddenly, the world looks different; it has come alive and there is so much more to explore, to learn! As they learn the names for each of these qualities and perceptions, the connections are solidified.

How satisfying this must be for them! Imagine the revelation, the feeling of belonging. This is a practice for developing one’s intelligence, quite literally.

A Foundation for Education

The experiences that 3- and 4-year-old children have with these materials give them minds that can think and bodies they can control—the ultimate preparation for math, language, art, science, and all other knowledge that will follow. Each child is prepared to learn. They each have their own unique system for categorizing new information as it comes in, for memorizing new information, and for learning to identify and organize information. They have the body control and the spatial awareness for laying out math problems and counting, computing, and recording their answers. Learning to read, write, and do math problems is made simple because of the sensorial experiences the children have had as a prerequisite. So, when your child recognizes, “The sky is blue!” or you see them staring at a leaf and hear them whisper, “hastate,” you have the Sensorial Materials to thank.

The Montessori Sensorial Materials: Part I

Tue, 15 Nov 2022 22:49:26 GMT

Why Are Montessori’s Sensorial Materials Important for Children? Great question! We all recognize those beautiful wooden prisms and the pink tower of cubes as being Montessori’s distinct materials for children’s development. The glossy red rods and the blocks with rows of tiny wooden knobs are intriguing. They seem to call out to be touched and handled. But there is so much more to this special set of 25 Sensorial Materials than their beauty; they are instrumental to children’s individualized educations, as students and as human beings.

The Sensitive Periods

There are distinct periods of human development through which every young child passes by the time they are five years old. These sensitive periods make children especially attuned to a particular physical sense, and to concentrate on it almost to the exclusion of all others. This happens for every child but can be hard to recognize if adults are not paying attention to their children’s behaviors or providing opportunities for children to explore these aspects of their surroundings.

For a young child, the world is a jumbled mass of impressions. He or she arrives on Earth with no knowledge, but with a gift of five senses—touch, taste, smell, hearing and sight—and the urge to explore through them. To help each child make sense of this world, education must offer a way to organize and label the chaos that they encounter every day. The orderly Sensorial Materials do just this.

As a child learns from working with Montessori’s Sensorial Materials in the classroom, he or she goes back out into the world and delights in naming qualities and recognizing forms all around them; it is as if she sees color for the first time now that she knows what it is, what it is called, and where it belongs in the order of things. Imagine what a joy this revelation is for a child!

The Sensorial Materials are foundational to Montessori education. Dr. Montessori’s journey as an educator began, in fact, with sensorial materials. Maria Montessori’s first professional task as a physician was to attend to the physical and mental wellbeing of young children in a psychiatric asylum. She learned so much about human development by working with these children with issues ranging from physical disabilities to psychological disturbances. Unfortunately, in the early 1900s in Europe, it was customary to segregate such individuals from society and lock them into a room with nothing to do. Montessori’s heart went out to these children. The first thing she noticed by observing them was the intense need for sensorial stimulation to feed not only their bodies, but their minds. Nature drives us to touch and handle objects from early ages in an effort to understand the world and develop the connections between our bodies and our minds—between movement and thinking. In this way, human beings identify and name the qualities of the world—color, scents, sounds, etc. Everything has a relationship to all else, a place in a set of qualities, and a name we attach to it.

Dr. Montessori realized, “The child is by his nature an avid explorer of his surroundings because he has not yet had the times or means of knowing them precisely” ( The Discovery of the Child ). She recognized that we can help children to acquire this knowledge in an organized fashion. As Dr. Montessori experimented systematically in showing children her first materials, she found that they were drawn to them and wanted to repeat their activities until they mastered each one. The children, she realized, were educating themselves through their use of these precise materials. They were serving a fervent need.

By combining her discoveries with studies of other doctors’ and scientists’ work, Maria Montessori designed and experimented with sensorial materials that would inform children about the qualities of the real world. To this day, her Sensorial Materials brilliantly support children to explore and learn the language for identifying differentiating qualities of color, temperature, size, weight, length, height, and spatial equalities. They enable children to train and practice their hand-eye coordination, decision making ability, discernment between details, and organization of information. The sensorial materials help children to build their unique, organized minds.

Which Ones Are The Sensorial Materials and What Does Each Address?

Below is a basic list of Dr. Montessori’s Sensorial Materials and the qualities children explore with them, which you will find in any AMI-accredited Primary classroom for children ages 3 to 6 years old.

Form and Dimension

Form and dimension are explored in the visual sense with:
The Solid Cylinders
The Brown Stair
The Pink Tower
The Red Rods
The Knobless Cylinders

Colors

Colors are distinguished, developing the chromatic sense in:
3 boxes of Color Tablets

Discrimination of Form

The Geometry Cabinet
The Botany Cabinet
The Geometric Solids
Constructive Triangles
Binomial and Trinomial Cubes
Square of Pythagoras (also called The Decanomial)
Superimposed Geometric Figures

The Tactile Sense

Touch Boards
Touch Tablets
Fabrics
Baric Tablets
Thermic Bottles
Thermic Tablets

The Auditory Sense

Speaking and Singing with the human voice
Sound Cylinders
The Bells

The Olfactory and Gustatory Senses

The Smelling Jars
The Tasting Jars

The Stereognostic Sense

The senses all come into play when we explore with the stereognostic sense , which refers to the all-around familiarity and knowledge of an object (stereo=all around; gnostic=knowledge). We invite children to feel an object with their hands and determine what it is by discriminating, through their senses, the weight, temperature, surface, and shape. The materials specifically designed for this are:

The Geometric Solids

The Mystery Bag (of various objects)

Most of the sensorial materials can also be explored in this stereognostic manner, often while using a blindfold if the child chooses to wear one, following the introduction of this style of exploration with the Geometric Solids and the Mystery Bag.

Final Thoughts

There are many purposes to Montessori’s set of Sensorial Materials, but the main ones are to refine one’s senses and acquire the ability to recognize, appreciate, connect, label, and describe the qualities one encounters out in the world. This self-education offers children a sophisticated experience of living.

Sensorial Materials Part II to follow!

Holiday Celebrations With Children: We Are All Connected

Fri, 30 Sep 2022 21:35:31 GMT

Holidays offer opportunities to include children in the wonder and meaning of our cultural and religious traditions. By considering the significance of each holiday, and our children’s stage of development, we draw them into the celebrations in ways that are meaningful for them. We provide access points to these important days, inviting them to participate and build their own authentic understanding of why these holidays matter to us.

While Dr. Maria Montessori was Catholic, her principles of child development are universal, and apply to the spiritual and communal life of all children. By understanding that the child’s capabilities progress from the concrete to the abstract, we can give children experiences that allow them to connect, as well as grow. Similarly, by encouraging their abilities each year, and showing them how to participate, they will begin to take on more and more ownership of their contributions to the holidays.

It may be helpful to consider holidays through a number of entryways: Books and stories, food, decorations, service to others, and prayer or song. Of course there are many others! By identifying some of the ways that your children directly experience the holidays, you can invite them to participate and develop their own relationship to these days.

Books and Stories

Sharing books and stories with your children gives holidays context and depth. Here, they learn the history behind why we celebrate certain days, and they also see glimpses of how other people celebrate these same days. Arrange a special trip to the library that you take before each celebration, and invite your child to look at the books both with and without you. If the library is not a comprehensive resource for your holiday, then consider looking on-line ahead of time and requesting books through interlibrary loan, or purchasing them to have at your own home. You may want to start a collection of books for each holiday that only come out at that time of year. This keeps the words and pictures special.

In our family, we have collected a basket of Christmas books, which address the history of the holiday, as well as stories that reflect the values of the season. We bring them out each November and put them under our tree. Even our oldest child, at age eleven, likes to sit by the tree each year, working his way through each book, relating to it differently as he grows, seeing different themes and appreciating different aspects.

Your stories don’t need to be limited to books. The holidays are a beautiful time to share oral traditions. Tell stories about what you remember experiencing as a child at this time, or what your ancestors did to commemorate special days. A connection to their past adds to the richness of your child’s experience.

Food

Meals take on an important role in many celebrations! This is an aspect of the holiday that Montessori children are well-suited for participating in. From a very young age, they can stand beside you in the kitchen on a stool, chopping celery, stirring batter, sprinkling sugar on dessert or buns. And as they grow older, they will take on more responsibility for special parts of the meal, preparing dishes entirely on their own or planning the menu.

Invite your children to cook alongside both you and other family members as you prepare familiar foods, year after year. Food creates memories and opportunities for togetherness through many celebrations, and gives your children the experience of participating and experiencing a beautiful part of the holidays.

Decorations

So many celebrations bring the occasion for decorating our homes in special ways. Consider what you can do in your home to commemorate each holiday, and invite your children to participate as they are able. Younger children can collect autumnal items from nature for a centerpiece for fall gatherings. No matter what the holiday, our children always like to make signs to decorate the windows, perhaps for their own enjoyment, and perhaps to share their joy with passersby.

In keeping with the theme of Montessori, older children can be responsible for more of the household preparations for the holidays. Ask them what they remember from the year before, and ask what they would like to do to bring the traditions and memories into this year’s commemorations. You may be surprised by what was important to them and what they would like to take ownership of!

Service to Others

Holidays bring time for reflection, which inspires service to others. This can be done in many different ways for children of all ages. Local food or book banks always need volunteers for organizing items. Your children will come to recognize the importance of collecting gently used toys, books, or clothes to donate. There are often organizations that need volunteers to prepare packages or supplies for children living in foster homes.

Similarly, service can come in the form of kindness to neighbors. Use these days as a chance to shovel an elderly neighbors’ walkway, or bring cookies to someone who lives alone. Drop off beautifully written poems or flowers to a family who is going through a hard time. The challenge here is finding ways to connect the values of your holiday to the action of generosity in age appropriate ways. It is an important instinct to encourage and strengthen in your children through holidays and always.

Prayer or Song

Many holidays have opportunities for special prayers or songs. Children will hear these recitations year after year, and they will come to represent the joy and values of the celebration or commemoration. Invite your youngest children to participate in the words you all say together, perhaps looking for shorter, accessible prayers or songs that they can learn. And as they grow older, challenge them to learn the longer prayers and the continuing verses of songs, eventually leading your family as you say or sing the words together.

You also may turn to poetry or special prose to reflect the values of holiday. My grandmother used to select a different poem to read before our Thanksgiving meals each year, giving the children in the family opportunities to read it aloud to the gathered group, and later reflect on what the words mean in relationship with the day we were celebrating. Your children may enjoy selecting or even writing poems on their own.

Recognizing Holidays from Different Traditions

Every family—indeed, every individual—will relate to the celebrations of their religion and culture in unique ways. Spirituality and community, while often a shared experience, are also deeply personal. This is true within the same religions and cultures, and it is also true across religions and cultures. Our call, then, is to show our children how to approach unfamiliar holidays or traditions with respectful curiosity, but also deep care. This may begin with finding books or stories about different holidays, making sure to expose our children to a variety of perspectives, meant to reflect even just the beginning of the variety of experiences within that celebration. It continues with sincere and respectful engagement with friends and elders from different traditions.

Our children will pick up on how we model this kind of self-education and interaction, and they also benefit from lessons, which in Montessori we call, “Grace and Courtesy.” These lessons are specific and direct. Here, we offer language for asking friends questions when we are curious about their holidays, and we also can provide the opportunity to act out different scenarios that may arise when we want to learn more but also want to be gracious and courteous (hence the name of the lessons!). Children almost always have the most generous of intentions, but they often rely on us for the language and behavior that will allow them to express their intentions kindly and positively. Do not shy away from these conversations with your children, and reach out to your children’s teachers if you are looking for age appropriate ways to lead your children in this way.

Final Thoughts

The Montessori philosophy provides accessible and inspiring ways to engage our children in our beautiful holiday traditions. By seeing our children as active doers, and offering them increasing responsibilities as they grow, we allow them to participate in increasingly meaningful ways.

A parent shares, “The Montessori pedagogy continually challenges us to engage our children in our family’s important religious and cultural traditions as equal contributors (rather than passive observers), who not only understand and can explain the significance of these festivities, but also joyfully celebrate our holidays.”

Your children can be active members of your important family celebrations. They contribute to the events surrounding the holidays, and they also develop their own deep relationship with the values behind the festivities. The holidays we care about as a family serve more than just the purpose of celebrating and gathering. They also reflect our family values and priorities. When we invite our children to experience the values of our holidays, we invite them to grow in the values of our family. We support our children when we are able to connect them to the purpose behind our holidays, and encourage them to find the values inherent in them, giving them tools for living a life of character and compassion.

Thank you to the amazing parents who shared their experiences and insight with me, and helped shape this blog to serve families in an authentic way. I am always so grateful for the opportunity to learn and grow from the wisdom and generosity of the families we share this community with.

For further reading, see Paula Lillard Preschlack’s blog Including Children in Holiday Family Traditions.

Art, Culture, and Nature: A Montessori Approach to Appreciating Beauty

Sun, 04 Sep 2022 15:02:00 GMT

Submitted by Laura Earls, with edits and contributions by Margaret Kelley

In a Montessori classroom, experiences with art, culture, and nature are embedded in the curriculum. Instead of viewing these parts of life solely as separate categories for study, Dr. Montessori believed that they were also inherently intertwined with the children’s daily lessons and work. So much of a human being’s relationship to art, culture, and nature is simply a relationship to beauty. Children who learn in a Montessori environment come to see beauty everywhere—both as something to create, as well as something to appreciate. This ability serves them throughout life, deepening their relationship with art, culture, and the natural world.

As teachers, we make sure to celebrate true beauty—encouraging it and elevating it in all aspects of the classroom. By showing the children how to create it through their work, how to appreciate it in the world around them, and how to engage with it in nature and culture, we give them a map for incorporating it into their lives as they venture outside of the classroom. These lessons provide children with a foundation for always appreciating the beauty they find around them, both manmade and natural—giving their lives meaning, and making the world a precious and cherished place to live.

Art

Making Work Beautiful

A Montessori teacher helps their students to strive for beauty in their work. There are distinct art lessons, but there is also the practice of making academic projects beautiful. When children bring their work home, parents may notice that no single sheet of paper is left plain! Once a child completes a piece of paper in any subject, they may decorate their work. Ornamentation on their finished reports is a lovely way for them to feel that their work is special and very much their own.

These designs grow in complexity and meaning as they learn more from the Montessori curriculum. A teacher may give them a lesson on “illumination” (decorating a text) and show them examples of illuminated manuscripts from the Middle Ages. They may then illuminate their own work on occasion, thus relating their personal desire for beauty with the activities of ancient people! The children also may learn to do calligraphy; to make and marble paper; to book-bind or use ribbons to tie up their booklets; and to make charts or scrolls. With these small additions, the children have pride in their work, take care to do their very best, and love making it beautiful.

Culture

High Quality Literature

High quality reading material serves your children in their relationship to the written word. There is such a vast array of books today that the task of choosing appropriate ones for your children can be daunting. The local library or bookstore often has lists of Caldecott and Newbery Award winners, as well as recommended reading lists. It is important to uplift the children's spirits and show them that there is goodness, beauty, and excitement to be found in the world of reading.

When parents read aloud to children, they can choose books of all subjects and writing styles. They may first read a biography of Lincoln, then a fun story such as Mr. Popper's Penguins, followed by a selection of poetry, and then a story of courage, followed by a fairy tale. They may also read children’s stories about Dr. Maria Montessori. When the children hear about the development of Montessori schools and materials, they are thrilled: “Oh! The sandpaper letters! I worked with those!”

In addition, it is important for children to have a silent reading time at home . At our school, they read quietly after lunch, which gives them time to become engrossed in their books before they go back to work in the afternoon. This special time shows that each child’s imagination deserves occasion and space. It shows respect for this very special undertaking.

Music and Movement

Beauty can be expressed and experienced in music and dance. These are forms of communication, a natural human tendency, here spoken in the language of the spirit. In music , the children learn to sing, compose and write music, and identify musical styles and composers. In the classroom, teachers often choose to play classical music, which touches the soul. It can play in the background during the children's arrival in the morning, as well as occasionally during their silent reading time.

At other times the children will listen to and interpret a certain composer's use of different techniques, dynamics, or instruments. They love to talk about how Bach's Toccata and Fugue in D minor made them feel or try to pick out the harp in Tchaikovsky's Swan Lake. They also like comparing different pieces of music and choosing their favorites. Sometimes a teacher will show the children how to draw abstractly while they are listening to music, trying to follow the sounds of a composition.

In addition, music is incorporated into movement, dancing, rhythm, and listening exercises. Montessori classes often exercise indoors in the winter, through stretching, walking or marching to different beats, or moving to different music. They also learn dances that are from a variety of nations and combine singing with dancing done in circles. The elementary children love these because they are done in a group and because they are fun and beautiful. They bring out peaceful, cooperative behavior in the children.

*There are, of course, even more ways that children learn about and experience culture in the classroom! Literature, music, and movement simply serve as a starting point for engaging with this important part of the human experience.

The Natural World

Finding Beauty in the Everyday

It is important for the children to learn that everything has the potential to be beautiful. Work can and should be joyful. Adults can celebrate the simple pleasures of life with them. When I was teaching, there was one October day when it began snowing in the middle of our day. It was the first snow of the season, and soon every child had discovered it and was in awe of its beauty and newness. We gathered around the windows, and I read poetry on snow:

The more it
SNOWS-tiddely-pom,
The more it
GOES-tiddely-pom
The more it
GOES-tiddely-pom
On snowing.

And nobody
KNOWS-tiddely-pom,
How cold my
TOES-tiddely-pom
How cold my
TOES-tiddely-pom
Are
Growing.

— A.A. Milne

Then we sat quietly for a minute looking out, and one child asked, “Could we go outside and do a snow dance?” So the children joined hands in small groups and danced in circles together. It was a small piece of beauty, inspired by the nature of the child to discover and embrace the divine.

The Importance of the Outdoors

In the autumn, children can collect leaves, then do leaf rubbings, classification, collages, and artwork. In the springtime, they can go out and examine the miracle of new life in nature. They learn to appreciate the beauty surrounding them in their everyday lives.

It is important that the idea of respect for all extends to the outdoor environment. They go on nature walks to observe the beauty around them. They go to the park and take some time to lie on their backs, in silence looking up at the sun streaming through the leaves; they close their eyes and listen to the leaves rustling and the birds singing. They take it all in.

On the last day of each school year, I used to take my class on a walk to Lake Michigan (just a few blocks from our school) and read poetry in anticipation of summer. We would then look out at the lake and each child would draw or write a poem or story. It was an extremely peaceful time for us, to be together while each being alone. It brought us together at the close of the year with a sense of the importance of community and a recollection of the special qualities of each other. It also reminded us of the great gifts we had and made us grateful.

Final Thoughts

All of these experiences deepen a child’s relationship to the beauty in the world around them. They learn to make it themselves. They learn to appreciate it in books, music, dance, and nature. They learn that there is beauty everywhere, just waiting to be noticed.

Childhood is an especially ripe and vulnerable time for developing love for the world they live in. T.S. Eliot wrote, “We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.” These are the years when children learn to love their earth. These are the years when the foundation for meaning and stewardship is built.

By being a part of a Montessori environment, and appreciating the beauty embedded in all parts of their world, children are inspired to live good lives, where they seek and create meaning, where they take on responsibility for caring for this world.

It is these very children who will inherit the earth. And first they must learn to love it.

Parents, Take Charge!

Sun, 07 Aug 2022 15:08:56 GMT

Getting Away With It...Again

“Jerry, it’s time to get out of the pool. Time to go now, please.” A father stands at the edge of a hotel pool in summer, clearly exhausted, as his wife walks past him carrying a crying baby girl, a floaty, a diaper bag, and two huge towels. “NO!” The boy in the pool, who looks to be about six years old, screams and makes an exaggerated pout, then disappears under the water before his father can say anything more.

I feel terribly sorry for this father, and I swim away, relieved that I don’t have to be in his shoes. Raising children is relentlessly humbling work. Then a second thought comes to me: I can’t help but feel concerned for the little boy getting away with this kind of noncompliant behavior. From his confident air, I am guessing that this is a pattern in their family. In recent years, I’ve noticed that some children, of all ages, seem to be making decisions for their parents and directing their parents.

Are children more rude than in the past? More difficult? I don’t think so. But I do think that many of today’s parents hesitate to take charge.

Building Pro-Social Behavior

The worrisome aspect of allowing children to run the show, in the long run, is that those children who practice pushing their parents around become increasingly unsure of their place in the world. They develop habits that do not ingratiate them to others.

The very first cues children receive about social interactions, what is fair and respectful behavior, are those from their parents. These experiences from home set the stage for children’s interactions out in the world with others. Most often, young children who are habitually defiant are searching for boundaries that they desperately crave. The adults in their lives need to provide leadership. They can do so without hesitating or apologizing, but by being loving, fair, and confident.

Parents must express confidence when they set the limit and say “No.” They can be sure that by removing a noncompliant child from a situation, they are giving necessary support. The goal at such times is much more far-reaching than the immediate situation at hand. Dr. Montessori wrote, “An individual is disciplined when he is the master of himself and when…he becomes accustomed to a discipline which is not limited to school but extends out into society.” Being able to master ourselves, with the self-control for cooperating with others, is something that adults help children to do over time, from their earliest years onward.

What should the guidelines for behavior be? Montessori said, “A child’s liberty should have as its limit the interest of the group to which he belongs.” If the behavior is causing disruption to others—including to you as a parent—then address it promptly. Your aim is to teach your child how to become an integral part of a positive community.

Being in a community is important for emotional well-being; desiring it is ingrained in us because it is how we survive and thrive. In other words, if a behavior is repelling others or causing an obstacle for someone else, it is nonsocial behavior. Such behavior may also lead your child to be unsure of why this behavior may leave them feeling unhappy and lonely.

Why Is It So Important?

If a parent cannot get a child to listen or to do what he or she has asked, they must consider that a teacher in a classroom, a caregiver on a playground, or a camp counselor in a day camp will not be able to, either. I am going to repeat this because it is so important to realize: If parents cannot get their child to listen to them or to do what they have asked, then nor can any teacher, caregiver, or camp counselor be expected to succeed.

Parents are the first leaders in a child’s life, offering a trusting relationship of complying with authority for the good of everyone in a group. This is pro-social behavior. Cooperative behavior must be established in a child’s first years of life, in preparation for school and for enjoyable group activities and community life. Consistency amongst the adults gives children security, so that they can put their energies into learning new things, instead of into pushing the limits.

In Public

The father at the pool’s edge didn’t have much chance to establish authority in the moment that day. I can’t blame him for not jumping into the pool, tackling his child, and dragging him away in front of an audience. But he does have the choice to address the noncompliant behavior by setting up their next outing to go differently. Parents can establish respect before getting into situations where children can run away or blow off a simple request.

If adults recognize certain situations where they won’t be able to follow through if they need to, the best decision is to aim for more controlled situations first, where you can establish the expected compliant behavior and work up to situations with more freedom and less immediate control.

This father might tell his child, not unkindly, “I will not take you to a pool when you don’t politely get out of the water when asked to. I need to see that you can be cooperative and respectful every time, not just sometimes.’” Children need this communication from their parents, the people who love them most. This is perfectly fair. Love your children enough to insist on behavior that will open doors for them in life, not close doors in their faces.

At Home

At home, parents may not always notice when their children are pushing the limits or being defiant. Especially when adults are distracted or tired, many children will see what they can get away with. It is important to take a step back, observe, listen, and watch for how your children respond when you ask them to do something that is a reasonable, socially acceptable norm.

Keep your expectations simple. Instead of having a list of rules, a family may consider just having two: be polite/kind, and don’t deliberately cause problems for other people. Almost anything you can think of falls under these two headings, making long lists of expectations unnecessary.

To be more specific, though, here are things to prioritize with children ages 15 months to four years old:

-We stay seated at the table when eating. No standing or walking with food.
-We wash our hands after using the bathroom and before handling food.
-We respond when summoned.

Children learn the grace and courtesy of their communities most between the ages of three and six, when they are in a sensitive period for absorbing customs. This means that children imitate the behaviors they see in day care centers, playgrounds, schools or camps. Consider this when choosing an environment for your young children and their adult mentors. The more consistency they experience, the better.

When children reach age 6, they typically conform to what they know is best behavior, but when they are younger, they accept and imitate a wider range of behaviors. This means that parents must be more vigilant in choosing environments for their younger children, realizing that the influences will be strong. Exposing your young child to bad behaviors is like telling them to do those things. It is that simple. This is why we urge parents to supervise their children when they are very young, to uphold the consistent standards of our Young Children’s Community and Primary classrooms, and to avoid other environments if discourteous behaviors are tolerated or go unnoticed.

How do you know when to draw the line as an adult on what is acceptable behavior? One guideline is when it’s best for you. In other words, take good care of yourself as a person, and you’re probably asking things of your child that are perfectly fair. You’re teaching them to treat you the way they should treat anyone they care about in society.

Be Confident!

Children are unsure when their parents are unsure. It is better to “fake it until you make it” than to second-guess your every move in front of your young children. We must always remember that children are developing human beings. They are not fully formed, and they do not have the judgment or experience that adults have. Just because they want something or don’t want something, doesn’t mean that that’s the best decision! They are young human beings, trying to find their ways.

Dr. Montessori taught us that we can have deep reverence for the process of human development and support it by observing, learning as we go, and providing sound leadership. And don’t take your child’s behavior personally; it’s perfectly natural for children to push the limits so that they can find out what the expectations are. The less you let their searching bother you, the more effective your responses will be. Take it in stride.

Lovingly give your children the limits they need. Be the leader. Your children will become happy people who know how to get along with everyone!

Montessori Summer Activities in Your Own Backyard

Fri, 17 Jun 2022 15:14:28 GMT

For those of us in the Midwest, June brings the beginning of summer. This means longer days, unstructured time, sunshine, green leaves, and flowers! Summer is so good for us after the gray skies of winter, but sometimes all that free time can create stress for families. What should we do with our unscheduled days?! What are some Montessori summer activities that children of all ages would enjoy?

Summer provides many opportunities for getting outside and enjoying nature, and there is so much to do right in your own backyard. It can be tempting to fill every day with organized activities or to make grand plans for excursions, but remember that many of your children’s developmental and spiritual needs are met through the humble tasks of the home. Summer provides the time and space for this work, and allows them to ground themselves in the rhythms of outdoor activities.

Dr. Maria Montessori recognized that children thrive when they engage in real work alongside adults. A younger child may need more support, while an older child can take on more responsibility and initiative. Think of your outdoor work in three categories: Gardening, Yard Work, and Animals. Then introduce these activities to your children so they can be busy in your own yard!

Gardening

Young Children’s Community (18 months–3 years): Find a small basket or bucket for your toddler to put bright red tomatoes and strawberries in. Show them how to pick the tiny leaves off herbs. When their fingers are stronger, demonstrate how to pinch lettuce leaves at the base.
Primary (3–6 years old): Invite them to help you make labels for the garden. Younger children can color in the pictures of the vegetables, fruits, and herbs. Older children can help write the names. Check the garden each day to watch for the produce to grow right in front of the labels!
Elementary (6–12): Elementary children can help plan your garden with a piece of paper and a ruler. Invite them to measure the space and translate the proportions to paper, and then label each section. The older they are, the more complicated this plan can be!
Secondary (12–14): The oldest children can be involved in research to determine which plants will thrive in your region, where to place seedlings in the light and shade parts of your garden, and also how to place the plants so that they complement each other as they grow.

Yard Work

Young Children’s Community: Give your little one a bucket and show them how to pluck the heads off of dandelions. This helps reduce the spread of seeds for the next year! They also can gather sticks to prepare the lawn for mowing.
Primary : Show your young child how to use a weed trowel to dig into the ground next to dandelions and pull them out by the roots. Challenge them to fill an entire bucket with the weeds!
Elementary : Your older child can be responsible for pulling the dead flower heads off of the plants that surround the yard. Show them that when they remove the old flowers, the plant has more resources to push out new blooms. They also can be responsible for setting up the sprinkler and watering plants and sections of your yard that need special attention.
Secondary : The oldest children can mow your lawn for you! Push mowers are easy and safe to use if you are not comfortable with electric or gas mowers. Along with increased responsibilities comes increased freedom. When they finish, they can bike into town for an ice cream, or fix lemonade with fresh lemons and stevia or honey in your kitchen as a treat.

Animals

Young Children’s Community: The very youngest children can help fill a bird feeder. Place the open feeder on the ground and open a bag or bucket of seed. Find a child-sized scoop, and show your toddler how to scoop the seed and put it in the feeder. Some may end up on the ground! Sweep it up or leave the treats out for the squirrels to clean up. Your child will love seeing the birds enjoy the food they prepared for them.
Primary: A primary child can learn how to mix water with sugar for a hummingbird feeder. The proportion for these birds is one part sugar for every four parts water, and the sugar water should be replaced every 4-5 days. They can learn to measure the portions themselves, stir the mixture, and pour it into the feeder. Then watch for these amazing animals!
Elementary and Secondary: Older children can do research to learn which kinds of bird seed will attract which kinds of birds. Once they know which birds are in your area, show them how to set up different feeders with various kinds of seeds. Then they can observe to see the birds that arrive in your yard, make lists of what is successful, and look up the birds that they do not recognize.

All of the age suggestions here are just that: suggestions! Older children may be happy to complete the tasks listed for younger children. And you may have younger children who are ready to take on the tasks listed for older ages.

In all cases, remember that the true purpose of a child’s activity is their own development. The process is more important than the product! Sometimes they will be truly helpful in the care of your home, and other times you may need to remind yourself that the goal is to raise a competent adult and not to have a perfectly manicured yard.

These summertime activities will provide opportunities for your child to experience how good real work feels. They will enjoy being productive with their minds and bodies. This work will help them develop their concentration, as well as their sense of themselves as contributing members of their family.

True self-esteem grows when children realize that they are competent and that their work matters. Your yard is the perfect place for your children to grow!

Returning to Our Montessori Values After Two Years of Screens

Fri, 13 May 2022 15:21:35 GMT

Adapting with Technology Was Empowering

We are more grateful than ever for the technology in our lives! During the pandemic, being physically separated from one another was painful, especially for our children who crave social interaction. Out of necessity, we learned inventive ways that computers, iPhones and iPads could connect us–to one another and to information about the world.

The worldwide Montessori community of educators found creative ways to use technology to reach students, which was an empowering example of how Montessori’s educational approach is designed for adapting to any time, culture and place. We learned to “teach” through the screen with voice, facial expressions, and using cameras to film teachers’ and students’ hands working Montessori materials. Teachers made and delivered materials to families and wrote directions for how to make one’s own versions. Many children and parents fashioned creative replicas and pivoted to continue their learning at home. It was a massive effort to translate Montessori education into new formats and to open access to more communities. Learning ways to adapt was liberating and the result is that many more people found Montessori as an option for schooling. Dr. Montessori would have cheered the adaptation, because she believed it to be perhaps the most important quality of childhood.

The Drawbacks of Increased Technology for Children

In these past two years, most children have become accustomed to using technology to communicate with friends, investigate information, use social platforms, and to text and chat. Their younger minds seem designed to intuitively navigate these forums much faster than adults. This is not an illusion. Have you noticed how quickly and nimbly your children learn to work around obstacles and outsmart even…you?

There are drawbacks, however, some of which you have probably observed. Many children become irritable, less patient, and lose their ability to focus or to calm themselves after spending an hour or more on screens such as iPads, cell phones, or other screen devices. Longer term effects can impact children’s fine motor and gross motor development, social skills, and emotional regulation. Because being able to calm oneself, being able to focus and being patient with oneself and others are imperative skills, this trend is worrisome. For children who are developing, any technology use–simply because it does not integrate the five senses and movement the way that real life does–can be considered overuse.

When you as a parent decide whether or not to give your children time with screen devices, consider the developmental consequences that will affect them. This is important, because we cannot go back in time and reset our children’s minds and bodies once they pass through each developmental stage. Montessori reminds us—and science has proven—that the most influential times in a person’s life are in childhood:

Years 1-6 are especially absorbent and malleable; trillions of neuronal pathways are being formed and pruned. These children need to explore their surroundings with their five senses, to use their fingers and hands to develop their abilities, develop gross motor skills for balance, core strength, and overall health. They need to be thinking, engaging with their surroundings, interacting, listening and speaking to communicate and developing their vocabulary, pronunciation, and interpersonal skills for cooperating, collaborating and expressing their thoughts and feelings in pro-social ways.

Years 6-12 are crucial ones for learning how to relate with others, to collaborate and get along with peers—social skills that their success and happiness in adulthood will depend on. They also need to stay active physically for their physical strength, health and well-being. These children need to be interacting with others their ages as much as possible, to learn manners, ways of relating, build friendships, and to discover and expand their own personalities. They need to be moving and active,
building physical structures, imagining and creating through play.

Years 12-18 are powerful ones for learning how to regulate one’s emotions, develop empathy, self-awareness and self-esteem. Physical activity continues to be important. Joining adults in society is a process of valorization for their confidence. These children need to be welcomed into the adult fold and introduced to how adults function successfully. Adolescents need to be shown how we adults handle and manage our thoughts and emotions, more intricate situations, complexity, and more refined skills such as balancing a checking account, paying taxes, a mortgage or rental lease, as examples. Some technology becomes an integral part of how we function as adults, and older teens are ready to handle some of the challenges and benefits of technology that we adults deal with, too. Around 15 years old, adolescents have great elasticity in their thinking and can navigate technology more maturely, with more developed judgment to manage inherent challenges.

Years 18-24 is when young adults learn to look outward and step into society to take part and effect positive change, if all the stages leading up to it have been satisfied. As young adults, they are independent in their technology use and ready to–if they were allowed to develop fully at each of the previous stages–be on their own, with parents and other adult mentors only needed as advisors or collaborators.

Each of these stages of development depend on the maturation of the one preceding it. This means that what we do as parents along the way really matters! To provide the optimal environment for our children’s best development, we’ve got to think through our family’s technology use for ourselves.

One exercise I suggest is to reflect on what one gives up (or “hands over”) when they use a cell phone or text–they give up a lot of the necessary executive functioning skills that children have to exercise and practice in order to develop. In other words, by handing your child a screen device, you create a kind of vacuum where skill-building would have occurred. Suddenly, a child does not need to–and cannot have the opportunity to–form executive function skills that will guide their decisions and behaviors in adulthood. Think of a teenager who is disoriented and unsure what to do if their technology fails them or does not guide them on what to do or how to handle a situation. They are learning to substitute or replace their own intuitions, experiences, and judgment, when they are too young to even realize it. This is where a virtual upbringing can quickly replace family and community interaction.

One common example of where executive function skills lose out is when we hand our children a cell phone and instruct them, “Call me when you want me to pick you up.” With this convenience, we avoid the opportunities for our children to practice planning ahead. They don’t get to learn how to stick with a plan of when and where they will be or experience how long it takes to bike or walk to a certain location, or how to manage their time. They lose out on all this practice and the development of important life skills. They also miss out on the chance to feel more independent. This may be convenient for the adults, but it’s unfortunate for the children. None of us really wants to thwart our children’s development, but this is the simple trade off.

There are some very good books and articles advising parents on screen time and its effects on children. When I look at these, I investigate by looking in the back of the book to find who conducted the research. Was the research published in a peer-reviewed science journal where studies have control groups? Who was the control group (children who interact with screen several hours a day, as opposed to those who interact with them nine or more hours? Or was the study group compared to children who interact with no screens at all–which would be a more clear picture of how even a small amount of screen time affects child development?) Finally, who funded the research? I am wary of tech company-sponsored research, which is driven to find positive results linked to screen use. One “flag” that I have noticed over the years is that researchers who study early child development and those who look at the intersections of socio-emotional levels and cognition and movement (both fine and gross motor), are alarmed at how children are slipping rapidly on basic skills and development. Pediatricians who have been practicing for twenty years or more certainly have witnessed this trend. But doctors whose only patients spend time with screens every day are not getting enough of a comparison to show them what children are capable of and what normal human development would be without the screen time.

Parents must use their common sense to make decisions about how to best guide their children. Most people know intuitively that being outside in nature, interacting with other human beings, moving our bodies, using our minds and reflecting to think deeply, are the healthiest activities for our families and especially for our children.

Montessori reminds us, “Children develop their brains as well as their bodies through movement, and in the process of concentration, self-discipline, and perseverance with an active interest, the foundations of character are laid” (Montessori Speaks).

Back to Our Values!

Although we have benefitted–and surely will again–by having technology that can connect us from afar, we also know that communicating through a screen is not the same as doing so in person. We adults– and especially children–lose quite a bit when screens replace three dimensional experiences and real interactions. Now that the daily necessity for screens has passed, it’s time to wean our children from using them out of habit. It is time to return to our fundamental Montessori values and to prioritize real interaction with the environment and between individuals.

If you are afraid that taking away your child’s devices and screen time will make them “the only one” at soccer practice, the gym meet, or any event without a phone, you may be right, at least initially. Your child may be looking around while their surrounding friends turn their faces down towards their screens. But the tradeoff is immense; your child will be thinking, observing the world around them, trying to talk to people or doing something interesting. In short, he or she will be building themselves as people. And the more parents catch on that the heavy use of technology is unhealthy for children, the more children will join yours. One increasingly popular idea is to talk to other families about starting a lower-tech community to give children a friend group with similar values and habits.

When making a change away from allowing your children to use screen devices in your family, the best strategy is to share your reasoning openly with your children and explain the long-term benefits of avoiding screen distractions in childhood. Tell them what you want for them, and why. Trust that your children are smart enough to understand your reasoning. Don’t underestimate their strength to be individuals in a sea of learned behaviors that do not benefit us as human beings. Quite simply, our communities and our future depend on individuals who can think and do! We do not need to join those who follow a crowd blindly. Just because “everyone else is doing it” doesn’t mean it’s the best choice. Montessori parents know this, and Montessori children do, too.

“Just do it!”

When you know that living a less “screened-in” life is the best thing to do, you can set an example for your children of being strong enough to make a change by doing it. Giving in to external pressures or giving up when nagged only sets a weak example for younger generations. We adults have got to be sure of ourselves and show our children how such things are done. You can be secure enough to donate iPhones and iPads to adults who may need them, and move on to healthier activities and a more peaceful, enjoyable home life as a family.

Additionally, when we make time and space to pursue our curiosities and talents in the physical world, rather than the virtual world, we open up great possibilities for our growth. Montessori wrote, “There is a vital force in every human being which leads them to make ever greater efforts for the realization of individual potentialities. Our tendency is to realize them. Joy and interest will come when we can realize the potentialities that are within us" (London Lectures).

We can step back, observe, think for ourselves and put technology back where it belongs, in adult hands. Children need to step out of our homes and into the world, to play, imagine, interact and create. Parents can enable their children to do just that. As one Montessori-trained teacher recently reminded me, “Children need to be part of the world in order to learn to love it. They need to be in contact with the soil, the leaves, the wind. They need to be part of a community of real people. Children need this contact in order to develop love for these elements of a good life. We cannot make these things happen for our children if something isolates them from these experiences.”

What A Joy the Real World Brings!

We are fortunate that we can turn off the devices, put them away, and even give devices away. These devices helped us and our children get through the pandemic. But now, it is a joy to be in person again, to feel the grass under our feet, to travel, and to share a meal with extended family or friends. It is time for our children to get outside, or play a board game, read a book, imagine and use their minds, talk and laugh with each other, and be creative. We do not need the technology the way we did, and we hopefully will not need it so intensively again for quite a while. In the meantime, carpe diem!

NY Times Opinion: I Make Video Games. I Won't Let My Daughters Play Them.

What is Normalization?

Mon, 11 Apr 2022 15:26:05 GMT

Normalization is one of the most important and most misunderstood terms in the Montessori philosophy. It is an objective of the Montessori curriculum. In fact, some might say it is the highest objective of the curriculum. Dr. Maria Montessori herself wrote, “It is the most important single result of our whole work” (Montessori, 1995, p. 204). The goal of the Montessori environment is to create this outcome. All roads lead to normalization. But what is it? And why does it matter?

What is it not?

To clear up any confusion, it is important to first address what normalization is not. Normalization does not mean being “normal.” Dr. Montessori wrote that her work was not intended for the creation of a “normal man” (Montessori, 1996, p. 34). It does not mean that children should strive towards societal, cultural, or even familial norms. Normalization is not about trying to make children the same or making them conform to imposed standards. It is not about removing children’s uniqueness or perfecting them towards some ideal. What’s more, it is not anything that adults “do” to children.

What is it?

Normalization was a phenomenon that Dr. Montessori observed in children who had been working constructively in her environment. It is a positive state of being that the children themselves bring about by their own activity. Dr. Montessori noticed that after a student had engaged in productive work, they emerged peaceful, joyful, and confident. For a period of time, they were free of what she referred to as “deviations,” defined in her own words simply as “the naughtiness of small children” (Montessori, 1996, p. 35).

A child who is normalized is helpful and kind. They are disciplined, independent, and accept the limits of living in a community. Their body and mind are fully integrated. It represents a child’s true nature, complete with their uniqueness. Normalized children do not all look and act the same, but they have similar attributes that allow them to lead with their strengths. Dr. Montessori wrote, “One is tempted to say that the children are performing spiritual exercises, having found the path of self-perfectionment and of ascent to the inner heights of the soul” (Montessori, 1995, p. 207). This lofty language refers to the spiritual quality of normalization— the inner development of a child’s best self.

How is normalization reached?

Normalization is achieved through concentration. Dr. Montessori observed that periods of deep and engaging activity brought children to this state. She wrote “[Normalization] always follows a piece of work done by the hands with real things, work accompanied by mental concentration” (Montessori, 1995, p. 204). After children work, they reveal their true and best nature. But how to encourage this kind of activity?

The Montessori classroom is unique in its ability to support the process of normalization. It offers children interesting and productive work that is relevant to their interests, abilities, and development. The teacher introduces children to this work, connecting them to materials that will be most meaningful for them. Then, the children are given the freedom to choose between different appropriate activities. When they have choices, they are able to select the work that will engage them fully. Dr. Montessori stated, “The essential thing is for the task to arouse such an interest that it engages the child’s whole personality” (Montessori, 1995, p. 206). Choice ensures that it will be their most satisfactory activity. Given time and space with this work, the children will concentrate.

It is after these periods of concentration that normalization emerges. Just as Dr. Montessori observed over one hundred years ago, research now shows that children in Montessori schools do in fact display the traits associated with normalization, including positive social development and greater executive functioning (Lillard and Else-Quest, 2006). Children in a Montessori classroom will have many opportunities for concentration, further strengthening their experience in that normalized state, and allowing it to become part of their character.

What can parents do at home to support normalization?

A child’s house should be their home. This means that a home should not be a replica of a classroom or try to imitate all the activities and qualities of a Montessori classroom. However, there are important ways that home life can support normalization at school. First is to ensure that children of all ages have plenty of opportunities for independent play and exploration. This kind of play should be unstructured and active. Screens and other forms of passive entertainment greatly undermine these kinds of activities, as they do nothing to support concentration or creativity.

Secondly, the home life should also have clear expectations of appropriate behavior. While these guidelines will be different from those in the classroom, consistent boundaries give children the security and discipline necessary for the development of normalization in their lives.

What does it look like at different ages?

Normalization is a productive point of departure. Dr. Montessori wrote, “Only ‘normalized’ children, aided by their environment, show in their subsequent development those wonderful powers that we describe; spontaneous discipline, continuous and happy work, social sentiments of help and sympathy for others” (Montessori, 1995, p. 206-207). It is not a permanent state, especially for a young child. There will be brief periods of normalization for young children, and these periods will eventually grow longer as children mature and spend more time in concentration with relevant work. Some children may experience normalization more easily than others. It is important that parents and teachers recognize that it is a process. Children will be inconsistent in their behavior as they will sometimes exhibit normalization and then will go through periods where they do not.

In the elementary years, normalization becomes more common. Children are capable of great intellectual work, and they will use this interest and ability to concentrate deeply on work that engages them. During this time, the positive traits of normalization become more of who they are. Through adolescence, Dr. Montessori recognized that normalization appeared as “valorization.” A normalized adolescent feels capable, strong, and worthy. Beyond adolescence, the hope is that normalization has been internalized into a person’s character. A normalized human being is a contributing member of society.

Why does it matter?

On a practical level, normalization creates goodness. Someone who is normalized feels happy and content. They are helpful to other people and contribute to their community. On a global level, normalization matters because of the profound inner change it can bring about in humanity. Peaceful people can bring about a peaceful civilization. Dr. Montessori was nominated three times for the Nobel Peace Prize in recognition of her work. The Montessori philosophy works on one child at a time, but, given enough time, that may be enough. Montessori is an “education for peace.” And normalization is a road to peace.

References

Lillard, A. S., & Else-Quest, N. (2006). Evaluating Montessori education. Science , 313, 1893-1894. doi: 10.1126/science.1132362

Montessori, M. (1995). The absorbent mind . New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Montessori, M. (1996). The formation of man . Oxford: Clio Press.

Assessment and Evaluation the Montessori Way

Mon, 28 Feb 2022 16:36:45 GMT

One of the most noticeable characteristics of a Montessori classroom is an absence of grades. No As, no Bs, no Cs, no Ds, and no Fs. Similarly, there is also an absence of testing. No exams. No tests. No multiple-choices questions. No essay questions.

This is often bewildering to people who are new to the Montessori approach. “But how do you know what the children are doing?” and “How do you know what they know?” and “How do you know what they need to learn?”

As with all aspects of the Montessori classroom, the answer has both a philosophical and a practical answer. Philosophically, Dr. Maria Montessori observed that children are intrinsically motivated to learn and master new concepts in the world around them. They don’t need grades or testing to motivate them. In fact (and this is proven by research), external motivators like grades actually diminish their intrinsic desire to learn. Likewise, testing has proven again and again to be a poor method for the process of storing information in long-term memory. Grades encourage competition and comparison. They inflate and deflate self-worth. Testing creates stress and the development of tools that mostly maximize short term memory.

So, given all the philosophical reasons one might have for utilizing learning and assessment strategies besides grades and testing, what might one use in its place?

This is where the magic of Dr. Montessori’s approach provides the necessary practical tools for evaluating students’ academic and developmental abilities, namely, record-keeping and observation.

Record-keeping

A Montessori teacher’s record-keeping album is a masterpiece in organization. Each album has a section for each child. Within that section is a list of every presentation for every material in the classroom, divided by subject area. These presentations represent all the possible work that can be done with every material in the classroom over the course of three years. There is an initial presentation, where a child learns the basic concept of the material, and then there are subsequent presentations, where they go more deeply into the concept, and explore more aspects of the work. Additionally, there is a category for “follow-up work,” indicating that a child will do this work on their own.

For each individual presentation, the teacher will mark if a child has been presented the material, if they have worked on it, how far they have gone with exploration of the concept, and, finally, if they have mastered it. All a teacher has to do is take a look at an individual child’s record-keeping section to know how much of a particular subject area of the classroom they have covered, and how much they have mastered. Here, the teacher sees if a child has been concentrating more on math or language, if they have mastered diagramming sentences, or if they have been given several presentations, but have not done the follow-up work necessary for deep understanding.

Teachers spend hours with their records each week, painstakingly taking notes on what children have done, what they have expressed interest in, and what they need to work on. Then they create individual lesson plans for each child that reflect these deliberations—ensuring that each child is excited about what they are learning, and also making steady progress through the curriculum.

It is important to point out that the curriculum for each classroom covers all essential lessons for those three years. Montessori teachers regularly compare their classroom curriculums to the local education requirements in their districts. This ensures that every child who completes a three-year cycle in a classroom will leave knowing everything they are expected to know by the local district—often more.

One of the ways that Montessori differs significantly from conventional schooling is that there is a concrete to abstract process for every topic. This means that a child is exposed to the concrete representation of every process before they work their way towards doing it independently on paper. A child who is pulled out of the upper elementary halfway through the three-year cycle and quizzed on what they know may not be able to show their work on paper. However, their teacher’s record-keeping will reflect that they are in the process of abstracting that process. For example, Cubing on paper is a specific lesson that children are expected to learn before they graduate from the upper elementary, but after they have done sufficient work with the concrete materials that represent cubing.

Several years ago, a young boy from Forest Bluff was taking a test on paper for diagnostic work with a therapist. He came across a long multiplication problem, and paused to ask the test administrator, “Do you have a Large Bead Frame?” (a hands-on material used for mathematical operations). Montessori teachers chuckle when they hear this story, knowing that it indicates his deep level of understanding regarding the concept of multiplication, as well as his own awareness of where he was positioned on the progression from concrete to abstract. Montessori children could probably prepare their own set of classroom records for themselves!

Observation

The second tool the Montessori teacher uses to assess a child’s development in the classroom is observation. The Montessori training thoroughly prepares teachers for this element of their work. Trainees listen to a lecture and write a paper on the process of observation. Then they practice this skill in Montessori classrooms, observing with specific assignments and taking notes, then writing summaries based on those observations. Observing is meant to be objective, informed, and always with the purpose of understanding children and the classroom environment.

Teachers take time each day to observe. The topic will vary from day to day. Sometimes a particular child is struggling socially or academically, or sometimes there is a particular area of the classroom that isn’t getting attention. By prioritizing objective observation with thorough note-taking, the teacher will get to know that student and the classroom better. And through that work, they will know what that child enjoys, what they struggle with, what they know, and what they don’t know. These observations serve lesson planning.

Careful observation can take the place of formal assessment. Children reveal themselves through their words and actions, and an observant adult will look deeper to learn about a child’s abilities and understanding. The Montessori environment is conducive for this kind of attention. A teacher gives presentations individually and in small groups throughout the day. In such small numbers, the teacher has time to check a child’s level of understanding, by asking leading questions, by observing facial expressions and body language, and by taking the time to listen to and watch each child process the information and concepts.

When I was a primary teacher, there was a four-year-old student in my class who was struggling with the Moveable Alphabet (a box with all the letters of the alphabet and is used for making words). While she could read the words in the Phonetic Object Box (a box with tiny objects with phonetic names and matching labels), she could not write any words out. She couldn’t seem to reduce words into individual sounds. I worked with her every day, and it seemed as though we never made any progress. Finally, I decided to step away for a week and see what she did on her own.

Left to her own devices, she took out the Phonetic Object Box and the Moveable Alphabet at the same time. Then she used the Moveable Alphabet to copy the labels on the Phonetic Object Box. This is the point where I should tell you that this exact activity was explicitly forbidden by my Montessori training. “It’s just busy work,” said the trainer. But when I cast aside this instruction and looked at this particular situation objectively, I could see that this four-year-old was working hard, fully absorbed, and matching the letters against the sounds. She did it again and again, gradually working up to writing the words from memory and then producing her own words. Eventually, she became a prolific writer in our classroom, producing pages and pages of beautiful stories.

Thank goodness for observation. Without it, I surely would have continued to try to teach this child my way, and I would not have been able to fully comprehend what she knew and what she was teaching herself. I still think of her—in college now—as the little girl who taught me the importance of observation.

Final Thoughts

Record-keeping and observation with this level of detail and reflection is an enormous amount of work. It would be easier to write tests, administer them, and assess children in a conventional and concrete way. Montessori teachers spend hours studying their curriculum albums, going over their records, carefully considering each child, making connections across the curriculum, taking observation notes, reading observation notes, and discussing the materials and their students with their colleagues.

The time spent behind the scenes is what makes the classroom come alive. It is what connects children to the materials, exciting them and encouraging them along their academic and developmental journeys. And, in the end, it is worth all that time and energy, doing it the hard way, the time-consuming way. It is a manifestation of every teacher’s passion and care for education and children. It is, in the end, a labor of love.

Let’s Play! Montessori’s Playful Nature

Thu, 10 Feb 2022 16:50:34 GMT

Is it Work?

As a parent, you may hear Montessori teachers describe your children’s activities as “work.” Your child may use the word, too, saying, “I love my work,” or, “I did a lot of work today!” But then you may wonder, “Why does my child go skipping in there every day?” and, “Why is my child dying to get back to school after the vacation, and sad when school is canceled?” How can “work” be so much fun?

Quite simply, Maria Montessori discovered that working at something that interests them is playful for children, under the right conditions. It must be internally inspired with choice offered for freedom. Montessori found specific ways for children to meet their developmental characteristics and needs through purposeful activities. A kind of joy arises when children can fulfill their natural drive to form their personalities and improve their abilities. In other words, children love to play games that have internal purpose for them.

Let's Play a Game!

One of the most enjoyable things about being a Montessori teacher is that it doesn’t feel like “work” for the adults, either, because we get to say “Let’s play a game” all the time. Have you ever noticed that in Montessori, learning to count, add and subtract with the bead bars is called The Snake Game ? Or that to practice a moment of quiet meditation is called The Silence Game ? Montessori’s introductory exercise for learning to read is called The Sound Game, and the first time a child writes long multiplication on paper it’s called The Dot Game.

Dr. Montessori appealed to children’s playfulness by making learning activities into games. The wording invites children to approach activities with curiosity and inquisitiveness. It invites them to explore, quite literally with their hands and senses, and also abstractly, with their minds. But importantly, Dr. Montessori also recognized that children want to do real things. She gave young children respect by offering realistic, purposeful learning actions for them to learn through. Even today, young children desire this respect: In her research, Dr. Lillard has found that children as young as 4-6 years old prefer real activities to pretend ones. If given a choice between preparing pretend food with a pretend knife and preparing real fruit with real utensils for sharing with others, children often prefer the latter.[1] This may be because they delight in being able to do things that they see grown ups do.

Perhaps children know, unconsciously, that these are things that will develop their independence and further their self-mastery in the world.

Playfulness in Childhood

Before she became interested in Montessori education, Angeline Lillard was a researcher who focused on children’s pretend play. She is now an internationally leading researcher on both play and Montessori, separately. But the two topics, interestingly, are intricately related. Dr. Lillard explains that by making real activities game-like, Maria Montessori succeeded to collapse the tension between work and play, structure and freedom.[2] This is why your children skip into Montessori schools, enthusiastic about doing their “work.”

Children have a tendency to play and to be playful. They also enjoy challenging themselves to acquire new abilities. In response, Montessori teachers invite their children to self-challenge their memory, their balance, their hand-eye coordination, and their self-control in many ways all throughout the day. Some of these games are quite hard to do, like memorizing a 4-digit number and keeping it in your head while walking across the room, then collecting the correct number of unit beads, ten bars, hundred squares and thousand cubes to represent that same number, and bringing it back to the teacher all by yourself! Or closing your eyes and feeling objects inside a bag with your hands and describing them out loud. In such activities, the children feel that they are playing games—and they are—but more importantly, the enjoyment deepens their engagement with their activities, and they learn difficult concepts and develop important abilities for further learning.

The aspect of playfulness invites children to focus on and to delight in the sensation of self-challenge. As they find this state over and over in their daily experiences in the classroom, children become insatiable learners with wide interests. This long-term effect seems to be the primary reason adult graduates report feeling that early Montessori education greatly benefitted them.

Be Playful at Home

In these long winter months when your family is often indoors, parents can find some simple ways to invite playfulness into your own lives. To be playful, your first instinct may be to get a competition going because that is the way that many of us learned to play games as children. “I’ll race you to the car” or “Let’s see who can…”. But that isn’t the kind of playfulness that leads to learning, independence and self-assuredness. So, pause and think first about what elements make an activity playful, vs. a competition, between two individuals.

You can begin by asking, “I wonder…”

I wonder if this hat can fit into this bag…

I wonder if the water is too hot, too cold, or just right…

I wonder where your snow boots are now…

I wonder if you can make this room neat and tidy before bedtime…

I wonder if you can reach that…

I wonder if you can help your sister…

Each question can feel like a spontaneous game for your children.

You can demonstrate challenging yourself, too, by saying, “I’m going to see if I can…”

I’m going to see if I can put this bicycle behind the others without tipping them over…

I’m going to see if I can make this door close without a sound…

I’m going to see if I can balance this cup on the tray without spilling all the way to the table…

These questions may inspire your children to also challenge themselves in fun ways.

When you look at a photograph or a book illustration, try a Where’s Waldo? approach.

I’m looking for a snowflake in the photo. Do you see one?

I’m trying to decide if that person is happy or sad. What do you think?

I’m searching for something red in this painting. Do you notice anything red?

Asking such questions invite interaction and conversation. And it’s fun!

We tend to think of “quizzing” or “testing” a child when asking them questions. But in Montessori, we take a more friendly approach of challenging ourselves alongside one another. The adult models challenging him or herself, while encouraging the child to challenge him or herself in their own ways. This result is children who enjoy challenge and who set ambitious goals for themselves because nothing is imposed on them—it is self-driven. This approach supports children to develop courage and realistic confidence.

What Kinds of Games?

Younger children are fascinated by exploring with their senses. They love to listen for sounds, search for tiny visual details, touch things with their hands and learn the names of degrees of variability. (This is smooth , this is rough , this is tepid , this is cool , this is sour , this is sweet . This is heavy , this is heavier , this is long , this is longer ). You can make up a playful little game on the spot wherever you are, any time, by demonstrating how we can use our senses to learn about our surroundings.

Young children also love to play memory games. Turn over several photographs or cards with images and play a spontaneous game of memory. Which one was the black dog? Which one was the brown cow? Or listen to bird call recordings and see if you can remember which bird makes which call. Just compare 3-4 at a time, and keep it simple.

Older children, ages six to twelve, enjoy exploring with their minds more than their senses. They love tongue twisters and finding facts. This is when board games become fun for them. But you can also make up spontaneous games wherever you are, like trying to list the U.S. presidents in order, or seeing how many state capitols family members can recall.

Elementary aged children also love to make up their own games, complete with rules, and play them with friends. These can involve math facts, historical figures or building complex structures with blocks or Legos.

Adolescents tend to enjoy trivia games and cards games, like poker. They love to trump the adults with what they know and with what they can do.

Learning Can Be Fun

Being playful can break up the tedium of a long day or a task you’d rather not do. Ironically, when the playfulness deepens the meaning of an activity, rather than distracting from its purpose, it is more engaging for children, not less. Think of the story of Tom Sawyer with painting the fence. The idea is not to make the painting activity into a “paint war” of throwing paint all over the yard. Instead, the playfulness gets added into the purpose (of painting the fence, for instance) and having a finished product at the end.

Children do love to learn. Many of us associate learning and learning in school, in particular, as being drudgery. But that is not because of the information presented. Rather, it was the methods of teaching that burdened many of us as young students. Using strategies like intimidation, rewards and punishments, prodding and competition, have made learning in conventional schools into unpleasant chores for many individuals. But in Montessori, where learning is presented in playful and enjoyable exercises, children learn for pure pleasure. This is just another example of where Montessori has been designed so that the education matches children’s natural characteristics and needs. It fits to the children’ natures, rather than forcing them to match an arbitrary education model designed by adults who aren’t considering how children really learn.

Now you know that when your children skip into school in the morning to work with the Montessori materials, to challenge themselves in some new ways, to learn new skills or to create a big project or a research report, it’s because they feel engaged and inspired by an atmosphere alive with playfulness!

To read another of our blog articles about play, see Playtime is Not Wasted Time

To learn more about her research, read Dr. Angeline Lillard’s numerous papers about children and play

Additional Reading

[1] A.S. Lillard and J. Taggart, Children prefer the real thing to pretending, Sciencebreaker, March 2018.

[2] Angeline Lillard. Montessori, an alternative early childhood education. Early Child Development and Care, vol. 191, 2021.

What is Essential?: Moving Forward in a Pandemic

Sat, 15 Jan 2022 16:56:56 GMT

I know I am not the only person who has re-defined the meaning of the word “essential” during this pandemic—or at least, come to a more nuanced understanding of it. As the world shut down in the spring of 2020, and we were driven to our homes, we called the people who did the work that absolutely had to be done “essential workers.” We wrote signs for garbage truck drivers, we thanked the grocery store cashiers profusely, and we wept with gratitude for the doctors and nurses who courageously showed up day after day in hospitals. Through this experience, we realized what work is truly essential to our daily living.

Similarly, we developed a visceral understanding of the word as it applied to our own lives. We experienced how vital, and how fragile, the basic necessities of our world are—food, access to water for hygiene, possibilities for human connection. We experienced many of these as a loss or became aware of how tenuous our access to these essential requirements for healthy living are.

I read recently that one of the gifts of winter is that it strips our lives down to what is essential. Winter lacks abundance, it lacks warmth, it lacks a feeling of limitless possibility. In winter, we remember what matters most, and we focus on and nurture those parts of our lives for the health and bounty of our spirit—no small task during cold, grey days. But the gift of this experience is the reminder of what matters. It is the opportunity to develop our relationship with these essential elements in our lives.

To that end, the pandemic itself has been a vast global winter. It has been a time of deprivation, of limitation, and of scarcity. We haven’t had easy access to the features of life that many of us have become accustomed to—travel, frequent social gatherings, seeing smiles in stores. And even with the fortune of having children back at school in person, what is missing during a second year of masking, social distancing, and a heightened anxiety about normal childhood illnesses? These are losses we don’t even have a name for yet.

So far as I can tell, this is our opportunity to examine what has been essential for us during our pandemic, our winter. And by examining how we understand what is essential, we can alchemize this experience into wisdom. We can deepen our ability to sustain ourselves for future challenges and for continuing to appeal to our better natures as we find ways to navigate this together.

When I consider the experiences I had during the pandemic, the essential elements rise quickly to the surface. It is clear what I have needed for my spirit to survive and thrive: Friends, Kindness, and The Ability to Create Joy.

Friends

I’ve always considered myself a person who is ambivalent about being social. On the one hand, I love people. On the other hand, I get tired and want to lie on the couch by myself after social activities. The beginning of our spring 2020 lockdown appealed to me. There were no social commitments, no casual conversations at the grocery store. And our quiet school year also had a certain attraction; we didn’t have to leave the house for anything extra, I didn’t need to drive our children to activities or friends’ houses, and we didn’t have obligations for holidays or special events.

But that year also contained a certain dryness. It felt flat, I felt empty too much of the time, and our children took turns in tears from missing playing freely with friends. “We need each other.” I heard a whispering in my heart. “We need each other.” It was only through the connections I maintained with friends that I survived that year with any of my sanity. We texted, we walked outside, we left each other messages, we sat around a fire. We laughed and cried and shared our struggles. Then, when my need for support became acute because of a loss in my family, these friends, all of whom were in similar states of depletion, filled my life with care and attention. I was humbled by their love. Friends were an essential nourishment.

Kindness

I don’t know anyone who hasn’t been depleted by the last year and a half of their lives. We’ve all fallen apart in different ways at different times. “We are all losing our minds,” I told my mother recently, when she shared some unusual behavior she had observed in a friend. There’s no other explanation for the way many people are acting right now. We are all losing our minds.

This pandemic has brought out the best in us, and also the worst. This is no small wonder. It has used all our reserves. And then, when we thought we were taking a breath again this summer, it asked for more. It feels like we have nothing left.

This is why kindness has been necessary—more than it ever has—in my own life. Whether it’s the patient doctor, who answers extra questions about a health issue, or the barista, who lets me have the hot chocolate for free because I forgot my wallet. It’s teachers, who are gracious with children and parents, and neighbors, who take the extra time to drop off cookies or a note.

The kindness shown to us has allowed us to keep giving. And the kindness we show others allows us to keep connecting. This, accompanied with the compassion and humility necessary for seeing that everyone is suffering in their own ways, is essential for our survival and continued connection to each other in this world.

The Ability to Create Joy

This final essential element is new for me during these last two years. I have had a lucky life; I haven’t wanted much for health, security, or love. And in having that kind of comfort and opportunity, I also didn’t have to pay much attention to what made me happy. I was usually happy, or happy enough, and if I became quite unhappy, it could usually be remedied with a little time.

This year has tried us. It has pushed us to the edge. It has taken all I thought I had and it has asked for more. It has not paused the everyday stress, tragedies, and sadness of life. We have had to grieve even while we survived. And in knowing that it is not happiness that sustains us, I have had to develop a practice for cultivating joy—in bits and pieces throughout my day—so that the feeling buoys me, carries me along, and fills my reserves, even by the teaspoonful. And when I need to give more, I have it.

This practice of building joy has entered all facets of my life. And most of it starts with awareness. All spring and summer long, when I noticed a flower, I actually stopped to smell it. Then I paused and smelled it again. This was an initially unconscious process, until I realized I was doing it so that joy could bloom, however small, inside of me. Similarly, I began to extend my walks to go all the way down to the lake, instead of standing on the bluff looking down. Seeing the water up close, hearing the waves, putting my feet in the sand, and letting my dogs race in circles on the beach all served to lift my spirits.

I drank a cup of special tea every day, I wore cozy mittens and noticed the soft lining, I sat down with a plate of lunch at the table instead of grazing in the kitchen, I spontaneously drove our children to see the sunset when we caught hot pink glimpses in the trees above our house, I lit an outdoor fire on Mother’s Day and warmed my feet as I read. These sources of joy were small, sometimes almost imperceptible. But with each experience, my spirit filled by a spoonful. And I saw that these acts were essential in a way I had never known before.

Final Thoughts

Just recently, I had a dream that I was looking at photos of my children at the beginning of the pandemic. And in realizing how much older they look now—recognizing how much they have grown and changed during this time of Covid—I was struck deeply by what a significant portion of their childhood has now been in a pandemic. It will be a part of them as they get older, for better and for worse. It is now an ingrained part of their childhood and will shape who they are and who they become. In my dream, I wept. I was grieving a loss of innocence—innocence they lost decades before I ever did.

But what is wisdom, if not the alchemy of changing challenging circumstances into a deep perspective and understanding of what is essential in this world? This hardship need not be in vain. By remembering what is essential, we can continue to fuel ourselves for the path ahead. We can support our children in the way they understand the story of these years.

As I walked under increasingly wintery skies this week, I found myself looking upwards. When the trees lose their leaves, the skies become more apparent. Winter takes away the richness of the foliage, but it offers us a clearer glimpse of the heavens. It strips away excess. Only the essential is left.

Now is not the time to lose hope in humanity or the possibilities of this world. Now is not the time to give up on each other, or a promising future. We must find what is essential in our lives and cultivate it. This action nourishes us. It allows us to keep our spirits and humanity intact during our winter. And when summer comes—which it will—and when there is abundance again, we won’t forget the gifts that got us there.

Have Faith in the Children

Wed, 08 Dec 2021 17:04:14 GMT

“Have faith in the child.” These are some of Dr. Maria Montessori’s most poster-worthy words, widely quoted in the Montessori realm. I must have heard this appeal at every Montessori conference and in all the Montessori training courses. It gets at the essence of Montessori education and parenting.

Certainly, the Montessori approach of education echoes this plea in every corner and in every way. Dr. Montessori saw that children have all the gifts of nature needed to create themselves as people. When supported and encouraged, children can develop to their full potential, and, often, they surpass our expectations. I have seen this as a Montessori educator again and again over the years, watching children on their journeys through struggles, difficulties, and eventual triumphs at Forest Bluff School. When they graduate from the Secondary Level program at age 14, every single young adult is remarkable. I don’t exaggerate when I say that this evolution, when supported by the Montessori approach both in school and at home, is stunning. Putting faith into each child’s abilities is what makes it happen.

The Messages in Montessori Classrooms

If you’re wondering how Montessori demonstrates faith in children’s abilities to form themselves, think about what distinguishes Montessori classrooms:

Children are free to move around the room, choose their own work, and sit where they choose.
Children are trusted to handle materials carefully when they have been shown how to.
Children take care of their classroom and the materials in it: They dust the shelves, clean up the floors, wipe down the tables, water the plants, feed the animals, shake out the rugs, and touch everything in the room; it is their privilege and their responsibility.
Children work with specialized materials that have a control of error built into each activity, so that children can learn to correct their own mistakes and create their own moral judgments of their performance.
Children enjoy repeating the activities they are most interested in until they have mastered them and feel ready to move on to another challenge.
Children are believed to have intrinsic motivation to do their best and to become their best selves; they do not need grades, stickers, or prizes to prod them.
Children are given three uninterrupted hours every morning and several hours every afternoon to do their own work; all work is treated as equally important and valued.
Children are not tested or quizzed on paper by arbitrary testing, but demonstrate their understanding as joyful expressions of their learning by writing reports, stories, making scripts or musical pieces, drawing, and by giving original oral presentations to their classmates and teachers.
Children are given freedom to play unsupervised outside when they are six and older in small groups of peers, where they can work through their own social interactions and resolve most situations successfully on their own.
Children are given the task of planning and executing trips out into society and into the wilderness, where they learn from their own mistakes, take on adult-like responsibilities and help one another to succeed as a group.

The result of such an education—where the children are not acted upon by the adults but, rather, do their important actions themselves—is independence and self-mastery. In Dr. Montessori’s words, “Thus he is both active and free, and from these two factors is created that vital quality of a strong character: internal discipline.”[1]

Such internal discipline arms our children to go out into the world beyond Forest Bluff with confidence. For example, this self-mastery can be seen in our graduates’ approach to their homework assignments in high school and college. They do not need their parents or teachers to prod them or remind them to do their work; these students know that the work is theirs to do, and they take pride in doing their best. Their sincere work ethic is integral to who they are.

The Messages from Parents

When we meet children’s needs and learning characteristics at each successive stage of their development on the continuum from birth to early adulthood, all things are possible. But what does it really mean, to have faith in your child?

The longer I have been a parent (19 years now), the more I realize that the most important thing we can do is show our children that we believe in their abilities with full confidence. Everything else starts to click and falls under this umbrella.

You can use words to tell your child:

“I have complete faith in you”

“I know you can do this.”

“I believe in you. I think you’re amazing!”

Whatever statement comes most naturally to you, say it often. But remember, it is imperative that you really believe what you are saying! And you CAN have confidence in your child—because when you stand back and watch them, really observe openly, you will see that every child works so hard, they care so much about how well they do, and they are eager to correct themselves and they know how to do it. The more we believe in them, the more we assume they are doing their best and that they’re in charge of themselves, the better and better things go. Everything starts to fall into place.

When we tell our children we believe in them, it may be appropriate to also say, “And let me know if I can do anything to help you,” or, “If I can be of help, please let me know. I am here for you.” Knowing when to ask for help and being comfortable doing so is, of course, an important ingredient to succeeding in life. But the main message— I believe you can do this —has got to be the unwavering theme. Your confidence must be sincere and overriding so that it is not derailed while you offer support.

Your actions as a parent can also show your child that you have faith in their abilities. You can give choices with boundaries that offer freedom and support so that your child can act and make decisions independently. This works best when you have a good idea of what is appropriate for each child at each age and stage of their development.

For instance, be careful not to expect your child to be more mature than his or her age, or to have powers that he or she developmentally cannot have yet. Often, parents might expect too much or too little, and sometimes both simultaneously. For example, I’ve seen parents expect an elementary-aged child to be able to monitor their use of screen technology, but then make their child’s sandwich for them. This is a prime example of a mismatch between a child’s developmental stage and a parent’s expectations. (An 18-month-old is capable of learning how to prepare foods, but a child is arguably not ready to monitor their relationship to technology until they are in high school)*.

By learning about Dr. Montessori’s observations of what children are capable of at each age and stage of their development, parents can match their expectations for their child’s success. This is what trained teachers do in the Montessori classrooms. Your child’s teacher is an excellent resource for how to find what choices and boundaries are most appropriate for your child’s stage of life. By reading about and discussing Montessori with educators and other parents so that you can try out the approach at home, you will quickly find the right balance for your family.

When parents set up home environments that support their children’s independence, it becomes even easier to have faith in their abilities. For example, giving a young child time and space to put on their own clothes, assisting them only as little as needed, placing objects down at the child’s level, and making things they need accessible to them offers children opportunities to develop their autonomy and confidence. As young children become more competent, parents find that they can trust them to care for themselves and contribute to the family more readily.

It's a Spiritual Journey

Maria Montessori really was a genius. And it wasn’t just her intellect that found ways to best support human development; it was her spiritual maturity that made her see how natural and superior human development is when unhindered by adults. She saw what happens when adults allow children to form themselves without unnecessary interference or prejudices about the outcomes.

It is not easy to have faith in our children because it means that we must believe that we’ve done a good job of giving them what they need for success. That means having faith in ourselves as parents, first! As the children watch their parents for clues about how to live a good life, parents are wise to have faith in themselves and each other, as well. Demonstrating that we have confidence in ourselves and others makes us good role models.

The Montessori approach takes us on a journey that is as spiritual as it is physical. Everything we do for our children is an act of giving of ourselves. Dr. Montessori was able to see how incredible children are when she gave them the freedom to act and think for themselves. She said, “The great benefit we can bestow on childhood is the exercise of restraint in ourselves.”[2] When the adults prepare the environment and provide boundaries and choices—but then let children be active to move and think for themselves—we give them a great gift.

When we can have faith in our children, we can truly follow them. They are the adults of the future, and they have the strength and the optimism to solve tomorrow’s problems as they encounter them in adulthood. They can only do this if we offer our confidence in them. Let’s put our faith into the future! Have faith in the child.

Footnotes

[1] Montessori, M. Montessori Speaks to Parents. 2017. p. 7

[2] Montessori, M. Montessori Speaks to Parents. 2017. p. 5

*At Forest Bluff School, we strongly encourage families to wait with screen technology such as computers, iPads, iPhones, and games until after eighth grade. Please see related blog articles to learn more.

Sanctuary of the Spirit

Mon, 01 Nov 2021 17:09:57 GMT

We have begun this school year with a renewed need for the perspective, courage, and resilience that carried us through a troubled spring and a summer of renewed fears: covid variants, vaccine breakthrough cases, many remaining covid restrictions—all of which work against our mission with children. Indeed we are living again, not in the life-threatening and challenging times of a year and a half ago, but, nevertheless, in a setback from where we hoped—and expected—to be.

Yet, as with all setbacks, good things happen in our human task on earth. We “overcome evil with good.” We develop a further awareness that we can’t control our universe; we only defeat one enemy and another appears. It is the story of human history from our beginning. Over time, however, as these experiences help us to develop realism about our own capabilities, our hubris fades and we grow spiritually. We realize our dependence and ultimate need for each other, as parents and teachers, in carrying out our mission for our children. Above all, we become more deeply aware of Creation itself and the Power that sustains it: of all humanity; and the progress of our human civilization from its beginning. It is this recognition, so uniquely the foundation of Montessori education, that enables us to present to our children the natural world and human achievement within it as a gift to them, eternally deserving of their gratitude and appreciation.

Nurturing the Human Spirit

As parents and teachers, we help our children to sustain this vision of gratitude and appreciation by meeting each new day with the resilience and optimism of a strong spirit. We live in a great and free country whose people are getting up every day, working and raising their families, and living by the values of civil behavior toward all. We are part of this greatness of humanity. In Montessori, we focus on this greatness for the children through a realistic appraisal of human progress since our beginnings on the earth. Truly, we face nothing new in human history today. It is just new to us.

Regardless of the problems of the world at large in any given year, there is always an opportunity for renewal for the human spirit. The Montessori approach has this appeal at its center. E.M. Standing, Dr. Montessori’s oldest and most intimate collaborator for the last thirty years of her life, explains it best in his book, Maria Montessori, Her Life and Work:

"One of the reasons why Dr. Montessori’s lectures had such a widespread appeal was that she never treated educational problems on a purely technical or utilitarian level. Her appeal was always to the spirit...Even when Montessori was dealing with a subject like arithmetic or grammar the spiritual element was never absent…She saw in every school subject an activity of the human spirit, and therefore treated it with a corresponding dignity and breadth."

To this end, our own spiritual development, both alone and in communion with our children, is our most important work. There are many distractions in this world, and our most vital activity is being present with our children in meaningful and joyful ways, whenever opportunities present themselves. The more that we can slow our pace, admire the changing leaves, read an uplifting book, or listen to our children’s stories—truly, whatever it is that gives us the opportunity to focus on our family life and the blossoming of our own spiritual nature—the more we nurture this part of ourselves and appeal to our children’s own strength of spirit. It is through the strengthening of our spirits that we are able to continue to meet life’s challenges and to emerge both stronger and wiser.

Maria Montessori's Life and Challenges

Perhaps Dr. Montessori’s ability to grasp this understanding of the primacy of the human spirit is the result of the resiliency and courage with which she faced the struggles of her own life—for they were legion. I share her story here because I have always felt uplifted when I am reminded of the fortitude she exhibited and of the way her courage and wisdom deepened with every challenge she faced.

At a time when women were barred by tradition and culture to do so, Dr. Montessori began a professional life by graduating from the medical school at the University of Rome in 1886. First as a practicing physician, and soon, in addition, as a renowned educator of young children, she earned the respect and admiration of her colleagues throughout Europe in both fields. However, when Fascists became dominant in Italy, Standing tells us, “she came to realize that an education which had as its aim the development of a strong and free personality could not thrive in a totalitarian atmosphere.” The Italian government closed all her schools, and the Nazi governments of Germany and Austria followed their lead, even burning an effigy of Dr. Montessori over a pyre of her own books in the public squares of Berlin and Vienna.

Undeterred, she started her work over again in Barcelona, Spain, setting up her headquarters there, and continuing a life of travel to train teachers and set up schools in many countries. Next, the Spanish Civil War commenced. She managed to escape the country on a British battleship, but with only an hour’s notice, so that all of her papers and work of many years had to be left behind. Now sixty-five years old, Dr. Montessori settled in Holland, establishing a school and training center there, while continuing her work worldwide.

The outbreak of World War II found her in India. She was held there for seven years, as an Italian national, along with her adult son, Mario. Despite the privation of separation from family members and constant fear for their safety in Europe, she successfully continued her work: training teachers and establishing schools throughout India. In fact, this opportunity for thorough immersion in the culture of India expanded Dr. Montessori’s understanding of humanity and its history, and strongly influenced the development of cosmic education and her educational curriculum for elementary children.

Finally, back in Holland at war’s end, she had the energy and dedication at age seventy-eight to return to India in 1948, to complete commitments made there, before returning once again to Europe. She was buried in Holland in 1952, spending the last weeks of her life planning to make her first trip to Africa! She was eighty-two years old.

Because Dr. Montessori refused to be defeated by the repeated upheavals in her life, we are blessed today to live in a world where the outreach of Montessori education is more global than ever. There are training centers and schools on five continents, and for the first time, Montessori is receiving serious notice by the public school sector in the United States. This expanding national and global spread is being powered by scientifically designed research studies*, which is leading to a recognition by academia worldwide of Montessori education’s potential to revolutionize educational practices throughout the world. Her strength of spirit is the original foundation for the incredible progress her approach has made in the last century.

Moving Forward

In the course of writing this blog, I received news of a setback for Forest Bluff—expected, at this point in the pandemic, but still disheartening. One of our students tested positive for Covid-19 and is quarantining at home. The good news is that they are the only child from the class to test positive and they are recovering quickly. We face this new adversity better prepared than ever before: with lessons learned about testing and exposure; further knowledge of the virus itself and therapeutics for its treatment; the encouraging news that an appropriate vaccine dose has been approved for children as young as five years old; and, in addition, booster shots for already fully vaccinated adults.

As I write today, looking out over our green pasture and pond full of geese, splashing and practicing for their flight south, and the oaks, maples, and hickory trees with their brilliantly colored leaves about to fall to the ground, becoming nutrients for new trees of the future, I am inspired by the Creator’s cycle of life and renewal. We are part of this great renewal, and so I know as teachers and parents, we will meet each new adversity, as in the past, with fortitude and strength of spirit.

One day soon, whether this winter, or if we must wait until spring, we will once again enter Forest Bluff by our main door. We will experience anew the awe and peace of our hallway with its vaulted ceiling and light from windows above. We will say goodbye to our children as they enter their classrooms, and know that they are entering a beautiful and carefully prepared space that is constantly filled with the joy of their learning together: a true sanctuary of the spirit for children and young adults.

That day is coming. We have only to be patient awhile longer, knowing that the Creator is in charge of all.

*Notes

To read the latest research on Montessori, search the following on Google Scholar:

Mira Debs of Yale University

Solange Denervaud of the University of Lausanne, Switzerland

Angeline Lillard of the University of Virginia

An audio version of Angeline Lillard’s book, Montessori:The Science Behind the Genius (Oxford University Press, 3rd edition), is also now available at audiobooks.com.

Developmentally Appropriate Montessori Gifts

Mon, 18 Oct 2021 20:42:34 GMT

The heart of fall marks the beginning of the holiday season for many religious and cultural traditions. And with the holidays comes the time for buying gifts for loved ones. This can be a challenge for the intentional parent, who wants to give thoughtful purchases that will inspire engagement and support development, while also not adding to the clutter!

If we turn to the essential observations that Dr. Maria Montessori made about children, we can use these as a guide to consider what is most useful and attractive to give. By viewing children in their planes and sub-planes of development, we see what their needs and interests are at these times, and can choose appealing and developmentally supportive toys, activities, and tools for each age.

For our purposes, we will consider the children in the following age groups: 0-3 years, 3-6 years, 6-12 years, and 12-15 years.

Infants & Toddlers: 0-3

Perhaps there is no greater leap in development that a human being will make in their entire lives than the changes that occur from birth to age three. The tiny helpless infant becomes an independent and functioning three-year-old! During this stage of life, parents and caregivers want to particularly support the tiny child’s development of their fine and gross motor skills.

Basket of Balls: Choose a variety of three or four balls (3-6 inches in diameter) and put them into a basket just large enough to hold them. The balls can be made of different materials and have different colors. An infant will reach towards and eventually scoot towards a ball placed in front of them. A crawling baby will chase after the rolling balls. And a toddler will practice throwing and kicking the balls outside or in a recreation room.

Set of Wooden Blocks: A baby who is sitting can practice putting one block on top of the other. As they develop this skill and interest, they can do this work with more and more blocks. By the time they are three, they will build even more complex structures.

Small Apron and Chef’s Hat: One of a toddler’s favorite places is underfoot in the kitchen! With the appropriate gear, you can signal to them that they are invited to participate in the work of the home. There are a variety of one- and two-step activities that toddlers can do in the kitchen. And a gift such as this one allows them to feel that their efforts and contributions are recognized.

The Young Child: 3-6

While a child spends the first three years of their lives developing their movement, they spend the next three years practicing refinement of these acquisitions. They also are now becoming more curious about what is in the world around them. At this age, gifts that allow them to work with their newly acquired fine movement skills and gifts that give them facts about the world they can see serve their interests and actions.

Colored Pencil Set: A beautiful set of colored pencils with a special drawing pad makes a wonderful gift. Children love having a designated case for their pencils and a specific booklet for storing their pictures. A gift like this elevates their activity and gives it dignity!

Kitchen Set: For this gift, choose a small cutting board, a small strainer, and a crinkle cutter / wavy knife. A young child enjoys contributing to the home, and the kitchen is a wonderful place for their work. These child-sized tools allow them to participate in many food preparation activities. Montessori Services carries many child-sized utensils.

Nature Guides: There are many nature guides that are appealing to young children: trees, leaves, flowers, insects, reptiles, amphibians, mammals, and more. Search for ones that have a large clear picture of the subject, and the name clearly written out (perhaps with supplementary information, also). At this age, children can best understand the books when they are simple and only have one picture per page.

The Elementary Child: 6-12

The elementary years represent a stable, curious, intellectual, and social period in a child’s life. While they grow larger and gain more reasoning abilities during this span, they do not undergo the intense transformative change that occurs from birth to six. Thus, these gifts are recommended for the entire six-year span, with the specification that an older elementary child will be ready for more advanced and independent work than the younger elementary child.

Calligraphy Set (or Other Hand Work): A calligraphy set is a wonderful way for the elementary child to explore new ways to communicate with the written word. They will enjoy the aesthetic qualities they add to their work, and they can write letters and make gifts for others.

Dictionary: During a time in our culture when so much of language is on the screen, there is still a place for a hardbound dictionary. Children enjoy looking up words they know and learning words they haven’t heard of before. They can check spelling and definitions. For the younger elementary child, a dictionary with pictures and diagrams can encourage their interest, while an older elementary child may appreciate a more substantial book.

Memberships: Elementary children are curious about the larger world around them. They love going into the city, or to nearby museums and nature preserves to learn more about history, biology, astronomy, government, and more. A year-long membership to an art museum, historical society, nature preserve, or similar place is a gift of knowledge and activity—perfect for 6-12 year olds!

The Secondary Level: 12-15

By adolescence, the teenager becomes deeply interested in discovering how they will contribute to their world. Their energy becomes reflective as they determine who they are and how they fit in with the people around them. At this age, gifts that honor who they specifically are and that give them access to the adult world offer dignity to their stage of life.

Tickets to a Symphony or Drama Performance: While some children may have attended musical performances or plays before, thoughtfully considered tickets indicate a new level of maturity for the adolescent. This event should be something that appeals to an interest the child has already expressed, and can be treated with the ceremony of an adult activity; perhaps there is dinner before with the gift giver, there are no younger siblings, and there is discussion afterwards to share the impressions of the experience. All these specifications make the gift a special part of the new stage of life the teenager has entered.

Personalized Crafting or Tool Set: By this age, many children already have specific crafting or building interests. Take the time to get to know what it is that they love to do with their hands—e.g., knitting, needlepointing, carving, or wiring electronics. And then find or create an advanced set related to these interests. While their interests may change over time, they will appreciate your recognition of their current passions and abilities.

Specialized Classes: After learning more about what your teenager is interested in, you can search out classes at your local community center. Developing their skills in artistic expression, cooking, or woodworking (just to name a few), gives them greater confidence and encourages their engagement with the world around them. They enjoy developing their independence and joining the adult world with real life adult activities.

Final Thoughts

For any stage of childhood, first consider what you know about a child’s abilities and developmental needs. By keeping these in mind, you are more likely to find a gift that will continue to appeal to them through this stage of their development. Secondly, it is always important to pay attention to who your child is and what their unique interests are at the time. A gift that reflects what you know about them tells them that you see who they are and love them for it!

Providing Peace in the Pandemic: The Montessori Approach to Living Well in Anxious Times

Tue, 28 Sep 2021 20:48:23 GMT

The past year and a half has brought about so many feelings in all of us. A great deal of our fears during the pandemic come from the feeling of uncertainty. Those who like to be in control and know the outcome of every situation have struggled mightily with Covid, exactly because we can’t. These are the types of valuable life-skills we need more than ever today: being comfortable with the uncertainty of an outcome. As much as we have learned about pandemics, no one is certain of the outcome. How are we helping to prepare our children to be okay not knowing?

The Absorbent Mind

The mind of a child is like a sponge, absorbing everything around it. From Dr. Maria Montessori’s observations of children during her work in the first half of the 20th century, she learned that what exists in the environment of each child becomes part of them. In Education for a New World, Dr. Montessori writes, “These impressions not only penetrate the mind of the child, they form it; they become incarnated, for the child makes his own ‘mental flesh’ in using the things that are in his environment. We have called this type of mind the ‘absorbent mind,’ and it is difficult for us to conceive the magnitude of its powers.”

In the first plane of development (birth – age 6), this absorbent mind takes in the language, sounds, smells, sights, tastes, and feelings that surround the child at home and, in fact, everywhere they go. That’s the reason we structure and prepare the environments so precisely at Forest Bluff School. Your home is your child’s first environment, and once they begin school, their classroom is their next one—we consider it a microcosm of society. And little by little, as they move up to the Elementary and Secondary Levels, their world expands. So our job is to prepare your children for the time when they will enter society in all its fullness.

Order and Comfort

Because of the enormity of young children’s powers with that absorbent mind, we must be ever so careful to give the child only what he or she needs. In your child’s classroom at Forest Bluff, your children are provided with predictable routines and environments, freedoms and responsibilities, respect for individuality, and the joy of being part of a community of children and adults who work together, caring for each other.

At home, you can create and maintain a sense of order. Dr. Montessori wrote, “Order is one of the needs of life which, when it is satisfied, produces real happiness.” So, stick to your routines, waking up at the same time each day, having your children make their own lunches, reading before bedtime. The comfort children derive from the stability and consistency in their day helps them feel secure and safe. Your children will know what to expect, and they will know that you are there and that you love them. This will provide them with a sense of joy, as well.

The warmth and affection provided by you to your children positively alter neural circuitry in the brain, which influences their health throughout their lives. This can protect them against the harmful effects of childhood stress. One clear way for our children to feel our affection for them is by reading to them each night before bed. The nurturing that comes from the physical warmth and closeness of cuddling in bed, along with the sharing of a favorite book, will provide strong memories for them later in life, so much so that that feeling of security will be part of their inner being.

As parents and as educators, we need to be our very best for our children. We must focus on the positive things in our lives. Any stress that we ourselves are experiencing in our daily lives will be observed, absorbed, and acted out by our children. In our Montessori training, there is an entire lecture on preparing ourselves as teachers of these children—In The Discovery of the Child, Dr. Montessori writes, “[the teacher] must acquire a moral alertness… that is revealed in her tranquility, patience, charity, and humility. Not words, but virtues, are her main qualifications.”

The Reasoning Mind of the Older Child

As our children become older, we can talk to them a little more about our worries and our concerns. In the second plane of development (ages 6-12), they have a reasoning mind, so they understand the issues facing society. But even our Elementary children—who could understand why we needed to wear masks and socially distance from each other last year—were still anxious about the measures we needed to take in the classrooms. And our oldest students in the Secondary Level discussed and debated the merits of quarantining before their trips dogsledding in Minnesota and canoeing in northern Wisconsin. Children in early adolescence can understand and handle more complex and divisive issues, such as mandating vaccination, but they are not yet fully their own person. Until the age of 24, human beings are still developing, sorting through who they are, what they believe, and how they plan to live their lives.

Developing a Practice of Gratitude

One of the most effective ways to develop optimism is to practice gratitude. When we are thinking about what we are grateful for in our lives, it makes it harder to be pulled into the anxiety vortex. It’s important that we do everything we can to stay positive in our own mental attitude. Try to remind yourself of the beauty all around us.

Gratitude is the antidote to taking things for granted. Oftentimes, we forget too easily the gifts that we have been given. We forget that life is impermanent. If it doesn’t come naturally, we must remind ourselves to be grateful for all we have. Once we received the stay-at-home order last year, we very swiftly went into our own lockdowns. It wasn’t until then that we realized how much we missed seeing others face-to-face, feeling their touch, giving hugs to our friends or our grandparents. It wasn’t until we lost those pleasures, that we realized what we had pre-pandemic. We were able to enjoy much of that again this summer, but let us not forget how meaningful and vital those small things are once we come out of this challenging time. Let’s share with our children the gifts of affection and love that they need and desire. Don’t allow fear to rule your thoughts and actions.

Nature as an Antidote

Richard Louv’s book, Last Child in the Woods , talks about what he calls a nature-deficit disorder, outlining the problems that come from us not spending enough time outdoors. He writes that direct exposure to nature is essential to healthy physical and emotional development, both for children and adults. Lake Bluff and Lake Forest provide so many opportunities to walk and bike around town, or hike through a nature preserve, or play at the beach. Continue to make these outings a priority. Nature is healing. Not only does it bring us a sense of peace and calm, but it reminds us of the great big world in which we live and our part in it. The beauty of nature reminds us that there is a spirituality that we and our children are longing for. We need to be reminded that we are only a small part of the mighty universe.

Just go outside and be present. Have fun! We are all happier when we’ve been outside. Take a positive approach to everything you do with your children. There are lots of good ideas in the book Let’s Go Outside! by Jennifer Ward. Here are some I have gathered over the years:

Hunt through the ravine to find different types of leaves, then take them home and make a collage out of them, or for the older children, have them look them up, label them, and categorize them according to their shape.
Lie on your backs and watch the clouds float by, guessing what each one’s shape looks like.
Build a terrarium together, collecting plants, gravel, soil, and moss in a glass container
Plant spring bulbs in the fall and watch for them the following year. Children can draw what they think they will look like when they bloom, and then compare the live specimens.
Have your older children use your phone to take photos of frozen berries and branches, coated in ice. Then they can make a collage or print them out and frame them.

Your children want to do what you’re doing. It may be messier and take more time, but it will be worth it for both you and them. They just want time with you, so be fully present with them.

Intentional Conversations

It’s so important that we don’t project our fears and anxieties onto our children. You may be sad about wearing a mask again this year, but your children are very adaptable and don’t mind it as much as you may think. I have observed in the classrooms daily since school began, and what I have seen is wondrous. The children are engaged, focused, concentrating. They aren’t talking about or complaining about wearing a mask. We project our fears and anxieties onto our children without even realizing we’re doing it. Already on the first day of school, they were joyful to be here again. Without even being aware, they had been craving the beauty of these Montessori materials and the feeling of satisfaction that comes from working with them.

In addition, try not to talk about your own worries in front of your children. Dan Baker, a psychologist and author, says, “We do not describe the world we see, we see the world we describe.” So we need to be careful how we describe the world to our children, so that rather than developing a sense of doom and helplessness, they have optimism about the future in which they will take part.

If they ask, explain to your three-year-old why we wear a mask at school, calmly saying, “We’re helping others by wearing a mask, so that we all try to keep each other healthy.” Instead of allowing them to hear about the Delta variant because the news is on and unfiltered, focus on the good things in your lives and take on an attitude of “We’ll get through this together!” With courage, you and your children feel empowered to take on each new day, each new challenge. They are not overwhelmed by the statistics and data, and we need not be either. Let them know that humans are amazingly adaptable, and that with their gifts of intellect and will, spirit and curiosity, we have as a species accomplished incredible things. Reassure your older children that this is not the first time the world has experienced a pandemic. If we model courage and optimism ourselves, our children will pick that up and understand that they, too, have the abilities and gifts to overcome any challenge that comes their way. In doing this, not only will you aid in their healthy emotional development, but you will be happier yourself.

When issues of political or social unrest come up in your family and you have children who are older, listen, acknowledge their feelings, and then talk about those in history who have stood out for their leadership and courage. When you express gratitude for others’ accomplishments and kindness, your children are then better able to approach, with respect and understanding, the differences they encounter in others and in the world. Don’t instill divisiveness in their language by only talking about issues around which people don’t agree. Instead, talk about ways to peacefully accept and respect those with different views and opinions than their own. These interactions happen daily in the classroom and outside of it, and the children are shown ways and given language to express their feelings with kindness.

Mindful Meditation

Another way to provide peace in your homes is to do some form of mindfulness meditation, a practice of self-awareness in body and mind. Our lives today leave almost no “down time”—no time for stillness, boredom, or relaxation. That’s why at Forest Bluff, we always recommend that you not overschedule your children’s afternoons and weekends. We all need this time, and after a full day in a Montessori classroom, children have lots to process and work through—all the activities they did, all the social interactions they had. They need time every day to relax their bodies and calm their nervous systems. Meditation can help with this. This helps relax their bodies and settle their minds, providing emotional balance and resilience in dealing with difficult situations. Dianne Maroney, founder of the Imagine Project, writes that, “Mindfulness creates resilience because it promotes an understanding of one’s emotions, the ability to control emotions, and a deeper sense of knowing what we are fully capable of.”

Service for Perspective

Serving those in need allows us to open our perspective on the world. This begins in the classroom, where each child cares for the environment—watering the plants, washing the dishes, dusting the shelves. They learn that their contribution to the class is important, so do the same at home. Help them to realize that their contributions to your family and home are also vital—that your children are a needed and wanted part of your family. Then, as they get older, this will translate to their realization that this care extends to those outside their own community. In the Secondary Level, the children continue this service to others by working to build canoe racks, an amphitheater, and an archery shed at a camp, to be used by others they will not meet. Here are a few ideas of ways your children can serve the larger society in which they live, while having to stay within the safety of their own homes during the pandemic:

As a family, packing “blessing bags” with supplies those experiencing homelessness need when living on the streets, is a wonderful way to give to others who are less fortunate. Our family made some last year, filling a gallon-size Ziploc bag with things like granola bars, hand warmers, bottles of water, needed hygiene items, and a list of shelters and local organizations that could help them. We kept the bags in our car, and when we traveled into the city and stopped at a traffic light, guess how thrilled the person was to get one of these? One man said, “Oh, I lovethese!”

Anytime we can get outside ourselves—our own concerns and agendas—we gain a different perspective. We forget about our problems and are able to see that, often, they pale in comparison to others’. Children need to see these things as they get older, and at the elementary and secondary levels, they are well able to use their sense of compassion to help others outside their immediate environments. Often, nonprofit organizations don’t accept volunteers under the age of sixteen, so be creative! Make bookmarks for the elderly and drop them off at a retirement community. Shop for your local food pantry with your children, dropping the needed items off at the store or church collection points. Make homemade valentines to share with elderly neighbors.

Cultivate Hope

Finally, one of the virtues I dearly espouse is hope. Without it, we would be living in a place of darkness. When we have something to look forward to, things always seem rosier. Research shows that anticipation of something can be more enjoyable than the thing itself. During the pandemic, we have had to cancel plans and forgo vacations and time with family and friends, so it’s been difficult to place our hope in anything specific. I think of hope as the belief that things will improve. This is not a superficial cheerfulness, but the faith I have that this pandemic will end. We can’t know when or how things may be different on the other side, but we have the strength to endure the losses and hardships until that time; and then when it comes, we can hold onto the gratitude long after our circumstances change. If we make that paradigm shift in our thinking, our children will sense it and come out of this time of darkness knowing there will always be light to see us through.

References and Resources

Baker, Dan. What Happy People Know . USA: Rodale, 2003.

Louv, Richard. Last Child in the Woods. New York: Workman Publishing, 2008.

Maroney, Dianne. “Using Mindfulness during Stressful Times.” Accessed September 8, 2021. https://theimagineproject.org/using-mindfulness-during-stressful-times/.

Montessori, Maria. Education for a New World . Amsterdam: Montessori-Pierson Publishing Company, 2018.

Montessori, Maria. The Discovery of the Child . Translated by M. Joseph Costelloe. New York: Ballantine Books, 1967.

Ward, Jennifer. Let’s Go Outside! Boston: Trumpeter Books, 2009.

Cosmic Education for Gratitude and Respect

Tue, 24 Aug 2021 20:54:32 GMT

An Interrelated World

Our world has gotten both larger and smaller in the last century. While we have expanded in many ways—exploration, travel, population, and our effect on the earth—we also have become more closely connected to human beings across the planet. It is increasingly clear that what we do affects people not only in our community, but also on the other side of the world. Given this undeniable connection, it is more important than ever that we practice gratitude and respect, in actions as well as thoughts. This begins with our children’s education.

Dr. Maria Montessori’s “Cosmic Education” forms both the foundation and the inspiration for the Elementary curriculum. Through this approach to education, children learn the different subject areas in the classroom within the context of an interrelated universe. Every lesson is presented as a part of a whole. This gives children an understanding of their moment in history, as well as their place in the world, and all the ways they are connected to and dependent on other people and other life forms. In this way, they develop gratitude for the people and events from history that made their lives possible, and they cultivate respect for people and life in the world today. They also then naturally come to see themselves as significant actors in the world, with their own important role to play.

Gratitude for Our History

A most important idea we must give the child is that all life forms throughout history have been preparing the way so that others may come onto the earth. In The Coming of Life , we tell the children: “If all had not happened as it did, the earth would not have been prepared, and human beings would not have been able to survive.” This impression deepens the children’s gratitude for all that came before that made their lives possible.

Through Cosmic Education, we look to develop in the children a sense of gratitude and respect for unknown human beings throughout history who have contributed to our lives today. Dr. Montessori wrote:

Let us in education ever call the attention of children to the hosts of men and women who are hidden from the light of fame, so kindling a love of humanity; what is first wanted is no patronizing charity for humanity, but a reverent consciousness of its dignity and worth. (1)

We do this in our telling of the Great Lessons. We give the children knowledge of common man. We let the children know we must thank the human being who invented the first chair: “Where would we be today without the progress made by the inventions of these unknown human beings?”

At the end of the third Great Lesson, The Coming of Human Beings , we talk about how special each and every human being is, and then say, “That's why we have to be so careful how we treat each other, because each of us in our own way is special.” The children learn in that lesson that human beings are unique because they have the abilities to think and to love. This encourages their understanding of the dignity of every human being in the world and inspires them to consider them thoughtfully and tenderly, even when their lived experiences are so different from their own.

Showing the children how early human beings progressed, learning that with fire they could cook their meat instead of eating it raw, gives them an appreciation of the significance of their work and progress. They had to build from nothing! They must have been very clever! What gratitude we feel toward them!

In another of the Great Lessons, The Story of Communication in Signs , we express gratitude to the Phoenicians: “Thank you, Phoenicians” for the creation of sound letters—quite an exciting discovery. We say to the children: “What you have to remember and be grateful for is the story of the Phoenicians, because they made real letters for sounds.” This is also an opportunity to explore other ancient groups of people and the ways that their alphabets led to modern written languages across the world, as well as the groups that preceded the Phoenicians.

With a story such as the one that accompanies The Hand Chart , in which the children discover what a short time human beings have been writing things down compared to the time they have been on the earth, the children see what a great contribution the ability to record information and ideas has made to our existence. As we do not know who created the very first written character, again we have gratitude for unknown man.

In The Story of Numbers , the last of the Great Lessons, this idea again resurfaces. We tell the children, “Once again we have someone, somewhere—we don't know the person's name—to be grateful to for giving us a way of recording numbers.”

It is interesting to note that this grand and noble idea of respect for others comes up in each of the Great Lessons. No wonder they are called “Great Lessons!” They hold the truths under which every other lesson falls.

Respect for People and Life Today

Along with learning about history, we also teach children about the humans living all over the world today—how they live and how we need each other—as well as the ways we depend on nature.

In a lesson known as People in Different Zones , we discuss the differences among peoples who live in various parts of the world. These differences arise from the fact that we all satisfy the same human needs in a variety of ways. Through this, we can express the importance of understanding and tolerance for people who are different from ourselves. This understanding should lead to a greater respect for other human beings, and the realization that we are all deeply connected as humans underneath the many different ways we may be different.

Our lessons on the interdependencies of all life also foster respect and gratitude for other human beings. We say, “Look at the number of people who were involved in the making of the bread that William had for breakfast this morning! Imagine if you had to do all these jobs yourself!” Then in the second activity: “Look how many people depend upon the farmer for their work!” Again, in activity three: “Here are all the people the farmer depends on!” and we go on to say, “...No one is self-sufficient, are they? For the satisfaction of our basic needs, we are all dependent on each other.” Through these exercises, including the final one on taxes, “the children will hopefully develop an appreciation for anonymous people, and will become better citizens themselves, knowing their own duties.” (2)

The economic geography lessons, also, can help the children understand the interdependencies of the global community. We want to show them that the world community is interdependent. “In order to accept, you must also give. Even if you have all the natural resources in the world, you cannot exist in isolation from other countries.” This will help the children realize that we are all part of the same whole. This awareness brings with it a sense of humility, which we must model ourselves.

This idea that we give as well as take comes up again in biology with plants and animals, which take from the earth but also give back to it. The child learns that there is a delicate balance between the earth and nature and so hopefully will learn to act responsibly with regard to maintaining this balance. Human beings have the power to change the world, so we must help the children realize how much we depend on our environment. In this way, they will appreciate it and thus take care of it. The children must realize the need to be respectful, thoughtful, and responsible in their choices. The children's study of ecology also shows the interdependence of organisms within the environment in which they live. With the Chart of Interdependency, we look at our dependence on the Supra Nature: “Once a discovery is made, it becomes the common property of all humanity.”

These lessons cultivate respect in the child for life in all its forms. They come to see how they are a part of the natural order of the universe and depend on others for their survival. They recognize the contributions and dignity of all the human population and the natural world.

The Cosmic Task

Through learning about all the events and people that are a part of their own lived experience, the children not only develop a deep gratitude for life, but also an awareness of the importance of every life form. When this happens, they naturally realize their own strength and potential in the world. Dr. Montessori referred to this as a “Cosmic Task.” By observing the people and elements of nature around them that contribute to their own lives, they see that they have a powerful role to play in this universe. We must help the children think of their work as a cosmic task, contributing to the good of the whole.

In a lecture Mario Montessori gave in 1958, he shared:

The years we have spent in this work have shown us the enormous change that comes in children, the enormous respect that they develop for creation and every part of it. When they see that stones or colors or animals are simply aspects of the spiritual expression called creation and the path that life takes is an expression of spirituality because each item of creation is preparing, though unconsciously, a better situation for other creatures... This is what we want them to grasp. (3)

Montessori’s curriculum shows children that we are all interconnected. She believed that once children understood this concept—that every part of creation can prepare a better life for others—they, too, would want to fulfill their cosmic task, and make the world better for others.

Today’s world has no lack of challenges for future generations to address. But we do not need to despair that these problems lack solutions. Montessori’s vision for education gives us hope. It includes all the ideas and beliefs we need in order to solve today’s challenges. As we watch our Secondary Level graduates venture into the world, we are filled with optimism. These incredible young people have all the tools at their disposal to enact positive change and maintain constructive connections with human beings across the world. They were educated in an environment that gave them a deep sense of gratitude and respect for life in all its forms. With a Montessori education, our graduates understand that their specific work is a contribution to the world, and their cosmic tasks are as unique as they are. It is by witnessing this tapestry of strengths, passion, and genuine love for the world and others that we can maintain our confidence that the next generation will be worthy of both inheriting our world and stewarding it for an unknown future.

Resources

Maria Montessori, To Educate the Human Potential (Madras, India: Kalakshetra Press, 1991), 26.

Montessori Institute of Milwaukee Training Course, 1993-94.

Wilderness Trips in a Pandemic: “A Minor Miracle!”

Fri, 09 Jul 2021 19:31:02 GMT

Every fall, the Montessori Secondary Level students at Forest Bluff School head to the north woods of Wisconsin for a two-week long camping and work trip. This year, despite the limitations of Covid, the teachers and Head of School wanted to offer this same experience to their students. The only question was what they were going to need to do to make this possible—and safe.

Secondary Level Director Abbey White shares, “We know the value of the trips. We always felt we were going to do this, we just had to figure out how.”

Each year, the students and teachers of this age group (12-14-year-olds) embark on three separate two-week trips: fall, winter, and spring. The purpose of these excursions is to unite them as a community, to connect them to nature, and to help them develop a deeper sense of themselves. Head of School Paula Preschlack wrote about the importance of these trips in an article in the fall of 2020:

People need to be actively working together interdependently to become contributing members of any community, and to develop themselves fully… Important parts of our children’s development happen when they experience living away, even for brief periods, out in the world. (“Adolescents Find Strength in Nature and Community” Forest Bluff School Blog)

Through these trips, the Secondary Level students have this opportunity to work together authentically, away from the pressures and expectations of their normal days. They become a true community during these times, and they develop an understanding and awareness of themselves that serves them through the rest of their lives.

Maria Montessori wrote, “There must be provision for the child to have contact with nature, to understand and appreciate the order, the harmony and the beauty in nature… so that the child may better understand and participate in the marvelous things which civilization creates” (Montessori, The Secret of Childhood). By being in the wilderness, children are able to become better citizens of the world they live in.

Starting the School Year Safely and In Person

Once it became clear that schools were going to have the option to open in September, Forest Bluff began making preparations for safe in-person learning, following CDC and Illinois Department of Public Health guidelines and recommendations. Co-founder and Head of Admissions Lynn Jessen came to school every day in the summer of 2020 with the constantly updating guidelines and a tape measure (to account for physical space). “We have to open,” she said at the time. “Our students need us.”

With that attitude, Forest Bluff was able to create a safe in-person learning plan so that every student who wanted could enter the building when the school year started.

In this spirit of creativity and persistence, the Secondary Level teachers turned their attention to the fall trip. “We wanted to show the students that you can always carry on in some way,” Mrs. Preschlack comments. “We wanted to demonstrate for them that by persevering, we can still find reasons to live. Hope, joy, and community are always possible.” Knowing how essential this experience was to the Montessori program, the teachers and staff began exploring every contingency, every necessary precaution, and every point of possible vulnerability.

Preparing for the First Trip

It became clear quite quickly that the first essential element of making the trip possible would be to establish trust with the parents. The parents needed to trust the school and the teachers fully in order to send their children anywhere with them in 2020. “Taking adolescents into the wilderness is daring to begin with,” Mrs. Preschlack observes. “Doing it during a pandemic requires even more courage.”

Mrs. Preschlack and Secondary Level Director Peter Dutko drove to each family’s house individually in August of 2020—thirteen homes in total. Ms. White joined the meetings once she completed her summer Montessori training. They met outside, wearing masks, to discuss the parents’ feelings, fears, and hopes. These meetings built trust in two ways. First, Mr. Dutko was a new teacher to the school. None of the families had ever met him, so holding this meeting allowed them to see him in person and get to know him. Secondly, it affirmed that Forest Bluff was hearing and addressing every concern of every family before creating the plans for the trips. In this way, they were able to assess the risks and weigh them against the potential positives.

After collecting the information and concerns from all the individual meetings, the teachers, the school nurse Maggie Kelly, and Mrs. Preschlack began systematically creating a plan that addressed every single possibility. They considered the areas where the students would be at greatest risk, namely, transportation, sleeping, eating, working together, and passing non-community members on the drive or at the site, and sought to eliminate the risk of each of these points as much as possible. The students and three staff members—Mr. Dutko, Ms. White, and Support Director John Dickson—would all be tested before starting the trip, sleep in separate tents, use a bleach solution to clean the dishes, wear masks while working outside, wipe down any common areas, and more. They put all these precautions into an organized plan that documented every known risk and their efforts to mitigate it.

Additionally, they created a flow-chart that broke down the decision making process if any of the students or school staff exhibited any signs of illness. This way they were able to clearly inform parents as to how they would determine when to seek treatment, test a child, or send someone home, and at what point the parents would be alerted. Mr. Dutko has years of experience with emergencies in the woods and on the water. He is trained in wilderness medicine and has traveled hundreds of miles from civilization in remote areas of Canada over the last 13 years. This background uniquely suited him to guide this decision making process. “This is how wilderness medicine works,” he shares. “You stabilize and generalize, and you determine if someone needs to be evacuated.”

Finally, they chose to make the trip optional for students. This way, parents could feel ownership over their choice, and make the best decision for their own family’s health and circumstances. While one family chose to opt out of this first trip because of their specific family’s situation, the rest opted in.

The painstaking processes laid a foundation of trust for the families. “Frankly, we were thrilled this was going to happen,” one father says. “The school took such thorough and sensible precautions to minimize risk, and communicated their plans so well, that we knew our child was in good hands.” The students themselves had the same trust in their teachers. A mother remembers her son sharing with her, “They have managed to keep us safe so far. What would be so different if we went somewhere else as the same group?”

A Successful First Trip

The thorough and scrupulous efforts of the families, staff, and students were not in vain. Not only did the class manage to maintain their health throughout the trip, they also had a positive experience both emotionally and developmentally. They contributed to the land, they worked together, and they found opportunities to persevere and build their own strength.

Normally, the students take on a single large project during their fall trip to Camp St. Croix YMCA Camp. But this year, because of budget constraints, “Buffalo Bob” (the point person on grounds) had many small tasks he needed done that he could not do on his own. Rather than feel disappointed that they would not have the same large effect on the camp, the students were buoyed by his gratitude. “They saw how much Bob appreciated it, and they saw his joy. It made them buy in,” observes Mr. Dutko. They even cleaned up the side of the road, and took pride in gathering every tiny piece of styrofoam they could see. “I’ve always wanted to do this!” one student shared. In this way, the students were able to see the significance their efforts had in these humble tasks. Their confidence in themselves grew because their work served a real need in the world.

Ms. White remembers, “There was a day near the end when the students were deciding whether to push on. They were hot from working with their masks on, and tired from almost two weeks of physical labor. We were deciding what to do when we looked up and saw students returning to the group with fresh water bottles. They rose to the challenge and decided to keep going. It was a beautiful moment of resilience. We were so impressed.”

This kind of profound effort arises spontaneously when children feel as though they have real work to do. “There were so many moments that felt real and challenging,” Mr. Dutko observes. “The students respond to that—they can relate to that. This isn’t just some activity adults are making them do. This is real and authentic.”

It is this authentic work and feedback that gives these adolescents a deep sense of their own capabilities and the necessary contributions they can make to the world. They learn what they can do, and they learn to trust in their own competence. The fall trip, set against the backdrop of an anxious and uncertain world, nourished these Montessori Secondary Level students like nothing else could at the time. It was a “minor miracle,” as one father shared.

Preparing for the Winter Trip

Mr. Dutko and Ms. White both emphasize that they had no reason to think that their successful fall trip meant that a winter trip would be certain. The Covid positivity rate was high, transmission was high, and vaccines still were not available for most citizens. However, the school was still open, had no recent cases of Covid, and had no transmission. The teachers were able to see that the health protocols were keeping everyone healthy and safe, and they were open to the idea of going on the winter trip. Additionally, this time parents also had less anxiety. They knew how well the fall trip had gone, they could see that the school was successful in keeping children healthy, and everyone had learned more about how the virus spread—and didn’t spread.

This year, the winter trip was scheduled to go to Ely, Minnesota, to the Wintergreen Dogsled Lodge. Students and teachers camp, hike, cross-country ski, snowshoe, work with the dogs, and ride on dog sleds. This is an unforgettable experience for the students, and they, along with their parents, were eager for the opportunity to make it work. “Our daughter had been looking forward to this [trip] literally for years,” a father shares.

When Mrs. Preschlack called Wintergreen, legendary North Pole navigator and Wintergreen founder Paul Schurke answered the phone directly. “Can we do this?” Mrs. Preschlack asked. Mr. Schurke’s answers were clear. “We can do this. We are ready. Your students are so special. We hope they’ll come.”

In this conversation, Mrs. Preschlack learned that the head of the department of health in Minnesota had visited the winter lodge herself and had gone over their practices and protocols to make sure they were safe. They could not have asked for a higher stamp of approval for their activity and destination.

Armed with this information, Mr. Dutko, Ms. White, Mrs. Preschlack, and Ms. Kelly set about to maintain the trust parents had given them by revisiting every single protocol. They created a new document that addressed every known risk for this particular trip, and how they would mitigate them. Similarly, they also created a new decision tree that reflected this endeavor. They shared the documents with the parents, and had individual conversations with every parent before finalizing their plan. This time, every family chose to participate. One mother shares her thoughts at the time: “A winter camping trip was a thrilling idea. And what better time to do this than with trained leaders?” This abundant trust in the teachers was clear.

A Successful Second Trip

Students, parents, and teachers all wholeheartedly agreed that the second trip was a triumph. “This [winter] trip was truly a life-changing experience,” a father observes. “It is remarkable how Forest Bluff School puts the students in a position to make these trips as meaningful as they are - they're overseen wonderfully, but the fact that the burden of planning and executing these trips falls more predominantly on the students than would be the case at almost any other school makes the payoff that much more genuine and meaningful.”

The students’ normal preparations were challenged further, not only because of Covid, but because of the freezing temperatures and snow of northern Minnesota. And because of the students’ individual and team efforts in putting together this trip, the results were indeed “more genuine and meaningful.” They were able to get away from the stress and restrictions of daily life, they worked hard with their bodies each day, and they cared for and connected with the animals. One mother shares that when her son came home, “He knew the names of all the dogs!”

This unique and incredible trip helped the children reconnect with nature, each other, and themselves. They grow in leaps when they have this experience. A mother shares, “You see a more grown up, more mature child coming back. They are closer to adulthood.” They are closer to the men and women they will grow up to be. They are closer to who they want to grow up to be.

Preparing for the Spring Trip

Parents and students were highly committed and enthusiastic about the spring trip, but, once again, the teachers and staff made no assumptions about safety or possibilities. “We started at zero every time. The spring trip was not inevitable,” Mrs. Preschlack shares.

The students decided that the spring trip would be a canoe excursion in the Wisconsin wilderness. While this adventure has the benefits of isolation and open air, the water itself and the size of the campsites created new challenges. The risk of tipping into the water from the canoe made wearing masks dangerous, and because the places where they would camp had restrictions on the number of tents, students were going to have to share sleeping spaces. Additionally, given the risk of ticks, they could not simply choose to sleep uncovered on the ground.

These challenges required another complete set of safety considerations and protocols. This time, the logical solution was to create a true “pod” with the students and teachers. They would all take PCR tests before travel, and then become their own family for the remainder of the trip. This way, they could take off their masks when they were in the woods or on the water together, and they could share tents for sleeping.

This proposition, once again, required commitment from every family. Mrs. Preschlack recalls, “This took a lot of work.” She reflects on the strengths of Mr. Dutko and Ms. White: “Abbey and Peter are both so sensitive to others’ feelings. It is important to both of them to have everyone on board. They care so much.” These dedicated teachers took the time and effort to reach every family, every parent, every student, and build the level of trust required for this endeavor.

A father shares, “There wasn’t a shred of doubt in our minds that Forest Bluff School handled the preparation and execution of these trips with the students’ safety foremost in their minds… It would have been easy—and irresponsible—to figure out how to make the trip happen without putting all of the safeguards in place that the school did. It is to their credit that they did the right thing, the hard thing, and made sure that all protocols were followed, and that parents bought into the school’s plan, before embarking.”

His words show just how much the painstaking efforts of the teachers and staff mattered to the parents. They were trusting their children in the wilderness with three young teachers in the middle of a pandemic. For however much these parents wanted this experience for their children’s developmental and emotional needs, it also required a leap of faith and confidence in the way the plans and processes would be set up on each individual trip.

A Successful Third Trip

The spring canoe trip brought the efforts of the entire year to fruition. On this excursion, the students worked even harder, were even more responsible, and were even more attentive to each other’s needs. Support Director Mr. Dickson shares, “I saw so much unity in the students… There was a group mindset of collaboration. I could tell the students were asking themselves, Everyone else is doing something. What can I do right now to contribute and be a unified team in this difficult endeavor?”

This kind of awareness and maturity is beyond what is normally expected in a group of 13- and 14-year-olds. These Montessori students came together amidst difficult circumstances and learned how to serve their community—and the vital ways that their own service mattered.

This unity also displayed itself in the ways they treated each other. One day some members of the group decided they wanted to travel much farther than the other days in order to reach a specific destination. Other members of the group were hesitant about this idea and wanted to continue at their normal pace.

Mr. Dickson observed the negotiations and discussions that ensued. He recalls, “They were acutely aware that they needed consensus.” One student suggested that they pair each reluctant traveler with an enthusiastic traveler. “The reluctant travelers knew they were with somebody who was willing to meet them where they were… The overall community was so supportive of every individual that nobody believed they would be left out or left behind.”

In the end, the group made it to their destination. Mr. Dickson says, “Their camaraderie and collaboration was foundational to their success. When a student feels that they can’t accomplish something on their own but they know their peers will support them through the process with respect and patience, an extraordinary level of comfort and trust is built within the group.”

The students were able to be successful because they trusted each other. They knew they were accepted for who they were. They believed in each other. Mr. Dickson recalls, “They trusted the group enough to know that everyone would show up and do their best.” This kind of trust allowed them to be fully themselves and to see themselves—positively and accurately—through their classmates’ eyes.

Why These Trips Mattered

These trips matter every year. They build confidence, they instill work ethic, they encourage independence, and they promote bonding. But this year they mattered even more. This has been a fearful and anxiety-ridden time. It has been filled with uncertainty, irregularity, unfamiliar rules, and limited opportunities for social interactions. It has been a challenging year for community and for trusting one another.

Planning and executing these trips required both community and trust. Everyone needed to come together. Everyone needed to wholeheartedly choose to be a part of this. Parents needed to trust Forest Bluff to take care of their children, the teachers and staff needed to trust families to fulfill their responsibilities, and the children needed to trust their teachers and each other.

When children are in an environment where everyone believes in their mission and in each other, they have the freedom to grow into the best version of themselves. One mother reflects, “These trips have given my child the ability to trust—his classmates, teachers, and, most importantly, himself.” In a year riddled with doubt and distrust, the Secondary Level excursions gave the students six weeks in a physical and emotional space where they did not need to doubt each other or themselves.

This mother goes on to share, “We can’t teach our child this… The maturity comes because of this program. They have to navigate all of it… They have to process all of it.” She recognizes something that is inherently true for all of humanity: No one can develop for you. You have to do it on your own. Each child must undergo their own experiences in life and take their own knowledge from it.

The Secondary Level trips provide the experiences necessary for confidence, trust in oneself, and maturity to develop. One girl shares, “I love the trips because they allow us to see each other at our worst. Then we don’t need to be awkward with each other at school. We can just do our work. We know all of each other’s strengths and weaknesses.”

There is something profound in experiencing this kind of community—a place where there is so much faith and confidence that each individual can be fully who they are, and be accepted for who they are. Then the students can mature freely and put their minds fully to their work.

Contributing to the World

Mr. Dickson says, “There is no other way for a group of adolescent students to bond so closely as through these trips. Forming secure bonds... is essential to developing confidence in themselves. They’ve seen themselves reflected in their peers…They build their identity. It is so important that they build a positive identity in themselves and in relation to their peers. Then they are free to do the work they find value in, and contribute to the world in a meaningful way.”

Human beings have an incredible capacity to affect the world - for better and for worse. Therefore, it is the responsibility of educators and parents to help children develop into adults who are committed to contributing positively to their world. In The Absorbent Mind, Montessori wrote, “[W]e begin to see one of the purposes of man’s life on earth, and to understand that man himself is one of the great cosmic forces of the universe.”

These adolescents are “cosmic forces.” Their potential is boundless, and we have the opportunity to offer them a childhood that will serve as a constructive foundation for their later work. Raising children with positive qualities is more than just a goal. It is a necessity. We need these children to be brave, to seek joy, to find the good in each other, to know how to establish trust, and to be creative. Our world is changing quickly, and this is the generation who will inherit its beauty and its problems. Let us invest in our children. Let us invest in our world.

Putting on a Play in a Pandemic: Let Us Sing!

Fri, 21 May 2021 17:54:21 GMT

“They had no idea how much their lives would change.”

This thought has been uttered thousands of times in the last year—maybe millions. It describes how we all have felt at some point—at many points—since the Covid-19 pandemic started. But we are not unique in human history. Entire populations of countries have been affected by hardships throughout time—by war, by drought, and, yes, also by pandemics.

While we have not lived through a pandemic of this magnitude in our own lifetimes, this is not a novel event in history. And as real as the tragedy and trauma of the past year have been, there is some comfort in knowing that humanity has survived events like this before.

This particular sentence—“They had no idea how much their lives would change”—is so exquisite because it is a line in a musical written by 11- and 12-year-olds. When their lives changed in 2020 in extraordinary ways, these Montessori children had hearts and imaginations large enough to recognize that their experiences, however challenging, were not unique to themselves or to this moment in history.

When these elementary children were given the opportunity to write the musical for a school-wide performance for Forest Bluff School, they, of their own accord, chose to write it about pandemics throughout history: the Bubonic Plague, Yellow Fever, and the Flu of 1918. Our Head of School Paula Preschlack observed, “They used stories from the past to normalize what is happening to us now.” With a Montessori perspective, these students reminded themselves and each other that people have lived through similar circumstances before. And they found that, each time, people survived with kindness, courage, and new scientific discoveries. They saw that people did the best they could with what they had. They also recognized the importance of all the discoveries humans have made before our time. As one of the characters in the script observes, “Thank goodness for all the hard working humans of the past. Without their toil and thankless effort, none of the tools we rely on today would be possible.”

Re-envisioning the Drama Workshop

In 2020, our school was unable to hold the annual Drama Workshop. Normally at this event, Drama Director Phyllis Mount, her son Max Mount, and her grandchildren wrote scripts, songs, music, and dances for our 60 elementary students (ages 6-12). Each year, the drama directors read the scripts with the students, assign parts, assist in practice and music, and then complete the program with a week at Gorton Community Center where the children work intensively for five days and finish with a performance in the evening in front of friends and family.

This year, Forest Bluff School had the great fortune of being open and in-person for this entire school year, besides a few isolated class closings. While much of the learning has been the same for children, there are still differences due to Covid protocols: mask wearing, social distancing, assigned seating, and daily health checks, to name just a few.

By January of 2021, it became clear that even with the success our school has had in staying open in a safe and healthy way, the traditional Drama Workshop would be impossible. Additionally, we received the news that the member of the Mount family who was planning to be our drama director this year had to recover from an illness, making it impossible for him to come to our school to lead the children.

Our teachers and Head of School wanted desperately to give the students a chance at their Drama Workshop, especially in a year when so much has been taken away by the circumstances of the pandemic. They took the time to reimagine the possibilities and came up with a plan that was bold, exciting, and, ultimately, more “Montessori” than ever.

They considered the fall, when the oldest Upper Elementary children wanted to create a play together. Their teacher recognized their strong urge to work together collaboratively, and encouraged them with this big project. After more than a month of hard work, rehearsals at school, original costumes, and extra meetings outside of school, the children presented their original rendition of “When Pigs Fly” to the whole school outside. It was polished and entertaining, and they produced the entire endeavor with minimal adult assistance.

Given this experience, the teachers and our Head of School believed that, with the right support, the oldest Upper Elementary children (ages 11 and 12) could write and design this year’s all-school musical themselves. Then, instead of the usual performance for family members in the evening (which would be prohibited by Covid protocols) they could make it into a movie to distribute to the parents.

At first blush, this idea may seem preposterous: Invite six 11- and 12-year-olds to write a play for almost 60 students, produce it, and then make a movie? How many ways can one plan go wrong?

Fortunately for these children, the adults in the room had the highest faith in them. And they had a plan to support them.

(Upon hearing the plan for a re-envisioned drama performance, Max Mount and his daughter McKenna Aikens were incredibly gracious in offering their time and talents to support our students in this endeavor. In addition to providing structure and direction through virtual meetings, Max and McKenna will each be coming to town to help with the production during the week of filming. We are so grateful for the Mount family’s generosity and continued commitment to Forest Bluff School and its students.)

Putting the Plan to Work

Elementary support director John Dickson, who has a background in theater and film, took on the role of guide in this endeavor. He reported that the children were “ecstatic” when they were told they would be writing the musical. One 11-year-old girl recalled that they were “excited and shocked” when they heard the news. They were advised by the Mount family to write the script as three acts; the six eldest Upper Elementary children formed three groups of two to write each act. The children saw the logic of this plan. “We figured out that if we split up into smaller groups it was easier to manage,” one remembered.

First, in order to make the gargantuan task approachable, Mr. Dickson broke down the script-writing process into a series of lessons. After each lesson, the six students would break off into their groups of two to do the work of the lesson. The first lesson was choosing a theme. This meeting lasted about an hour, and many ideas were introduced. They settled on the broad theme of “overcoming challenges” and “perseverance.” Once they had these concepts for direction, one student who was currently doing research on American history during World War One suggested they write about the Flu of 1918. Quickly, several other global diseases were thrown into the mix. “The Yellow Fever hit the US after the revolution!” “Let’s do Ebola!” “How about Swine Flu!” After much deliberation and a quick lesson on the rank-choice voting technique, their final decision included the Bubonic Plague, Yellow Fever, and the Flu of 1918. All three topics were connected to research one or more of the third year students were currently doing.

Second was a lesson in structuring the story’s plot elements and employing one of the seven basic story archetypes. Mr. Dickson taught them the importance of exposition and character introduction: how to do the necessary research on the time and place of the story, and how to make characters interesting and believable. Third came a lesson in dialogue. This included both the specific syntax and formatting of a script, as well as discussions about pacing: introducing the conflict, the rising action, the climax, and the falling action. At each stage, the children came back to Mr. Dickson to check in and to ask questions. He went over each scene with them, discussing the scene’s purpose in the play and how to make sure the story was properly paced. The last script writing lesson was on stage blocking and camera directions. Here, Mr. Dickson showed them how to describe where the characters were in each scene with theater nomenclature, how to write in specific stage instructions, and how to indicate camera directions for the transitions and titles.

Adding Music

During their standing Friday production meeting with the Director, Max Mount, they discussed the direction of the script and music. Mr. Mount advised them on how to place their songs within the story. He said, “Use a song when words no longer suffice for the emotion of the scene.” They went through the script to find these moments in their story. All students contributed to the lyrics, and one 12-year-old boy eagerly claimed the job of writing original accompaniment for all the songs.

This student dove into the project with enthusiasm—and only a little bit of knowledge! Through purposeful work, he learned about notation in music. As the deadline for the finalized script approached, he realized that this was too large of a project. With humility and self-awareness, he stepped back from his original plan and decided to put the students’ original lyrics to preexisting instrumentals from the school play archives. He did persevere to create original accompaniments for two of the songs using staff paper, an electric keyboard, and support from his peers. This experience required the students to be flexible with their expectations, and it exposed them to the adjustments one must make in the face of a hard deadline. The student who wrote the accompaniments worked at the keyboard, sharing his struggles: “This is so hard! I’ve got to get this!” He finished with pride and determination. The music and lyrics are all wonderful.

The Opportunities for Growth

Growth in Group Work

With a project this large, in scope and group size, challenges are inevitable. The students had to work through difficulties both within their writing pairs, and within themselves. One of the challenges of working on any project with a deadline is the necessity of being motivated to do the work in time to complete the project. This is further complicated when in a group, because the members need to coordinate their efforts not only to meet the deadline, but also to be productive at the same time as one another.

The Upper Elementary children experienced this as well. For as enthusiastic as they were about this project, no one can be enthusiastic all the time. The students set aside time each day to focus on the play, but they also had to align their focus simultaneously with their partners. Sometimes, one partner would be ready to work, and the other would not. At other times, one would say, “I’m tired of doing all the work.” And the next time it might be the other!

Additionally, the partners had to coordinate which efforts they wanted to pursue at a given time. In one pair, one of the students wanted to focus extensively on the exposition, doing all the research to set the time and place. The other wanted to move on quickly to the dialogue, and sometimes these disagreements led to discord. In these moments, they would take a break and then come back to each other to work later.

Dr. Maria Montessori recognized that the desire to be together is a huge motivator for focus in elementary-aged children. Because these students wanted to work in communion with their peers, and they wanted to produce a musical for their peers, they ultimately found a way to work through every single disagreement. And, fitting for a Montessori environment, the solutions for compromise were different for each pairing; some took turns on the work, others divvied up tasks and delegated to each other. They found what worked for themselves and for their specific relational dynamics—and they enjoyed the process. A mother of an 11-year-old writer shared, “Joy exudes every time she talks about what happened that day, that they laughed about or worked through.” This kind of growth can be uncomfortable, but these children learned, grew, and felt good about what they accomplished.

Personal Growth

Another opportunity for growth was the necessity for hearing feedback and integrating it. This project was not an individual activity. It was a group effort in service of the entire school. To that end, the work was not only about individual needs. It was about making something that would be useful and interesting for three classes of elementary children—more, if you include the community that will make up the audience!

As the students wrote their acts, they worked in conjunction with their teacher and the Mount family who guided them over Zoom. These conversations resulted in feedback on their writing, which was sometimes hard for them to hear. “Children feel strongly about their work,” Mr. Dickson observed. This passion is a beautiful thing, but this time their work was an essential part of a large production, and it had to make sense both for the storyline and for the scores of other people involved in putting on the production.

Feedback was given with mindful communication, time to process, and time for further discussion. The children learned to be more flexible and resilient with their vision and their work. They spent time in conversation, figuring out what they valued most and what other people valued most, and they learned about compromise within an artistic endeavor. Mr. Dickson shared that the children ultimately agreed on what to write in the script, with a feeling that everyone’s voice had been represented. The children grew in their abilities to adapt to each other, and to shape their own work for the greater good.

Responses to the Script

One mother shared about her daughter, “Her pride and excitement around the opportunity and responsibility has been palpable.” The writers took enormous pride and joy in this task and were thrilled to finally be able to share it with their peers. Once the script was completed, the students shared their work with a read-through in front of the rest of the Upper Elementary students.

At the end of the reading, a 10-year-old raised his hand, “I really loved that one song that was sad—it was so sad. And then the mom gets better, and then it was so happy. My emotions were going up and down!” This sentiment reflected so many of the wonderful aspects of this unique project; the students were able to hear for themselves that their work not only was correctly done as a screenplay, it also had the intended emotional effect. Their peers were responding to the story they had worked so hard to create.

Other children revealed similar sentiments. “I can’t believe they put together that play in just a few weeks,” a 10-year-old boy commented. “It’s my favorite play we’ve ever done. It’s really amazing that they did all that work in such a short time.” In this way, the other children were able to appreciate the final product and also the process. Younger Upper Elementary students have asked if they will get to write the play in future years, a testament to the excitement the writers have shown throughout the spring, as well as admiration for the play itself.

Moving Forward

Now that the script creation phase of the production is complete, the students have moved into the production phase: sets, props, and costumes. A student committee led by two third year students will create each of these elements. The students have revisited the script for all possible details that would inform the items they will need. After generating complete lists, they delegated creation plans to the students in their committees and the parent volunteers.

Managing a project of this size is no small task, especially for 11- and 12-year-olds. This is a lesson the students will remember forever on scrupulousness, attention to detail, collaboration, and effective team management. Each student committee chair employed their own style: some maintained more control over the process, while others trusted their team and gave more creative latitude to the other members. Every student committee chair will experience the real life consequences of their leadership style.

Mr. Dickson, who has founded a few small businesses in the past, is guiding them in this process and has encouraged the third year students to ask questions of themselves, such as, “How can I leverage the unique talents of everyone on my team?” “What bottle-neck situations can I predict and prevent by having the right resources on hand or by giving the right preliminary instruction to my team?” “What are the specific logistical considerations of a production item and how can I support my team with shared creation timelines?”

This process is almost always confusing and messy with many simultaneously moving parts. Having the experience of starting with their ideas in the abstract, working through the detailed planning, and overseeing the execution of their production will give them the confidence and ability to take on even grander visions in the future—a skill they will have for the rest of their lives.

At the end of May, the elementary students will meet at Gorton Community Center for five days with their teachers, members of the Mount family, a pianist, a choreographer, and a stage manager. They will work within Covid protocols and, once they finish their rehearsals, they will begin filming. At the end of the production there will be a DVD or flash drive available for purchase for families, friends, and the greater community. All funds will go towards the budget necessary for this project. (Purchasing several recordings is a wonderful way for the community to give the children the response their work has warranted—and also makes great gifts of entertainment for family members and friends of all ages for many years to come!)

Reflections

What these children have done is remarkable. They have taken a sustained, stressful current event, rife with uncertainty and tragedy, and they have set it within the context of history. They have placed their own lives within the context of this history, in a way that neither diminishes nor aggrandizes. They have undertaken a complicated and important project, and they have done it brilliantly and sensitively.

Mrs. Preschlack observed that, as Montessori students, these children have learned from the beginning that their education is in their own hands. They have, as she said, “a self-propelling approach to knowledge.” Knowing this, it is not surprising that these children did exactly what they did when tasked with writing a play during a pandemic. They looked back through human history to ask—Has this ever happened before? How did humans survive? And whose shoulders are we standing on now?

In answering these questions through their research and their story, they made it possible to look forward into the future. They saw that even though it felt like their world was falling apart, this had happened before, and humanity had persevered. Amidst the mistakes and pain and disappointment that humans had created, something beautiful had also happened: They had worked together, cared for each other, and lifted each other up. These children saw that and when they named their play, after reflecting on the effects of each pandemic, the title came easily: “Coming Together While the World Falls Apart.”

What do our Montessori children see when they look at the world in this moment? They aren’t blind to the news or deaf to our conversations. They know about uncertainty, disappointment, and tragedy. But what they also see is humanity coming together. It is this act, and this generation’s observation of it, that can give us that hope—that clear optimistic sense—that we will survive this too. We will make new discoveries. We will persevere. We stand on the achievements of those who came before us and we too have our own role to play. As a character in their script shares, “Let’s…make the world a better place for the humans that will be born after us.”

Montessori and the Power of Mental Association

Mon, 19 Apr 2021 16:52:43 GMT

I love finding ways that Montessori’s educational approach inherently addresses human needs. When I look at books espousing the best ways to teach, the best ways to conduct business, or the best ways to be healthy, I usually find that the Montessori approach already incorporates the recommended practices—and always in an integrated, natural way. The Forest Bluff Directors and I are witnessing this once again while reading our latest teacher group discussion book at Forest Bluff, The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering The Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators, by Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, Clayton M. Christensen. In today’s world, the ability to innovate is key to solving problems large and small. I would argue that it has always been important for human survival and progress, but it has become a more urgent need, and now it’s a buzzword for educators.

The aforementioned authors explain that to create something new—to innovate—a person needs to associate (connect ideas), network with others (socialize), observe (reflect), question (lead with your curiosity), and experiment (be unafraid to try things and fail). In the Montessori approach, you can see how these practices, or habits, are all actively encouraged and cultivated. Each of these important aspects of innovating are worked into the educational approach seamlessly. Dr. Montessori was simply following what made sense for optimal human development.

For one example, Montessori education has captured an essential key to children’s learning: presenting the world in context, from the whole to the parts, with a deliberate, ongoing opportunity for children to associate topics, themes, and details of information. Associating is a crucial skill. Montessori’s approach creates habits in children’s thinking that prepare them for a life of innovative creativity and problem solving by constantly encouraging them to associate.

Why Mental Association Matters

The Innovator’s DNA emphasizes the importance of associating for sparking innovative ideas. This is when we connect things we’ve seen, heard, and experienced, to imagine and create something new. Any original idea is only made possible by exposure to many diverse ideas and the foundation of knowing how to recognize connectivity.

A great example in the book is the way that Steve Jobs created the laptop computer. His experience with meditation taught him how important silence is for concentration, so he sought ways to eliminate the loud fans that all computers had up to that point. To accomplish this, Jobs reduced the size of the processor—the engine—in his computer so that it would not generate so much heat (thus eliminating the need for the louder fan). In this way, he created the quiet laptop computer that Apple became known for. In another example, Jobs thought back to his past experience of taking a calligraphy class at Reed College, and realized that enabling people to use different fonts on their computers would give them the artistic satisfaction that we all experience today when, by simply pushing a button, we can change all our text into various fonts. There are other examples of where Jobs connected his experience in one area of his life to another in order to solve a problem in new ways. This is what we call associating. With practice, it becomes a way of thinking.

Montessori Supports Associative Thinking

In Montessori, we cultivate this human ability in several ways. To begin with, the curriculum—everything the children are going to study—is out on the shelves in consistent locations so that children can see the “whole” of their education in front of them, every day. This encourages them to see connections with an orienting framework of information in their minds. As the children reach their elementary years, much of what they will study is abstract and original, but the associations the children envision are still supported by this physical layout. This physical layout presents the diversity of topics.

The authors of The Innovator’s DNA tell us, “Innovative ideas flourish at the intersection of diverse experience” (p. 45). In a well-functioning Montessori classroom, children are exploring a variety of activities at any one given moment, and that makes a room full of diverse topics. As a child crosses the room, he might pass a friend working with a puzzle map of Africa, another with Stamp Game Division, a third reading Phonogram cards, another tracing a Metal Inset of a hexagon, a child saying the Botany Cabinet leaf shapes out loud, one practicing the multiplication facts finger chart, another writing a story with the Movable Alphabet, someone meditatively pouring water, and a child composing a piece of music on the bells. This child’s mind will be filled with ideas, images, and sounds from this array of information. By having individual interests, the students expose one another to different topics. This creates a natural cross-pollination of ideas. From such experiences, a child will make original connections between topics, maybe even later when he is thinking, trying to create something new, or solving a problem of his own.

Time to Reflect and to Associate

In the day’s schedule in a Montessori classroom, there is a three-hour period of uninterrupted work, then the children eat lunch together, they play outside together, they read together, and so on. In short, they are with their teacher and peers all throughout the day in different activities, which invites them to continue ongoing conversations that connect topics and experiences. The teacher can point out, “Oh your sandwich is a square, just like the square in the geometric cabinet you worked with today!” More often than not, it is the children themselves who make such connections and announce them. You might hear a child burst out with enthusiasm, “My sandwich is a SQUARE!” Such opportunities for discovery make associating joyful. Often, what follows are responses from other children hearing such comments; they then make their own associations. One might say, “And that is a triangle,” looking up at the support beams on the outside of Forest Bluff’s school building, which children can see from the windows while eating lunch. Free associating is made possible by long stretches of the school day when students are not only allowed to talk with one another, but encouraged to do so. Because silence is not imposed for the children to listen to a teacher lecturing or to watch an instructional video, and because children are not interrupted from their flow of thought, associating is a constant, synergetic, and collaborative experience in a Montessori setting. This is just one of the many ways that Montessori prepares our children for life!

Additional Reading

To read more about how particular habits of thinking are fostered in Montessori classrooms, please see our previous blogs and future blogs:

Developing Courage

Adolescents Find Strength in Nature and Community

Returning to School with Resilience, Creativity, and Courage

How Montessori Fosters Curiosity and Courage

Cultivating Curiosity

How Montessori Fosters Curiosity and Courage

Not Fearing Failure

In Pursuit of the Correct Answer: The Role of Process and Discovery in Montessori

Learning to Love Effort: How Montessori Fosters Perseverance

How Montessori Education Prepares Children For Life Beyond School

Internal Organization

What’s So Great About the Great Lessons?

Developing Inner Order: How We Can Help Our Children

Routines at Home

How Montessori Fosters Curiosity and Courage

Thu, 11 Mar 2021 17:58:05 GMT

When transcribing notes from a recent alumni panel discussion, I realized that two words came up so often that one might mistakenly think we asked the panelists ahead of time to please focus on them! These were curiosity and courage. Of course, many other themes arose–and often do–when discussing Montessori’s effects on students long-term. But these two intertwined traits are imperative in today’s world, and they deserve some attention here. Without curiosity and courage, we cannot adapt and progress through the pandemic, or through the economic distress, political and social strife, or the environmental concerns that we face.

So, how exactly does the Montessori approach foster the two traits of curiosity and courage? Let’s look at curiosity, how curiosity is fostered by thinking and reflecting, how it supports creativity, and at courage and how agency and challenge build one’s courage.

Curiosity

We all begin life with an inborn curiosity. Children are undeniably curious; it may be safe to say that curiosity is a natural trait of childhood. And like any character trait in life, curiosity can be discouraged–or encouraged–to develop further. In my own experiences of conventional school, curiosity was discouraged when my childhood teachers didn’t “call on” me in class when my hand was raised, and by the idea that there was usually only one “correct answer” to a question; once it was declared, the discussion was over and the teacher moved on. I was discouraged from being curious by having questions written out for me; every worksheet, textbook or quiz already had the questions that I was supposed to pursue and answer. There was little time for me to look for answers to original questions, or to even think of what my own questions might be. No one presented resources for where I might seek out answers…everything was prescribed and laid out ahead of time. All I was supposed to do to be a “good student” was go along with what was set up for me. I was never explicitly invited to come up with my own, original questions.

This wasn’t the greatest preparation for adulthood. Out in the real world, asking original questions leads people to make new discoveries, to solve difficult problems, and to make improvements. In The Innovator’s DNA, authors Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen and Clayton Christensen describe how a young man learned to think up and write down several questions each night for work the next day. By asking his team questions every morning, this young man got the group thinking of solutions. But more than that, he began thinking with curiosity, he primed his thinking. The authors explain that priming one’s thinking by fostering curiosity and asking questions enhances one’s ability to be creative and then to come up with new solutions. As The Innovator’s DNA explains, this exercise has proven to make business teams more successful across the board.

I do not fault my childhood teachers for not fostering my curiosity; I am sure they would have loved to have been able to encourage curiosity and originality in their students. But the framework and timetable my childhood teachers were given for passing along information did not allow for this. It was the conventional school system we were all in.

By contrast, the Montessori approach fosters curiosity in deliberate ways, every day and at all age levels. Montessori children are actively primed to think! The classroom environments invite children to explore,both physically and mentally. The Montessori directors are trained to model curiosity in how they present materials and with the questions they ask aloud. Montessori teachers are encouraged to follow their own curiosity to learn about topics alongside their students, making them living examples.

Montessori graduate Grace Kasten explains that having the freedom to follow one’s interests prepared her well to seek a deeper understanding of whatever she’s doing now:

"[We were] allowed to study and learn about whatever we wanted to for extended periods of time if we desired–we use the term, ‘deep dives,’ now. This ended up fostering a level of curiosity and an actual interest to understand the mechanics of what we were learning."

Grace goes on to explain that this approach to work made her a more thorough and engaged student all through high school and college, and that it guides her every day in her current work as an investment banker.

Fostering Curiosity by Thinking and Reflecting

A main ingredient for developing curiosity is having time and space for thinking and reflecting. In a Montessori setting, children are not rushed from one activity to the next. Even their casual conversations as they greet each other in the morning give children time and space for thinking and asking questions.

During their presentations, Montessori Directors encourage children to ask their many questions. Most elementary presentations actually begin with the Director asking the children a prompting question, such as, “Have you ever wondered about how…” or, “Have you ever noticed….?” Such an opening question is always followed by deliberate pauses for the children to respond and volunteer any other questions this may make them think of. There is lots of encouragement to ask one’s own, authentic questions. Because the answers are not always immediately apparent, a lively search for some answers is the natural next step in the children’s original work.

This practice leads directly to what some of our graduates in the recent alumni panel report: that they tend now–as adults–to ask a lot of questions and to wonder, “why” in all sorts of business and work-related situations. Another Montessori graduate, Reeve Waud, tells us that he constantly asks his business school colleagues, “Why do we do it that way in business?” He wants to really get to the bottom of the systems in place and to understand their purposes. He is always wondering, “Is there perhaps a better way? Could we improve? If so, how?” Having grown up always exploring in his Montessori education, Reeve is an adult who passionately continues to explore.

How Curiosity Supports Creativity

Curiosity and creativity are closely linked. Creativity is key for succeeding in a rapidly changing world where innovation and creative problem solving are imperative for survival. In The Innovator’s DNA , the authors researched the businesses and leaders who have been most successful in the past fifteen years and tell us:

“The key insight from our research is that creativity is not just a cognitive skill endowed by genetics. It is powerfully rooted in your behaviors–and in particular the extent to which you engage in questioning, observing, networking, and experimenting. Change your behaviors and you can change your creative capacity.”

Our graduates have felt the validity of such habits in their adult lives. Reeve says, “It’s…important to be able to operate independently, which we learned at Forest Bluff...and allow your curiosity to take you different places, a skill that’s very important to learn early on."

The tendency to ask questions is a fundamental prerequisite to creative thinking. Creative problem-solving grows out of honest curiosity. To begin any process of making new discoveries, one has to be curious, and then, he or she must have courage to take the next step...

Courage

Courage is essential when facing the unknowns. Another one of our graduates, Luke Corsiglia, tells us that he has found this to be true. Having courage means being willing to be wrong to start out on a quest for new information and experimentation. As a mechanical engineer, Luke says that he can wake up in the morning and create any system that he thinks might work for a certain problem. In a field such as engineering, there is no set plan or specific blueprint when looking for a new solution. This is very uncomfortable, Luke says, for some of his colleagues at work.

Luke says, "Being comfortable with uncertainty... I see it a lot in some younger engineers I work with, they're not comfortable with that... When they get thrown into this environment where you've got some rough guidelines, but no real specifics from a design perspective, being able to wrap your head around where to go... they just get a little lost, and they're not comfortable with that scenario, that we've got to figure out what we're doing while we're getting to the result, and that's something I never have a problem with." Having grown up in a Montessori environment, he says, enables him to be at home with uncertainty of outcomes, and to be courageous in his work.

Reeve shares the same sentiment when he reflects on the role uncertainty plays in learning. He says, "Being comfortable not knowing the answer to something is one of the things Montessori really instilled in us. Then we were comfortable enough knowing we didn't know it, and then wanted to figure out why we didn't know it."

For a Montessori graduate, it comes naturally to start exploring and asking questions, to create something new and to try it out. That’s practiced courage.

Montessori teacher John MacNamara has a sign on his classroom wall giving his 7th and 8th graders a mantra he believes gives them courage: “If you can’t be right, be wrong.” In other words, don’t be afraid to be wrong, just try something , and go from there! You may have lots of failures along your path to success.

This is how courage is fostered in Montessori, where mistakes are welcomed as natural parts of any process. You may be familiar with Albert Einstein’s quote, “Failure is success in progress.” Indeed, many must fail, sometimes multiple times, in order to create something of value. Maria Montessori wrote, “Every great cause is born from repeated failures and from imperfect achievements.” Think of the great inventions and solutions to problems that would never have been if their creators lacked the courage to push through their failures!

How Agency and Challenge Build Courage

Montessori students are given many choices and a lot of autonomy, from their earliest years up through their Secondary Level trips at age 14. This helps them build their confidence gradually over the years. Graduate Kallan Benjamin explains:

"Being allowed to feel like you had a lot of agency at a really young age enables you to make really strong, positive decisions. That's what occurred on our trips."

The numerous experiences of making a choice of what work to do when children walk into a classroom each day, how long to work on it, and when they determine they are finished, leads into the Secondary Level adolescent’s decisions about what work needs to be done for a trip, when and how to take care of themselves and each other, and what steps to take in a trip project. Kallan also tells us that her courage was fostered further through the challenges she encountered in Montessori’s Secondary Level program. The trips were very challenging, by design, and managing through them was impactful for her:

"Knowing that I did that [made it through the intense/tough Secondary Level trips] has got to give us some confidence that we were capable of managing that level of responsibility at that age, and having fun with it, too, when it was so tough..."

Building that courage made Kallan feel better prepared for high school and for her adult life.

Courage also forms when a young person feels confident from knowing herself well. The pauses and the time offered for reflection in Montessori classrooms offers children what Grace calls, “pure moments” in life. Grace says that through these reflective pauses, she developed:

"A level of self-awareness, and being able to know yourself on a really deep level, and how you fit into the world and how the world moves around you. There were a lot of pure moments [in Montessori]. Having pure moments in life-- reading outside, sitting on the floor singing together, packing your own lunch-- made you feel more in touch with yourself."

This self-awareness, coupled with being respected by the adults around them, helps Montessori students build more courage. Grace tells us that she and her classmates developed a level of comfort interacting with adults that other young adults don’t always seem to have. This stems from Montessori teachers encouraging children to come up with their own questions, and to pursue original answers to them. This act alone is one of ultimate respect for each individual. We must foster and encourage this originality if we are going to bring every person’s gifts to the table.

Encouraging curiosity and courage is one of the most powerful strengths of an authentic Montessori education. By preparing young people to tackle the world’s problems from a place of practiced curiosity, we can feed the next generation with valuable skills. By giving them explicit opportunities to build courageous personalities, Montessori gives the next generation the strength to make this word a better place for all.

Music in the Montessori Classroom

Mon, 01 Feb 2021 18:01:48 GMT

Music Lifts Us Up!

Those of us working in Forest Bluff’s office often feel separated from the life of the classrooms during this time of COVID restrictions because we cannot open the doors to see the children working. But one thing has warmed our hearts every single day: the sound of music coming from everywhere. Children are always singing or playing the bells or the tone bars, every day. In this way, original musical expression is the backdrop to the Montessori classrooms.

Our children experiment with melodies as a way to learn about humanity and articulate their understanding of the environment. Music is fun, but it is also a launching point to explore physics, history, language, geography, and arithmetic. Music also involves group coordination, executive functioning, and compromise; this is required to organize a performance, which some of our brave upper elementary children decided to tackle, earlier this year.

Music is an important and vital part of our lives. However, it’s easy to overlook its value in children's education. We admit that even in a Montessori school that follows an education designed to integrate all aspects of life, we often have much more left to teach in the extensive Montessori music curriculum. In a society that prizes educational topics such as mathematics, language, and science, music can be thought of as an extra, less necessary, part of schooling.

But because all subjects are interdependent, both in life and in the Montessori approach, we spend time exploring the significantly worthwhile language of music: its mechanics and its context. Every aspect of musical study has many links to other topics. Making these connections enriches the lives of the children, their outlook on human history, and their understanding of sound and music physically, intellectually, and spiritually. Music is good for our souls. It helps us work through emotions, lifts our moods, and gives us a sense of close connection to our fellow human beings!

Music in the Classroom: Silence, Movement, and Imagination

Dr. Montessori took the time to point out the value of music in all aspects of our lives. One of the most important elements of her approach is the emphasis on silence and its important role. Young children develop an awareness of the role silence plays in their teachers' instructive presentations, where their expressions and movements are highlighted by the absence of talking. Being silent also requires each child to exercise self-control. Montessori’s “Silence Game,” which is a simple meditation in silence, points to the relationship of silence to the sounds we make when we move our bodies.

Children develop intense concentration when working with and creating music, because controlling their movements is challenging for them. The bells and the tone bars are music materials that elicit hours of focus and flow state concentration. When children have the opportunity to work in a state of flow, the mental faculties associated with concentration are strengthened. Concentrating on music is practice that makes it easier for children to concentrate on other important developmental tasks through their education and life experiences.

Montessori education also emphasizes movement's connections to music and the brain. Movement is imperative for children's psychological and physical development in all stages. Precision of movement is inherent in every presentation of physical materials at every age level. Movement requires body coordination and control, rhythm and tempo, especially in music presentations. Creating one’s own musical movement is encouraged when children as young as four years old are shown how to make up their own compositions on the bells. This gives them an enjoyable, exploratory relationship with musical expression from an early age. In their elementary years, children are shown how to make simple instruments to encourage a scientific exploration of sound. Children also learn to study the mathematical relationship of tone when music is given with the bells and tone bars. We introduce the history of music, composers and inventors, movements in style and migrations of ideas, as a field to consider in all areas of their classroom work.

In typical Montessori fashion, music presentations vary depending on the developmental characteristics typical of their age. For the younger children, music presentations progress from the most fundamental and basic, where we begin with body control, listening and analyzing sound, to the more detailed and finite areas of music study. For the elementary-aged children, who are driven by their imaginations and abstract thinking, music is introduced through stories of history, arithmetic relationships, and purposeful work. The child is given the context of music as a whole first by integrating it throughout our day and telling stories of its origins, before zooming into the particular details using nomenclature cards, music notation, and studying specific artists, composers, and historical works. This detailed breakdown of the component parts is known as “isolation of difficulty.” The child can then focus on one aspect at a time of a complex whole, before putting it all together to understand greater purpose and meaning in their work.

Further Exploration in the Elementary: Studying History and Designing Instruments

When developing the concept of a well-rounded education, the Greeks considered music to be arithmetic calculated in time, while geometry was arithmetic calculated in space. The Greeks knew that music was key to unlocking human potential, and so did Maria Montessori. By learning of the connections between music and human culture, children become part of a larger conversation that has been going on thousands of years regarding what music is and how it seems to connect us across vast barriers in time and space. While the connections to historical time periods and human culture can easily be introduced through stories of music’s past, the mathematical connections are best demonstrated through a tool first described in early Sumerian writings and later reinvented by Pythagoras, the Greek philosopher, geometer and mathematician.

This tool is called a monochord and is something older children can make in class to show the harmonic relationships of rational numbers such as 12, 13, and 14. The monochord is a single string stretched across a hollow box. By depressing the chord at the halfway point, the child is able to pluck the string and produce a note exactly one octave higher than if the string were plucked in the open position. When they depress the string exactly halfway between the midpoint and the end, another octave is discovered. When the children begin to make the connection between distance along the string and tonal relationships, the world of music and mathematical relationship elegantly intertwine. This leads to activities in measurement, proportion, ratio, fraction operations, number theory, and so much more. It shows the child that beauty is latent in all things and all it takes is structured exploration for it to be discovered; recognition of beauty will motivate further exploration and concentrated effort throughout their life.

Music for Social Development

Last holiday season, some elementary children at Forest Bluff decided to put together a group performance of three festive songs with the tone bars, bells, and an assortment of handmade percussion instruments. They laboriously deliberated over the choice of songs, conducted numerous processes to determine each of the six participants’ parts, and then practiced it towards perfection. It is no easy task for six elementary children to self-organize a band and perform for their peers in only a few days. There were technical challenges, scheduling miscommunications, interpersonal obstacles, and yet, they cared so much about their work that they together overcame.

All of these adversities are ones that are common for adults to encounter when working collaboratively and they must be overcome when people are working to contribute meaningfully in society. The children delegated responsibilities and trusted each other to share control of the outcomes. While one team listened to the songs on a CD and transcribed the music onto staff paper, others made and organized the instruments, and another group wrote invitation letters to the classrooms. The collaboration and compromise required in this type of work encompasses so many soft skills that are critical to success working with others.

As our world becomes more and more specialized, the importance of effective communication and teamwork is a key differentiator between teams and individuals that are successful and those that are not. Had these children not had all of the preliminary explorations of the tone bars, bells, musical notation, and historical inspiration, they most definitely would not have had the courage to take on such an endeavor as difficult as a musical concert performance. And in turn, they would not have had the opportunity to concentrate so deeply on their work. Taking these risks develops confidence and inspires concentration in the child that they will use in important ways throughout their life. Being free to choose work that excites them and having presentations on the component parts of musical expression, the children have the opportunity to grow in ways that prepare them for a meaningful and successful life.

Reaping the Benefits

Not all Montessori students will go through the entire music curriculum. But we hope that demonstrating here what value our music curriculum has will inspire parents to encourage their child’s exploration of music, in and out of the classroom. When speaking to your children about music, appreciate how it enriches their lives and helps them in their individual and social development. Just as giving our young children a rich language environment helps them to develop their vocabulary and ability to speak well, giving our children a rich musical environment helps them to develop their gratitude for–and ability to communicate through–musical expression.

Music has been a part of human life since language has, perhaps even before. It is primal and fundamental. It is the prose of human emotion, which every person needs an opportunity and tools to express. Music, as introduced in Montessori, is a hub through which the child develops themselves into a whole and rounded human being: capable and confident of their capabilities because they see how things connect and work together.

As AMI Montessori trainer, Maria Teresa Vidales, said, “Music can touch us in a way that nothing else can. No better gift can we give to the child than to open this door within [them].”

A Shared Vision of Peace: How Montessori Embodies the Values of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Thu, 14 Jan 2021 16:09:26 GMT

On Monday, January 18, 2021, our nation remembers the life of Martin Luther King, Jr.—a man who dedicated his life to seeking equity for all of humanity. The events of this past year have reminded us that we are best able to serve this goal when we listen, learn, and focus on the positive moral development of children.

Here, we re-post a blog written one year ago that reflects on the connections between Dr. King and Dr. Montessori, and shares the many ways that the Montessori approach supports Dr. King’s beliefs about peace and equity.

A Shared Vision of Peace

The arc of the moral universe is long, but it bends towards justice.

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

Establishing lasting peace is the work of education; all politics can do is keep us out of war.

— Dr. Maria Montessori

As millions around the country celebrate the life and legacy of Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., we have an opportunity to consider his lasting impact in our lives: how we may honor his teachings throughout the year as well as in our daily practices; and the symbiosis that exists between Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.’s and Dr. Maria Montessori’s teachings. While there is much that can be written about the overlap between these humanitarians’ philosophies and work, here we offer a brief reflection on how we embrace Dr. King’s values in a Montessori community.

Martin Luther King, Jr. shares his vision for peace

In Michael K. Honey’s edited collection of Dr. King’s speeches All Labor Has Dignity , he describes three phases of Dr. King’s civil rights movement. The third phase, tragically shortened, focuses on human rights. As Dr. King said in 1961 during his speech at the United Automobile Union, “A society that performs miracles with machinery has the capacity to make some miracles for men if it values men as highly as it values machines.” He famously repeated his belief that the dream for humanity and peace could be realized, “For although the arc of the moral universe is long, it bends towards justice.”

While not nearly as prominent a civil rights leader as Dr. King, Dr. Montessori was also a humanitarian. A similar pattern is seen in Dr. Montessori’s life work, as she moved from establishing a process for education to calling the world to action by embracing an education founded on equity and peace and centered on the needs and characteristics of the child. In a collection of her lectures, Education and Peace , Dr. Montessori states, “An education capable of saving humanity is no small undertaking; it involves the spiritual development of man, the enhancement of his value as an individual, and the preparation of young people to understand the times in which they live.” Her development of and advocacy for an education for peace led to three consecutive nominations for the Nobel Peace Prize.

This shared commitment to the inherent good in humanity and the vision of peace means that, beyond a day or month of recognizing Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr’s impact, we strive to embrace that philosophy in practice throughout our lives. In the classroom, this can be seen through: valuing classmates’ contributions to the community; studying human history through a lens of gratitude for the diverse peoples and civilizations that have contributed to making the world what it is today; examining historical time periods and events with an understanding of context; exchanging ideas and striving for mutual understanding, in collective, respectful conversations; and through service to others.

Valuing Classmates' Contributions to the Community

“Life's most persistent and urgent question is, 'What are you doing for others?’”

— Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr.

“The consciousness of knowing how to make oneself useful, how to help mankind in many ways, fills the soul with noble confidence, almost religious dignity.” — Dr. Maria Montessori

We see the respect of work—of human contribution— throughout the Montessori community. This begins at the youngest ages, where children’s natural capacity to find joy in contributing is encouraged. Children as young as 18 months old are given daily opportunities to work in ways that benefit the whole class: washing windows, watering plants, preparing food and setting the table for a communal meal, and so on.

Children in Montessori each have responsibilities for the care of the community, ranging from ensuring they replace work items to carefully polishing and dusting shelves or caring for classroom pets. The mantra of the classroom becomes “We are all responsible for the well-being of the community.” This can be seen in small acts, such as when a child recognizes that a peer needs assistance and offers it kindly, or when an older child holds open the door for the family of a toddler. It is also seen as the Young Children’s Community shares meals together, passing food to one another, each ensuring that there is enough to feed the whole group before taking seconds; or by waiting to eat until everyone has been served and a collective thanksgiving is said to express gratitude for their meal and the joy of sitting among friends. Following the meal, the students are responsible for cleaning up after themselves, and there is a flow of movement as they take turns washing their dishes, wiping remnants of food from tables, and returning chairs to their place—everyone doing their part and understanding that each task, however small, is for the benefit of all.

Studying History Through a Lens of Gratitude

As children enter their Elementary years, they become more cognizant of social constructions and patterns, and are exploring moral values and behaviors both within themselves and in the world around them. This is the same age at which children in Montessori are formally introduced to human history and the beginning of society, with an emphasis on gratitude for those individuals who have helped create the society we live in today—both those deemed “significant” (i.e. renowned historical figures) and “ordinary” (the average human in a certain place and time). Just as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. and Dr. Maria Montessori urged society to recognize the dignity of all work and value the contributions of all, no matter their task, Montessori students are encouraged to view human history through a lens of gratitude for the individuals, known and unknown, who helped create a better society for us living in today’s world. Many of the early Montessori Elementary lessons are designed to appeal to the child’s natural tendency to engage in hero worship, often serving as a launching point for the child’s further independent research. The Montessori child does more than ask “What can we learn from these people?” or “How is my life experience alike and/or different from theirs?” They also thank them for their contribution to society.

In the Lower Elementary, many of the Great Lessons emphasize the theme of one-ness. They identify what humans throughout time and around the world have in common with one another. The children study a diverse array of world civilizations, influential leaders, and change makers. From an early age, the children are asked to investigate these individuals by assessing what Dr. Montessori referred to as their “fundamental human needs.” These are the core entities and values that all human beings have in common, regardless of their place in history or geographical location. For example, they will discover how the individual or society satisfied their needs for food, shelter, self-defense, transportation, and even their spiritual needs. The Montessori Fundamental Needs charts can be applied cross culturally, demonstrating how all humans share the same sets of needs.

The three Great Lessons specific to human history— The Coming of Human Beings on Earth, Communication in Signs , and the Story of Numbers—and the key lessons that follow from them are given regularly throughout the school year; these lessons are the springboards from which the children often do more in-depth research of their own. This work is designed to highlight the universality of the human experience. For example, The Story of the Coming Human Beings specifically identifies how all humans are special due to hearts that can love, minds that can think, and hands that can create. The key lessons on The Interdependencies of Human Beings in Society highlight the individual humans who contribute to our daily life, often times going unnoticed. These lessons focus on individuals working together both to create a product for the greater good and to serve the community.

By first identifying our commonalities, such as our fundamental human needs, the children connect themselves to the individual or individuals being studied. They then recognize and explore the innovative or alternative ways in which these needs were met. As they investigate the life experiences of these diverse societies or influential individuals, the children are not only able to learn the tactical means by which these people brought about change, but more importantly they feel a connection to them, and an overwhelming sense of gratitude for the work they’ve done or continue to do.

In celebrating a particular transformative individual, or hero, such as Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., the children engage in more pointed activities surrounding the individual’s work and his or her tremendous impact on the world. They utilize Dr. Montessori’s approach to human history as they ask why Dr. King, for example, needed to fight for change, and they investigate how he did so. Some students may choose to write a play, research other civil rights activists, or seek out a local expert. They celebrate with a deep sense of gratitude and admiration for both Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr. himself, the people he advocated for, and his message of peace and equality.

Understanding Historical Context

Montessori students are encouraged to dig deep into historical context, finding the connections between events, movements, and messages. For example, an Elementary-aged child learns that grandparents of his close friends did not have the ability to vote in the Southern states due to being born African American. This insight brings about questions regarding voting status, the history of civil rights in the United States, and research into current civil engagement regarding everything from access to voting to how the electoral college is structured. The world is open to explore because a community that embraces humanity, embraces questions and investigation.

New ParagraphIn the Secondary Level at Forest Bluff School, during history and literature discussions and through a civics trip to Washington, D.C., students spend time thinking about the history of slavery in the United States and tying that history to the ongoing Civil Rights Movement. They go beyond research conducted at the Elementary Level and delve into the historical context of events and movements, allowing them to see the connections across time periods and to confront some of the more complex topics in our world’s and nation’s history. For example, the implications that our founders were great leaders and thinkers, and that they were fundamentally flawed as slave-holders is something that our students do confront. They read source material such as John Locke, the Constitution, Abraham Lincoln, Jefferson Davis, and Justice Taney's Dredd Scott decision. These primary sources are approached with a critical eye towards meaning and interpretation.

By the time they study the Civil Rights Movement, the students have a context for understanding its significance; they can see for themselves how the important work of Martin Luther King, Jr. and other leaders of the Civil Rights Movement is directly connected to and shaped by the time period from the founding of our nation up through reconciliation and reconstruction after the Civil War. When history is contextualized in this way, the people who make it are better understood and appreciated for their complexities and heroism.

Respectful Conversations & Mutual Understanding

When students acknowledge and express gratitude for the contributions of their classmates and the humans who came before them, they are better equipped to approach their differences and conflicts from a place of mutual respect. Students in a Montessori classroom are empowered to constructively work through their differences in peaceful dialogue. Such conversations are critical to the students’ development of problem-solving and conflict resolution skills that they will use throughout their adult lives. At Forest Bluff School, students are provided freedom to responsibly cooperate inside and outside the classroom on a daily basis. Students self-organize into small groups to pursue research interests, solve a detailed math problem, create music on the Montessori Bells, etc. This cooperation is also practiced as they organize small groups for playing outside. When working and playing together, students practice listening to one another, coming to a mutual understanding, and compromising on a path forward—skills that are essential to the continued progress toward a more just, humane, and peaceful society.

In Service of Others

Both Dr. King and Dr. Montessori believed that a life lived in service of others was a life well-lived. The vision of peace that both luminaries promoted is only possible through action, or service, that is based on the respect, understanding, and gratitude that has already been established. As the child grows, their foundation in valuing humanity can be seen through service-oriented work and experiences. Because Montessori children of all ages internalize the importance of contribution to the classroom community, it is only natural for them to apply that mentality and behavior to the community at large.

Service work is an integral component of experiential learning trips at the Secondary Level at Forest Bluff School. In the past few years, for instance, students have worked together to build an amphitheater, archery shed, canoe racks, and a scenic lookout for a YMCA camp that offers year-round programming in support of youth development, healthy living, and social responsibility. Completing an arduous task from beginning to end for the sake of contributing to the greater good gives adolescent students perspective. Such experiences impress upon them the enormous amount of collaboration and hard work that is required to build a highly functioning, just society.

An Enduring Message

In reading speeches from both of these humanitarians, there is a clear and present theme that important work remains to be done. As we enter a new decade, the time to heed Dr. King’s and Dr. Montessori’s words is still upon us. It is through our collective efforts, that we will continue to work for a more equitable, peaceful, harmonious society. As we teach our children and build our families, we have many opportunities to further this growth and practice peace in our homes, schools and communities.

Four Montessori-Inspired Activities for the Winter

Fri, 18 Dec 2020 17:37:25 GMT

After a difficult spring, we have enjoyed a summer of relative normalcy and freedom in Illinois. While abiding by restrictions and safety measures, people gathered in outdoor spaces, children attended socially distanced camps, and we’ve all had the chance to swim, walk, run, and explore. This freedom has done a great deal for everyone’s mental health and happiness! Being together, being outside, and engaging in structured social activities has been an antidote for a difficult time.

As we head into a winter of uncertainty, many parents and caregivers are looking for creative ways to continue to engage in the outdoor world, as well as bring inspired and open-ended activities into the warmth of their homes. Restrictions on museums, gyms, churches, and other normal places for gathering and exploring have created the time and opportunity for us to “make our own fun”! Here we share four Montessori-approved and inspired activities for this unusual winter.

Build an Indoor Carnival

Encourage your children to build an indoor carnival! They can make rides, games, and spectacles for family members to play with and explore. They can practice practical math skills by making tickets and awarding prizes. A cardboard box becomes a slide, and sofa pillows on the floor become a giant trampoline. The carnival may have a bean bag toss, bobbing for apples, or a petting zoo from stuffed animals (or pets!). As with all Montessori activities, the purpose here is for your children to engage in the bulk of the work and productivity. Your role is to inspire and support, and let their creativity and motivation do the rest. To this end, you can make the suggestion to create a carnival, but then see where your children’s unique creativity leads them. Only give as many suggestions as necessary to let their own enthusiasm take over!

Make a Pie...Or Nine

Host a pie tasting event. In the children’s classic, Harold and the Purple Crayon, Harold sets up a picnic with “all nine kinds of pie that Harold liked best.” Do you know what your nine favorite kinds of pie are? Pie making appeals to all ages and has flexible recipes. You can add more or less sugar, mix fruits, change up the toppings, and find many ways to explore and create variety. Decide how many pies your family wants to bake in a day or a week, and determine which flavors you want to compare and rank. Younger children can help roll out dough if you choose to make your crust from scratch (the grocery store offers pre-made crusts in the pan for those who are less inclined for baking!). They can also rinse and prepare fruit by removing stems and leaves, and cutting large fruit into pieces. They can pour ingredients and stir. Older children can look up recipes and decide if they want to make substitutions or experiment. They can measure ingredients and follow instructions. And the very oldest children can take over most of the activity on their own, only inviting parents in for the taste testing portion. Once all the pies have been tasted, they can make an award for the best tasting pie, and add honorable mentions for the other pies (Tartest Pie, Messiest Pie, Most Burnt Edges, and so on).

Have a Cookout

Have a family meal around a fire pit! First make sure your city allows for cooking over an open fire. On a chilly day, invite your children to collect dry kindling and wood for the fire. Then gather around to prepare your meal together. There are many different kinds of food you can cook in this way - hot dogs on sticks, chopped peppers and onions wrapped up in tinfoil, pizza in a cast iron skillet, and, of course, s’mores for dessert! You can sing songs and play games around the fire. My children love “Truth or Dare.” Dare usually involves eating a spoonful of mustard or running around the yard saying something silly! The fire creates special memories and a comfortable way to gather outside on cold days.

Explore Nature

Explore a nature preserve. Most people think of nature preserves as an activity for warmer temperatures, but these open spaces are special year round. The winter offers an incredible time to look for animal footprints, see the dramatic branches against the sky, observe the bravest animals, and breathe fresh air. The landscape is different but still very beautiful! Dress warmly, bring hot chocolate in a thermos, find a pair of binoculars, and hit the trails with your family. There are many wonderful preserves in our community. Lake Forest Open Lands has several throughout the area, and Independence Grove offers year round accessibility as well. If you feel like traveling farther, Starved Rock in Illinois is a beautiful site for a day trip—be sure to pack a picnic and a thermos!

A Montessori Parent’s Reflection: Finding Joy in Winter

Wed, 18 Nov 2020 17:57:44 GMT

I looked at the calendar on November 1st and it took my breath away. The end of the year is hurtling towards us, and soon its chapter will close. This was our 2020. It was a global pandemic, a resurfacing of racial struggles, and contentious political campaigns followed by a dramatic presidential election.

When our Montessori school first closed on March 13, I had no idea what was ahead of us. It’s hard to even remember who that naive person was. Since then, we have lived with periods of relentless anxiety, and we have also seen extraordinary acts of heroism. We have woken at night fearful about the world we are raising our children in, and we have been moved by profound acts of goodness.

Just as it has been since the beginning of human history, there is joy and sorrow all around us. And as we move towards the end of the year—a time that invites reflection—I find myself considering what this year has meant for our family personally, and where that joy and sorrow have lived.

Before the pandemic, I could have easily listed off qualities of character that we hold in esteem: Resilience, gratitude, empathy, courage, and hope. And then I might even have confidently listed off the ways our family’s practices and language aim to develop those qualities in our children. But what I know now is this: I didn’t know.

Now, we have experienced resilience. We have felt gratitude and empathy. We have witnessed courage. And we have hoped like our lives depended on it. What do we have now that we didn’t have before? We have experience with hardship, disappointment, and suffering.

Maria Montessori knew that adults do not pour intelligence and character into children. Children build these qualities on their own. She observed, “[P]rogress comes from within the child. It is the child who begins to exercise himself; he constructs his own conduct, so that this order becomes a phenomenon of development” (Montessori, 1997, p. 54). To this end, children themselves will progress and develop by means of their own experiences with the world. We cannot do it for them. I can describe the ideals of character to them every day, but they will not truly have them until they find themselves in situations that require them to build this character.

Our family has led lives of great ease and comfort until this year. And while these points of character were somewhat contrived before, they are now embedded in our days and in the ways we engage with our neighbors and the world. How do I know this? I know this because I have seen glimpses in our three children (ages 5.5, 7.5, and 10). We have a long way to go. “No person is ever finished,” my favorite parenting blogger (Simply on Purpose) says. But what this year has given us is the necessity to look deep within ourselves, and build these qualities—resilience, gratitude, empathy, courage, and hope—into our being.

Resilience

As the reality of the pandemic sank in, and we gradually understood how much of our lives would change, and for how long, we all grieved. Our oldest child cried when he learned that our spring break trip was cancelled and that March Madness was cancelled. He sobbed when he learned our family trip to Wisconsin was cancelled, and he cried as though his heart would break as he learned of friends who would no longer be at his school. I, too, cried as I watched weddings and graduation celebrations get called off, and as I understood how my children’s classrooms would be different when school opened in September.

But each sadness gave us the opportunity to watch life go on. Each setback also provided time to recover and the chance to fill life with other ways to connect and love people, and other ways to explore and enjoy our days. Every disappointment told us that we could bear this and that we could carry on. This fall, when I told our son that we were pulling him out of his beloved baseball team because COVID cases were going up in our county, I anticipated tears. Instead, he nodded. “Okay,” he said. My heart broke a little as I watched him in that moment—more grown up than I’d understood him to be, and more resilient than I’d anticipated.

Montessori recognized, “Real freedom… is a consequence of development… Development is active. It is the construction of the personality, reached by effort and one’s own experiences; it is the long road which every child must travel to attain maturity.” Our son had traveled down that long road farther than I’d thought. This year gave him opportunities to develop actively toward maturity. He has knowledge about the world now that he didn’t have before—the many ways it can let you down. But he also has knowledge about himself now that he didn’t have before—the many ways he is resilient enough to handle it.

Gratitude

Gratitude came next. As we watched the pandemic spread through our country and the world, we experienced a visceral gratitude for the state of our own lives. We had an abundance of food and water, we had electricity and central heating, we had access to excellent healthcare, we had a yard to play in, we had books and toys, and we had each other—to talk to and to hug. Throughout quarantine, our youngest child expressed frequent gratitude for the many small pleasures of our daily life. She took time to notice the delights of her present moments. “This food is SO good,” she would report most evenings. “I love Huckleberry SO much,” she told us several times a day (our cute but grumpy and unplayful dog—a real testament to her positive outlook). “I’m SO glad you got me these dolls for my birthday,” she would share with me, as she took them out for the hundredth time that week.

Her practice of gratitude has been a quiet but steady heartbeat in our home. Montessori observed, “The child is the instrument through which everyone comes to love his own corner of the earth” (Montessori, 1996, p. 65). Young children live in such a way that draws them to a loving intimacy with their environment. As the larger and more exciting activities are unavailable to us, we have no choice but to look closer for joy. We have an opportunity to focus on what is near to us. Watching our littlest one enjoy the often unnoticed elements of her life moves us to do the same. Our family has so much. And now we have a practice of gratitude to connect us to all that is right in front of us.

Empathy

June brought about an awakening for much of the world to the racial struggles that Black and Brown skinned people experience every day. In our own home, we reflected on the ways we have been a part of this system, and we sought to begin righting wrongs by educating our children in age-appropriate ways. We walk a fine line of wanting our children to have the freedom to be little, but also giving them age-appropriate facts about the world and empowering them to do more when they can. This is a deeply personal line—unique to every family, based on individual beliefs, children’s temperaments, and parents’ observations.

Our middle child felt these conversations deeply. Montessori recognized that the elementary child asks themselves, “Do we merely live here for ourselves, or is there something more for us to do?” (Montessori, M., 1991, p. 10). In this moment, our daughter believed there was something more for her to do. She absorbed the stories we read to her and the way we explained what was happening in the world, and she took those feelings and got to work. She asked if there were jobs she could do in our house and yard to earn money, and when she was finished, she asked us to send the money to families who needed it.

In the Montessori classroom, children have great freedom to choose productive work. They do not experience much resistance when they have relevant ideas for purposeful activities.

Empathy is a powerful tool. It allowed our daughter to feel the suffering of others. And because she also has energy and autonomy, developed in her Montessori environment, she was able to transform her feelings into acts of kindness—an empowering and productive service.

In normal times, we are consumed in our daily lives. We hear passing stories of others’ pain and then our attention returns to demands of our own days. This year created an expansion of space and time to reflect on other people’s lives. With nothing else to distract us, our empathy grew. And through the deepening of this quality, accompanied by autonomy, our moral compass directs us with kindness and intention into acts of service.

Courage

After Illinois’ quarantine, our children were used to staying in our house and social distancing. Our son expressed anxiety about returning to normal activity. “It won’t feel right,” he kept saying. Even after the summer, and despite our reassurance, he was nervous about the ways school would be different from how it was before, and also being around so many people in an indoor space.

“There’s a difference between living and just surviving,” my high school physics teacher told me. Allowing our fears to control our actions reduces our lives to survival. It takes courage to transition out of what feels absolutely safe into a life with measured risk. Montessori wrote, “The important thing to develop in the child is courage… What is important is not to take a second step, but the effort that is made to walk.” (Montessori, 1994, pp. 306-307). With this in mind, we made no promises about the world, but we encouraged our son to take the first step. We explained to him that scientists believed that children were not at increased risk for COVID, that everyone would be wearing masks and social distancing, that windows would be open and he could work outdoors, and that humans were remarkably adaptable.

We also explained that life was for living. That courage was a tool for carrying on. The pandemic brought elevated vigilance into our lives. It brought sustained concerns about the health and safety of ourselves and others. We couldn’t make our son’s anxiety go away. But we could remind him that he already had a tool to overcome it. He brought courage with him on that first day in August. He felt his own strength and capabilities as he faced a fear. And the courage he carried with him became his own.

Hope

Hope has been the most elusive, the most amorphous, quality we’ve cultured in 2020. As our life as we had known it was essentially cancelled, we stopped making plans. It became too painful to look forward to something in the near future only to have to call it off. Life became stagnant. We stopped hoping. In the past, I had understood hope as something specific that I wished would happen. I saw hope as something that could be managed, something that could be dashed, something that could fall. Hope felt out of my control.

But what is hope? What is hope when you don’t know what tomorrow will look like? What is hope when the world looks dismal? Perhaps hope is a faith in a better future, even when we don’t know what it holds. Perhaps hope is a belief that light will follow darkness, even when we don’t know when or where the light will shine. And perhaps hope is holding all possible outcomes lightly, and knowing that we have the qualities we need to carry us to that brighter future.

So where does that leave my family? Montessori’s entire curriculum was designed with a belief in the possibility of a better future. The very nature of her work with children is full of hope. She wrote, “The child is both a hope and a promise for mankind” (Montessori, 2007, p. 31). Our hope now is not confined to specific scenarios—hoping that something will or won’t happen. Now hope strengthens us and tells us that just as life can bring unimaginable despair, it can also bring unimaginable joy.

Final Thoughts

In days of bounty, happiness is plentiful. Wellness teacher, Dr. Matthew Dewar, reminds us that the summer brings easy joy. It surrounds us. It comes to us easily. The joy in winter is harder to find. We work for every bit of it. We earn our winter joy through the contrasts—the coldness of the air against the warmth of the fire, the bareness of the trees and sky against the light of our homes. We have to use our own efforts to move ourselves from bleakness into that life-giving place that brings joy.

This year, our meteorological winter coincides with the winter of the pandemic. It is darker, colder, and bleaker. Joy won’t come as easily as it did in the summers of our lives. We will have to move ourselves from despair into possibility.

Montessori wrote, “Joy in life together with discipline seems to be more the result of… activities guided from within than from any outer circumstance” (Montessori, 1996, p. 43). This joy that we work for, the joy that we earn, the joy that we build through our character, is a deep and empowering joy. This joy, founded on qualities like resilience, gratitude, empathy, courage, and hope, is a joy we will keep. This joy will fuse into the cells of our body and sustain us for the uncertain road ahead—and carry us to an unknown, but hopefully brighter, future.

References

Montessori, M. (1991). To educate the human potential. Madras, India: Kalakshetra Press.

Montessori, M. (1994). Creative development in the child II (R. Ramachandran, Trans.). Madras, India: Kalakshetra Press.

Montessori, M. (1995). The absorbent mind . New York, New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.

Montessori, M. (1996). The formation of man. Oxford: Clio.

Montessori, M. (1997). The California lectures of Maria Montesori, 1915 . Oxford: Clio.

Montessori, M. (2007). Education and peace. Amsterdam: Montessori-Pierson Publishing.

Adolescents Find Strength in Nature and Community

Sat, 17 Oct 2020 19:53:08 GMT

We are immensely grateful that this fall, our Secondary Level adolescents were able to go off into the woods to get away from screens, the media, and the consuming concerns of the adult world for two full weeks. Camping trips offer people the chance to bond with one another, to re-set their nervous systems and to connect with the grounding rhythms of nature. This is more important in adolescence than perhaps at any other time in our children’s development, especially in our current times.

Such results cannot be achieved in the same ways between classroom walls during the years of early adulthood. People need to be actively working together interdependently to become contributing members of any community, and to develop themselves fully. In fact, Dr. Maria Montessori believed, “To act in association with others either in thought or in practice is the only way in which human nature can be active…Education cannot be kept within the limits of a closed room in which the student remains inert and always dependent upon the teacher while being kept separate from his fellow students…Education must be to offer a wider environment and to multiply the possibilities of association and activity” (From Childhood to Adolescence). Important parts of our children’s development happen when they experience living away, even for brief periods, out in the world.

Dr. Montessori pointed out that adolescence, in particular, is a vulnerable time of rapid growth and sensitivity. This is also a period of inconsistency, where adolescents seem to be up then down in the span of an hour, exhibiting superhero strength one minute and feeling exhausted the next, full of cheer one minute, then sobbing in despair the next. Living through this transitive stage of life is much like a roller coaster for them and for the adults around them!

To support our Secondary Level students through these inner challenges and to give them opportunities for healthy, positive growth in substantial areas of their development, Forest Bluff School helps them to plan three work service camping trips a year. Providing such an opportunity to live out in nature and to work together as a community is more important for the next generation than ever before. But to prepare themselves to understand and solve the problems of the natural world, young adults first must have a passion for it. They need to understand, on a visceral level, how to work with and in natural surroundings. And they must understand, and have experience, living in unison with others. To seek out and be able to work in community with others, our young adults need to have a passion to do so. Adolescents fall in love with nature and with community life by experiencing it, especially in this tender stage of their lives. Thus, our Secondary Level trips have two special elements—nature and community—that give these budding young adults purpose and focus.

Learning to Love Nature

Montessori education capitalizes on the relationship between human beings and nature from the very beginning; in early childhood, children develop a connection with nature by experiencing it sensorially and fall in love with it. The natural world becomes their home. They come to respect the natural world in a physical way, as we see when our youngest children learn to tenderly wash the leaves of a houseplant in the Young Children’s Community and Primary classrooms.

In their elementary years, Montessori children learn to respect the natural world in an intellectual way, learning about photosynthesis and the interdependencies in nature. They are awed by the miracles of creation and evolution. Using their imaginative powers, children personify plants and animals to recognize what their purposes and motivations are.

Now in early adolescence, Montessori children learn to respect nature on an emotional level, where they can understand that we need the natural world and it benefits from us as well. They come to realize and feel, “The natural world heals me, and I can physically help the natural ecosystems around me. I belong here, I am part of it, and it is a part of me.” Living outdoors in nature on camping trips helps them to feel this deeply.

In later adolescence, young adults will be ready to take that respect, love, and sense of belonging and connection and turn it into a bigger mission. High school students can see that we are all interwoven and each has a job to do; they are ready to internalize this intellectually. They realize that humanity and nature work together. If they have had all this preparation leading up to it, then by university, our children are ready to help others understand this. They want to affect the world and make a change—make a difference. It is important not to expect this level of maturity in childhood or early adolescence, but to allow each stage to fully develop on this path. Adulthood is a point of arrival. All of this grows out of that first seed of love for the natural world.

As examples of these experiences, our students saw beautiful, natural sights on this last fall trip. They saw juvenile eagles and osprey catching the air currents off the bluff where they were camping and working. They saw the leaves turn yellow and fall off the trees. They lay outside on the ground gazing up at the stars at night and learned names of constellations from one another. In such ways, nature supported the children and inspired them. Such peaceful moments in natural surroundings builds that deep love for our environment and a timeless concern for it.

Learning to Love Community

Like the importance of developing a sincere love for nature, it is immensely important that our children develop love for humanity in order to become a part of it. From that love comes a burning passion to help others and to devote themselves to society. Montessori pointed out that the young adult cannot, “take part in the functioning of a society for which he lacks all feeling” (From Childhood to Adolescence). So, it is imperative that in this time when COVID causes greater isolation from one another, our young adults experience real community life.

Every evening on the fall trip, the Secondary Level students made a campfire. They sat around it out under the stars and shared what went well that day and what they thought they could do better the next day. They also thanked one another for what each had done for the group. In these ways, our adolescents cultivate a proactive attitude towards solving problems and a daily habit of expressing gratitude. Some of the most common “thank yous” mentioned were for: patience for a classmate, volunteering for a task, persevering to finish a hard task together. There were also many funny moments to recollect every day. Over the course of the trip, there was a lot of laughing, playing outdoor games, and singing together.

Living in community supports adolescents. They develop a fondness for one other, they laugh hard together, and they help one another. For example, we heard that on this last trip, one boy observantly helped a girl who was struggling to figure out the sequence of cleaning the dishes, (made more complex with COVID safety guidelines). Adults later remarked at how he patiently, calmly, kindly talked her through it and made suggestions. Such interactions build a deep trust between individuals. Adolescents get to grow from such experiences, and they bond in a friendship more like family members than classmates.

Being Challenged to Grow Strong

Adolescents are supported by the natural world and by living in community, but they are also deeply challenged by these two factors. Nature, for instance, challenges our students in many ways: it can be very cold at night and in the mornings, and on this last trip, there was more than one cold, rainy morning of trying to cook and eat breakfast outside. There are spiders that can find their way into tents, causing unexpected irritation and fear. Living out in nature 24/7 is uncomfortable and requires campers to adjust by making changes to their attire and ways of doing things, in order to get comfortable.

Living in community also challenges adolescents. They have to work with each other all the time. When they are tired, they may want to put down their shovels and walk back to the tents to rest. But if the work isn’t done yet, that isn’t an option if they want to stay part of the group. They each must persist through personal discomfort. When they are cooking and cleaning up, students have to collaborate, even with personalities who see things differently. They have to fine tune their systems of working together until they can make progress without conflict. They develop their own substantial rhythm.

These numerous social interactions pose challenges to grow from. Young adults get better and better at navigating through community life on a camping trip, where common tasks must be done and there’s no escape. A student cannot just go off on his or her own; each is forced to work together and figure it out as a community. Each person’s well-being depends on it. Adolescents are incredibly capable; in fact, as they mature, we even see them serve themselves last, after preparing food for others.

Ev ery new situation when living in nature and in community challenges young adults to grow in meaningful ways and prepares them for adulthood. Perhaps just as importantly, the Secondary Level trips foster a deep love for nature and community that will shape how our young people approach life when they become adults.

Doing Hard Work

Over the two weeks of the fall trip, our Secondary Level students threw themselves into physical tasks of service work. They cleared buckthorn, shoveled trenches to re-rout water, cleaned up an outdoor camp chapel, and laid grass seed. They replaced rotted fence posts and beams, dug holes for signposts, reorganized a utility building, cleared out a barn attic, painted an old barn, and fixed wire fencing. The eleven adolescents accomplished an amazing amount of physical work in just 12 days. They felt good about it! This was hard work that involved trekking up and down steep hills numerous times a day, in the heat, and pushing themselves. It was very demanding and, therefore, deeply satisfying.

The Secondary Level Directors who lived with the students on this recent trip said, “It’s just magical up there.” They were referring to more than just the physical beauty of the rural St. Croix region of Wisconsin, however: It was the relationships the class formed in that setting that made the trip so profound. The adolescents developed their relationships through hard work, and they returned home to school as a family.

When Adolescents Return Home

When preparing Forest Bluff parents to welcome their adolescents home after the two weeks away, we remind them that the purpose of the trips was to introduce some challenges into their children’s lives so that they could build emotional strength. Overcoming reasonable challenges helps children develop self-esteem and confidence. This is key during this more turbulent stage of life. Inevitably, our Secondary students come home needing to share stories of their personal struggles with their parents. Sometimes the first stories parents hear may be the ones involving the hardest moments! What adolescents need in return is validation and sincere admiration from the adults around them.

Parents can validate their children by responding with respect, by commenting on how the stories prove that their children have become so strong and capable. The adolescents–with their stories of struggles and triumphs–are just trying to convey, “I was deeply challenged; this wasn’t so easy for me.” They need their parents’ response to be, “And I’m so proud of you; you did it on your own, without me there to protect you or tell you what to do. You did it!” Going off on a two-week trip is about developing independence at an age when young adults need to know they will be able to survive life without their parents always present. With their peers and adult mentors there to support them, our students find that they can accomplish many difficult tasks in life. They come home taller and prouder.

Follo wing a Secondary Level trip, we also introduce the idea to parents that when their child re-enters the family, the dynamic of child and parents may shift a bit. This is a wonderful opportunity! When they return from the fall trip, it is a great time to invite adolescents to take on more adult-like roles in their families. We encourage parents to treat their adolescents as being more capable than when they left. Not only can young adults take care themselves, they can care for their parents and siblings a bit, too. Parents may do some nice things for their adolescents, but adolescents can also step up and do some things for the other adults in the house, as well. Doing such things as planning and cooking a dinner, cleaning up the garage, painting the basement, or doing another adult-like project valorizes young adults. It helps them to feel strong and to find their sense of self-worth. They can bring some of that newfound strength into their lives at home.

By talking about the purpose of the trips in this way, we prepare parents to welcome the young person who steps into their car after a Secondary Level trip as the new being that they are: a little less of a child and a bit more of an adult. This gradual transition is the magic of adolescence, a special stage of life.

How Adolescents Prepare for Today's World

When the world seems to be taken over by fears of the novel coronavirus, climate change, pollution, societal strife, racial struggles, and political tensi on, it is important to be reminded that there are reasons to hope. There are ways to calm ourselves and think more clearly and creatively. There are simpler, more basic ways of living that we can find in community life in natural settings. Getting back in touch with this foundation presents young people with the basic structures of society and the ways to resolve problems. By tackling the small problems that arise naturally, one at a time, on a work trip, adolescents build up practice cooperating and solving problems as a community. This prepares them for the real world and the bigger challenges they will face in their lives.

Thes e trips are invaluable to our young adults. We are very proud and grateful that we were able to help our young adults to make adjustments and accommodations for new safety requirements in COVID times, so that they could still carry on with certain life priorities. Our Secondary Level students learned that it is possible to adapt to the times and to continue with this important aspect of their Forest Bluff education, even when, and especially when, faced with big challenges.

The Forest Bluff Montessori Lunch

Tue, 29 Sep 2020 17:29:56 GMT

The body content of your post goes here. To edit this text, click on it and delete this default text and start typing your own or paste your own froThe Forest Bluff lunch is a quintessential Montessori experience that builds responsibility, self-esteem, cognition, and independence. Here we explain why this daily routine is so important, and we provide guidance to support families in this endeavor.

Forest Bluff School is known for not assigning homework. This is, in fact, a bragging right for alumni when they reach high school! Their peers are usually a little envious (and a little confused). Because so much work happens during the school day, there is no need for extra academic work at home. The time after school is meant for creativity, the outdoors, and family time.

However, Forest Bluff teachers will tell you that there are two important activities your child should be doing in lieu of homework: Reading and contributing to the home. While there are many productive ways your children can contribute to home life, one of the most important ones is preparing their own lunch. This is a daily routine that encourages and builds children’s responsibility and self-confidence. Children learn that they are capable of taking care of themselves, and that they can help with the running of the household!m a different source.

The Process of Independence

Your child will start staying all day at school the day they turn five. However, the ability to make one’s own lunch doesn’t happen overnight! The first step lies in the preparation they have had beforehand--the times that you have included them in Practical Life activities at home and asked them to participate in cleaning and care for the environment and themselves. School itself is also preparation for this work, as there is much that they do independently there.

Once your child is five, you can work towards giving them sole ownership of their lunch. Some children will be so ecstatic about the idea of staying all day with the “older children” that they may eagerly take on this task without much friction. However, this is not always a linear process. My own children were very enthusiastic about turning five, and they were thrilled to stay all day at school, but going from a three-hour school day to a seven-hour school day is a big jump! Some days they made their lunches quite independently, and some days they needed more support.

It also has been interesting to see how differently my children have responded to preparing lunch five days a week. One needed more guidance and discussion as they adapted to their new job, while one of them happily took on the role and probably would have cheerfully made their siblings’ lunches too!

We have found a process in our home for lunch that feels comfortable and balanced for all of us (most of the time). In the winter, our newly turned five-year-old was in charge of the dishes and linens in her basket. I usually prepared her food, but I did not take special requests! (Unless they were very simple). If she wants exactly what she wants, then she can choose to do it herself, and she often does.

After about a month, she adapted to her new schedule. At that time, she took responsibility for her fruit, vegetable, and dessert (a small cookie). I continued to provide her protein and carbohydrate. We will keep up this arrangement for a while, and at some time before her sixth birthday, she will take over the rest of her lunch, with continued guidance and support from me. She will have many periods of time before she is six when she will make her entire lunch on her own, and I will encourage this. However, for our family, this will not be a consistent expectation until she is six. Five-year-olds are very capable, but their stamina is still unpredictable! As I said, one of my children did not need much help from the very beginning, while the other appreciated the support.

By the time my daughter is in the elementary class at six and a half years old, she will have ownership of the entire process, and I will check in only occasionally. At this time, it can be helpful to have a list of the main categories that are available in your refrigerator each week. While my children know fruits and vegetables, “protein” can be a bit abstract for them, and it helps when we write “cheese, sliced turkey, hard-boiled eggs,” or whatever happens to be in the fridge at that time. I do not lean over their shoulders every time they make their lunches. If I notice they are regularly not making a well-rounded lunch, then we have a talk about it. I also once received a phone call from a teacher suggesting that our son may want to bring more than dates and celery for his lunch. I am always grateful when teachers bring patterns like this to my attention! This led to a good discussion about the importance of protein and fat.

Lunch Materials

From age five through the lower elementary, children bring their lunches in a basket. I have found that the elliptical baskets sold at The Mustard Seed in Lake Forest, IL, are the best size and general durability. We use duct tape to patch up holes as they develop, and we usually end up replacing the baskets about once a year. Once they are in the upper elementary, the children bring backpacks. We have liked the backpacks with a divided larger compartment because it allows for more organization.

Our children use linens and dishes that would not break my heart if they were ruined or broken. While it is important that the children are trusted with real glass and attractive linens, I do not want them to sense an emotional attachment on my part to any of their lunch materials. I remember weeping as a child when I broke a beautiful china plate I had brought to school that I thought my mother loved. I do not even remember her reacting when I brought home the broken pieces, so I know my assumptions were all in my head! However, the experience has reminded me to make sure my own children know I am not emotionally attached to any of their school dishes.

Our family uses bento boxes in an insulated lunch box with a freezer pack to carry food to and from school. The boxes have one larger compartment and two smaller compartments. For my children, this has helped them see the variety they need to bring for their own nutrition. One compartment for fruit, one for vegetables, and one for the protein and a possible carbohydrate. They also each have a lunch box for the bento to go in with a freezer pack that gets zipped in. They each have two packs, so that they have the flexibility of always having one in the freezer for the days they decide to do the entire lunch process in the morning.

(Note: During COVID, children bring water to school in a water bottle, and it is especially important that every item in their baskets are replaced or cleaned before coming back to school the following day.)

When Should They Make Their Lunches?

The answer to this question will vary for every family! For some children, they may find that emptying their basket right when they get home is a good habit. Then, after having a snack, they are ready to prep their basket items and to make and store their lunch for the following day. This allows children to enjoy the rest of their afternoon and evening without the rush of preparing their meal in the mornings.

When we first started making lunch for Forest Bluff School, I advised my children to follow this schedule, because I knew it had worked for many of the students in my own class when I was a teacher. However, I found that this was sometimes met with resistance! Especially for my newly turned five-year-olds (or when a child has transitioned to an older classroom), when they got home, they needed to unwind first. Children are different from each other, and it is important to observe and experiment to figure out what works best in your own home.

In the spirit of autonomy and collaboration, I decided to ask my own children when they liked making their lunches. “After dinner, when we are in pajamas, and it is peaceful in the kitchen,” was their first answer. “When I’m really tired, I like to do it in the morning because I have more energy,” was their second answer.

Children often know themselves better than we think they do! Likewise, children like to have reasonable choices about the responsibilities in their lives. We had a discussion and came to an agreement. As long as their lunches were always ready 10 minutes before we had to leave the house, they could make them whenever they wanted. This included me letting go of insisting that they clean out their baskets when they get home. It turns out that they do it quickly and efficiently when they are ready to do the work.

So far, they have always had their lunches ready by the deadline. However, they understand that on the day that they do not, we will revert to my schedule for the week, and they can earn back flexibility as they show their conscientiousness.

Forgetting the Lunch

If your child is in the primary class and they forget their lunch, you can bring it to them. They are not old enough to be fully responsible for always remembering it. If this becomes a regular occurrence however, talk to your child’s teacher about why this might be happening and revisit the process to help set them up for success.

If your child is in the elementary class, unless there are extenuating circumstances, the teachers ask that you do not rescue them. Rest assured, they will not go hungry! When an elementary child forgets their lunch, they go to the primary class to borrow what is needed. They put together a lunch from the leftover refreshments, such as cheese and crackers or an apple. For most children, the mild hassle of this process is enough to help them remember their lunch in the future. But if this happens repeatedly, speak to your child’s teacher about what your child may need to do to improve their lunch making routine and to remember to bring it to school. (During COVID, children will not borrow dishes and food from the primary. During this time, please call the school office if your child forgets their lunch to determine how to best handle forgotten items.)

Exceptions to the Routine

About once a week, one of my children has been tired enough that I can see that making their lunch is going to be a struggle for them. Usually they have been working especially hard at school, but sometimes it is because we just had our first sunny day in weeks, so they played outside for hours and now they are exhausted! The reasons vary, but in these cases, I help them make their lunches. They are aware that I am helping them and say thank you (which I will remind them to do if they forget!). While it is important that they feel it is their responsibility to make their own lunches, and it is good to experience doing things even when they are tired, it also is an appreciated kindness when someone steps in for support.

If I find that they are in this state repeatedly, we take a step back to figure out why they do not have enough energy for this important responsibility. Sometimes they need an earlier bedtime, and sometimes it means we have been too active after school and need a calmer routine.

Final Thoughts

The Forest Bluff lunch is a quintessential Montessori experience for our children. It is an element of self-care to work towards doing independently. It involves an understanding of processes, memory development, natural consequences, and information about health and nutrition. It builds true self-esteem and cognition.

Lunch is also a unique experience at school. At Forest Bluff, the teachers eat with children in small groups. They make and bring their own lunch, and converse freely. Some of my favorite memories as a teacher were those times I spent in natural conversation with the students I loved so much, enjoying the lunches we had all brought to school that day. We all came to the table with the peaceful sense of accomplishment that only comes when you have ownership of your own life, and the joyful feeling that you are truly capable.

(Note : During COVID, children will eat their lunches socially distanced outside, or peacefully on their own, in reflection or while reading a book they brought from home. Again, this is a moment when they can enjoy the feeling of ownership and competence!)

What’s So Great About “The Great Lessons”?

Tue, 01 Sep 2020 19:18:12 GMT

You may have heard your children excitedly exclaim, “We heard a Great Lesson today!” and wonder what this means. It’s hard to imagine that something you don’t even know much about can be so important to your children’s education. In fact, Maria Montessori’s Great Lessons provide the framework for children’s understanding of the world, the drama to fuel their imaginations, and the impetus to explore with their relentless curiosity.

The Montessori Elementary curriculum is outlined by these five 20-minute Great Lessons, or oral stories, that the teacher tells to the children as a group. We begin every fall with the first story on the first day of school, and progress by telling each subsequent one every few weeks, in order. Each time new children join the class, the outline begins again to orient the new children and to continually reorient the older children. Though they hear the stories many times, the children enjoy them for their drama and imagination, and they hear something new in each retelling. More than anything, these stories feed the insatiable “but why?” questions for children ages six to twelve. Their numerous questions that only they can ask and which only they can answer for themselves, thus have a direct, central role in their educations.

The Five Great Lessons

I. The Story of the Universe , or God with No Hands, tells about the beginnings of the universe. In this story, “God” is a character with no hands, eyes, ears or mouth, and yet there’s some mysterious power of nature that caused the planets and the stars and everything that exists to be. It invites the children to wonder how this could be and to come up with their own theories.

Dr. Montessori told us, “If the idea of the universe is presented to the child in the right way, it will do more for him than just arouse his interest, for it will create in him admiration and wonder, a feeling loftier than any interest and more satisfying. The child’s mind then will no longer wander, but becomes fixed and can work. The knowledge he then acquires is organized and systematic; his intelligence becomes whole and complete because of the vision of the whole that has been presented to him, and his interest spreads to all, for all are linked and have their place in the universe on which his mind is centered” (To Educate The Human Potential).

This first story is therefore a springboard, which ignites children’s numerous questions. As they wonder about all sorts of things and seek more information to answer their questions, the teacher helps them learn to do original research and to express what they learn through their artwork, writing, presentations, musical compositions, or original dramatic productions. The study of planets, stars or our sun and earth are common paths of study. Because everything falls under the category of “the universe,” the possibilities are endless! Offshoots to this lesson are the study of astronomy, geology, physics and chemistry, which have many detailed lessons going up through age 12.

Now that the children have the framework of the Earth and where it is positioned, a few weeks later, we tell them what happened next on Earth.

II. The Coming of Life tells the story of the first forms of life and the spread of species as they evolved. There is a visual timeline that spreads across the floor to mark the passage of time and creatures. This orients the children in scientific eras and with layers of the earth. Students follow by seeking answers to with their own questions about plant and animal life. Offshoots are the study of ecology, biology, botany, and zoology, which have detailed lessons going up through age 12.

Now that the children have the framework of the universe, how the earth took shape, and how plant and life forms spread across it, we narrow in on ourselves:

III . The Coming of Human Beings t ells the story of the evolution of human beings on Earth, from our origins onward, and what important survival features make human beings unique amongst all species. This story also has two timelines, the second one being a more detailed section of the first. There are large blank spaces on the timelines to invite the children to fill in with their own discoveries and to suggest that there is much more to be found out. Offshoots are the studies of all subjects of human history and cultures, as well as the interrelations of ecology, geology and human history.

Now that the children have the framework of the universe, the earth, the origins and evolutions of all life forms, and the orientation of human history, they are ready to explore two of humankind’s most important discoveries:

IV . Communication in Signs tells the story of why humans need to communicate with written symbols, or writing, beginning with the early cave drawings and continuing up through the emergence of our own alphabet. Follow-up lessons are all the language and arts lessons in the curriculum, including parts of speech, grammar, sentence structure and writing styles, composition and editing, artwork, and musical expression and composition, going up through age 12. Offshoots are the studies of other alphabets and languages, such as Latin and Greek roots and vocabulary, and writing styles.

Now that the children appreciate why and how human beings communicate for survival and progress, we introduce another creative discovery that is a language of its own—Mathematics:

V. The Story of Our Numerals explains the purpose for mathematics. Children discover why we need to measure, why we need numbers, and how number systems evolved from this necessity. When they recognize the sincere need for numbers and other aspects of mathematics, children become much more interested in the subject and its role in their own lives. Offshoots are the many lessons in mathematics, including geometry, precalculus, trigonometry, and mathematical word problems, in detail up through age 12.

Once the children are oriented to all of the above, any and every piece of information they come across in their lives can find a logical place in their own, personal context built from hearing these stories over and again. The Great Lessons create a scaffolding, whether conscious or unconscious, for each individual child, for all their pursuits of knowledge in life.

A very common question is, “How can the Great Lessons be relevant if they remain the same? Isn’t it problematic that scientific discoveries change our views of history all the time, and that information is constantly evolving?”

I love this question because it gets at the very problem of how adults think of educating children: this question stems from the idea that teachers are the source of all information (not the environment in which the child lives and acts) and clings to the idea that the information is static in any given moment. In that common paradigm, information given must be the correct, most recent information on that day. This is why textbooks are constantly changing and conventional curriculums have to constantly update to try to keep up with human discoveries, a significant financial cost to schools. More importantly, that paradigm suggests to children that they must rely on adults to give them the absolute truth—that they cannot go and find it for themselves.

But the Great Lessons themselves are NOT meant to deliver absolute information nor even the latest information. The stories place the child, by the very nature of their telling, in the active position of explorer of information. Great Lessons are stories, based in facts, meant to inspire action. They excite the children to pursue the latest information and find out for themselves what is out there now. The child is the one who learns how to learn in this ever-changing world, where things are not just handed to us and we are not passive. The Montessori teacher’s job is to inspire and then model and guide students, to remove obstacles from their paths, and help them go on their own journeys of discovery. Children learn how to find information in books from the library, by finding local experts to interview, by forming their questions and by sharing what they learn and find with others around them when they write reports and give presentations.

The Great Lessons are the starting points . They are not meant to teach, but to inspire an active process of going out into the world and seeking and acquiring information. This invites a new kind of mindset, one that much more accurately matches how human beings learn and how we make the great discoveries in life. The child becomes an adult who does not take everything others tell him as the absolute truth. He thinks, he participates, he searches. And he has so much fun doing all this! It is fun sharing information with others when you discover it on your own. School, and lifelong learning, is something to enjoy.

The Great Lessons and the follow-up work they inspire set a classroom of children in motion as a community. Dr. Montessori said, “To act in association with others in thought or practice is the only way in which [one’s] human nature can be active. All this shows clearly that education cannot be kept within the limits of a closed room in which the student remains inert and always dependent on the teacher while being kept separate from his fellow students. An education so limited is insufficient for children…The first reform in education must be to offer a wider environment and to multiply the possibilities of association and activity.” This relates to both the physical environment within and outside the classroom, and between children and their resources for information.

The flexibility for interpretation and mental association that the Great Lessons and their subsequent discoveries give to children also gets at the purpose of education: If our goal is to help children develop adaptability, to change with the times, to always approach the world in a relevant manner, this means that we must present information as something to seek out for oneself. To educate is to educate oneself as an active quest, one that never ends but continues all throughout life.

This is difficult to do without a framework that orients the learner. Children have the courage and intelligence to explore further and to make new and meaningful discoveries only when they have the security that comes from having first built an established framework within. The Great Lessons expertly serve this purpose.

Returning to School with Resilience, Creativity, and Courage

Sat, 08 Aug 2020 19:30:19 GMT

How do we ready our children for what school will be like this year? They will see their school environments transformed to accommodate new concerns; there will be new signs on the walls, new rules, and new customs.

Adults may need to actively discourage children from following their natural urges to touch things: objects, door knobs, and even their own faces. Our children may have to stay at home for periods of time again. They may need to communicate with classmates and teachers using screens. We may need to prepare our homes to be their alternate school environments to keep them learning with the help of their teachers remotely.

How Do We Normalize These Things for Them?

Montessori education, above all else, is an approach that fosters adaptability. To be adaptable, we need to be resilient when things change on us; we must exercise creativity to respond well to changes, and we must practice courage when facing transitions.

Maria Montessori wrote: “It is necessary that the human personality be prepared for the unforeseen…man must have a strong character and quick wits as well as courage; he must be strengthened in his principles by moral training and he must also have practical ability in order to face the difficulties of life. Adaptability—this is the most essential quality; for the progress of the world is continually opening new careers, and at the same time closing or revolutionizing the traditional types of employment” (Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence ).

The good news is that Dr. Montessori also recognized that children are prepared to be adaptable by their very natures, with sensitive periods to acquire new abilities, absorbent minds that soak in information easily, and human tendencies that guide their development. Our children are more resilient, creative, and courageous than we adults are, by nature. They have an advantage over us from the start! However, our children do look to us to set the tone and model for them, so we must adopt some resiliency, creativity, and courage ourselves as well.

Resilience

During times like these, it can be tempting to want to change the things in our lives that we can control. As adults, we might want to make big life decisions right now. In many cases, experiences like this offer perspective and allow us to move forward in important areas of our lives. However, we must be careful that they are not changes for change’s sake. To be resilient, we must pause in our discomfort with uncertainty, breathe into it, and open our eyes to the beauty and opportunity that is right in front of us in our own cities, homes, schools and lives. We can take “the long view” and see past the horizon; in a few years, we will be stable and prospering again. Think of where you want to be then, and work towards that goal. This long view will give you the resiliency you need to demonstrate for your children. It offers stability, outlines a plan, and encourages determination.

Creativity

It is hard to think creatively when we are stressed or tired, but creative thinking is exactly what we need right now. Montessori education encourages our children to think creatively not by providing solutions or telling them what to do; instead, Montessori provides a well-prepared environment with order, an inspiring teacher, and an organization of information for children to explore. As adults, we might crave for someone else to solve problems for us or to tell us what we ought to do, especially right now when we feel unsure, but there aren’t always definitive solutions for us! So, like our children, we adults must “think outside the box” and make discoveries.

We can foster our own creativity by resting and refreshing our minds. Take a break from the news and from technology. Remove interruptions, and get out into nature. Spend a little time away from your usual responsibilities if you can, whether it be a few days or even a few minutes. This gives your mind and soul a chance to reset and open up to creative ideas.

We can also use creativity when thinking about the current social landscape that children need to get used to:

Sew or purchase some pretty cloth or paper face masks. This gives each person in the family identity with their own face masks and helps young children to recognize one another and the adults in their lives.
Normalize mask-wearing by helping your child to make miniature face masks for stuffed animals or dolls. Suggest that your children play “going to the store” or “to school” with these masks on the stuffed animals or dolls.
Treat the masks with care like any other belonging, by hanging them by the door or placing them in a basket for easy access.
Be matter-of-fact about wearing face masks. We may not enjoy the way they feel, but we can get used to it.
Praise your children for washing their hands, not touching their faces, and for wearing their face masks when needed. Tell them, “You are really doing a lot to protect yourself and other people from illness. You are doing a great job!” Mention this now and then, even casually saying, “You really are thinking about your hands and not touching your face. That’s really great!”

Set up the sinks in your house for more frequent hand washing; you can use different soaps to put a little fun into it, and use different attractive hand towels so each family member has their own color.
Download a sign from CDC to pin up by a sink (on handwashing procedures) or by the door (that encourages people to wear masks) to familiarize your children with seeing signs about these topics. You can also draw your own.
Cultivate routines of washing hands when exiting and entering the house and wearing masks in stores or when visiting others in close proximity.
Show your children how to wipe down objects, knobs, and surfaces as regular habits when sitting at a table to eat or entering or leaving a bathroom.
Show your children where to sit with space between themselves and others; you can practice this with dolls or stuffed animals or with family members, using a measuring tape if that works well. If you notice that your child is perturbed, alternate this with big hugs and “Now let’s socially UNdistance!” Snuggle back together to make it enjoyable, like a game.

Developing these good habits will prepare your children to be comfortable with the changes they will experience at school, at social gatherings, and in public settings. These new customs do not need to be enforced with fear or punishment. Instead, help your child make positive associations with these customs by telling them, “You are being SO helpful to other people by wearing your mask!” We want to help children develop a sense of care and love for others, even for people we do not know personally. “Let us in education ever call the attention of children to the hosts of men and women who are hidden from the light of fame, so kindling a love of humanity…[and an appreciation for all human contributions]…we should not need to be reminded that no man can love God while remaining indifferent to his neighbor” (Montessori, To Educate the Human Potential ).

Courage

It is easy to be anxious and tense in this period of incredible uncertainty and unknowns. Montessori classrooms give our children dependable routines, consistent physical environments, choice and freedoms, respect for individuality, and the experience of being part of a cooperative community. Montessori Directors are calm, confident, and smiling adults who reveal many wonders of the world to their students every day. In their classrooms, children are able to concentrate and thereby calm themselves. These repeated experiences help our children to build courage for the unexpected challenges life gives us. At home and outside of school, we can cultivate this courage by focusing our attention on reality.

An obvious choice is to notice the realities and certainties that the natural world provides: We can see the sun emerging in the mornings and setting in the evenings; we can hear the birds singing and observe the leaves on the trees. Using every one of our senses, we can find reassurance in our immediate surroundings. Take a moment to notice “Something I can see, something I can hear, something I can smell, something I can taste…” This is a little meditation that can stabilize you and your children, helping you to find courage when you need it.

Reminding ourselves and our children of enduring love is another practice that gives courage. We can list people we love: “Daddy loves you, I love you, Grandma loves you…” These are facts we can count on right now. Being able to count on a few certainties gives children courage for facing whatever may come.

As we learn about changes in restrictions and guidelines in the coming weeks or months, we can approach what comes with resilience, creativity, and courage. We all may have our moments of wanting to give up! There are many pressures, unanswerable questions, and a level of uncertainty most of us have never lived with before. We really have no choice but to adapt. This necessity gives new meaning to Montessori’s suggestion to “follow the child.” Children are malleable for adapting to their culture, time, and place, and to all the changes that come. Not only will your children adapt, but they will demonstrate the resiliency, creativity, and courage that our world needs.

Supporting Your Child’s Self-Mastery

Wed, 15 Jul 2020 17:11:03 GMT

What is Self-Mastery?

The importance of being in control of ourselves has changed over the last sixty years. Before the 1950s, parents had a basic, unquestionable belief that control over oneself was of the utmost importance. They raised their children with this as a priority. After the 1950s, with the advent of a deeper psychological understanding, parents began to attend more to their children’s emotional lives. They showed more warmth and affection and encouraged self-expression. While there are many positive effects of this shift in focus, it also has had a negative effect. As self-control has dropped in our culture’s priorities, self-mastery has fallen with it.

Dr. Maria Montessori was deeply aware of the importance of self-mastery. She wrote, “We claim that an individual is disciplined when he is master of himself and therefore he is capable of controlling himself when it is necessary to comply with the law of life” (Montessori, 1967, p. 49).

Having self-mastery means being physically and emotionally regulated. It means being able to control desires and urges in order to achieve plans and dreams. It means knowing that we cannot have whatever we want.

Dr. Montessori had incredible self-mastery. While she loved life, family, food, and the world around her, she was not sentimental. She was a scientist, a medical doctor, and an extraordinary observer. She maintained discipline about her work, was humble in the service of children, and submitted herself to exile during the Great War with grace and perseverance. She was a true realist.

People who encounter the graduates of a Montessori program often observe, “They know themselves so well, and they always know how to handle themselves, even in difficult situations.” This is self-mastery. Knowing yourself, knowing your limits, and setting realistic goals—high enough to be worthy, but not so high as to be impossible.

Why Does Self-Mastery Matter?

We must have some degree of self-mastery in order to meet our goals, live within a community, maintain healthy relationships, and care for our children physically and emotionally.

People who never develop self-mastery will eventually fall apart. They may make it through school and even early adulthood, as long as the path in front of them is clear. But when there are serious obstacles, or even simply space for them to have to make their own choices, they will not be able to do the work and reflection necessary to guide their actions. They may act out, or they may collapse. This crisis will look different for every person.

We need self-mastery as a society because this is how we will move forward in a productive way. We need people who are able to make good decisions every day, people who are able to maintain perspective, and people who are able to recognize both the importance and the limits of their place in the world, whatever they may be.

Montessori did not intend to change human nature. She knew that the human spirit did not need to be altered. She was intent on changing attitudes about children so that they could develop to their full innate potential. She believed that every human had essential gifts to offer this world. Self-mastery allows us to use all the gifts we have been given. Every person is entirely new. They have never been before and never will be again. There is one opportunity for each individual self to contribute to the world. This is why self-mastery matters.

The Adult First Masters Himself

We are the model for our child. When we have self-mastery, we reflect this in our actions and words around him or her. Our children see all the small and large ways that someone lives a life of self-mastery. They absorb our mental hygiene, whether it is healthy or unhealthy, and it becomes a part of who they are.

We must know ourselves well enough to know what we need to work on. We had our own parents who gave us their mental hygiene. We all have to deal with the values, beliefs, and behaviors that are basic to us because of our upbringing. We must know our strengths and weaknesses. Self-mastery means that we are able to work with all of who we are. We must know when we need more discipline, and we must know when we need to learn to be flexible. We may need to master disorganization, anger, excessive emotions, neediness, and perfectionism, among others.

Self-mastery does not mean perfection. No human being is perfect, and this is not the goal anyway. We live in an affluent society. Most of us do not endure the question of physical survival on a day to day basis. While this is unquestionably a better way to live, it also means that we will have a tendency to turn to the fallacy of human pride, and assume that we are capable of perfection. Our goal as parents and leaders is to understand the fullness of our personality--our strengths and weaknesses--and to be able to work from there.

After our 20s, we should have the equipment to master ourselves. It can take almost 30 years of life before we have even developed the mental capacity for true mastery. It is a process and for many people, this may require therapy. For others, it takes honest friendships, time for reflection, and an ongoing desire to learn about yourself in the context of the world.

In a marriage, the work is done along with the other spouse. It is how we learn to relate with true intimacy. We grow and develop with this person over the course of many years, and our mastery (along with his or hers) will serve the health of the marriage--because it is what ensures that we are able to cooperate, compromise, and collaborate.

Anyone in a position of influence needs to develop mastery-- whether the influence is small (such as within a family) or large. All great leaders have to learn to control themselves--For example, even George Washington had to learn to control his temper! A leader must be able to stay with a goal. They set an example and are not narcissistic. A leader does not need to be perfect, but without being in control of oneself, they will be unable to rally a group of people towards a larger goal. Prejudices and biases and desires will have too much of an effect on actions and words.

This kind of control is more complicated in today’s world because of the mass influence of technology. We have to master ourselves on so many platforms (interpersonal, social media, email, texting, etc). We can have an influence on others from the privacy of our own living room! All of this produces a larger negative effect on those affected by our influence. Technology has much potential for good. The call is to be vigilant. We must use it wisely and with self-restraint.

How Does the Montessori Curriculum Support Self-Mastery?

Dr. Montessori recognized the importance of self-mastery and created a curriculum and environment that supported it. Her method was revolutionary in its approach to both teacher training and children’s development.

The Teacher Training

The Montessori teacher training program is one of the most rigorous programs in the world. Montessori expected that her teachers would undergo a “transformation” during their training. This takes a long time and requires many hours of observation, practice, and study. During this time, teachers come to self-mastery. She wrote:

"This method [of education] not only produces a reformed school but above all a reformed teacher, whose preparation must be much deeper than the preparation traditionally offered. […The] mission is to be a scientist and a teacher: a teacher in the sense of an observer who respects life, drinking in the manifestations and satiating [the] spirit. Hence it greatly raises the personality of the teacher" (Montessori, 2013a, p. 276).

And also:

"It is not so easy to educate anyone to be a good teacher. It is not enough to study at a university. Perfection is a part of life; in order to achieve it, we must make a long study. Conversion cannot come to everybody. We must patiently try to understand and act on our understanding. Our conversion must be in the heart" (Montessori, 2012, p. 26).

Montessori saw that in order for teachers to support children fully in their development, their first task was their own transformation into self-mastery.

Opportunities for Concentration

A child in a Montessori Young Children's Community chooses sewing workMontessori observed that self-mastery arose when children had the opportunity to concentrate. She wrote:

“Discipline is born when the child concentrates his attention on some object that attracts him and which provides him not only with a useful exercise but with a control of error. Thanks to these exercises, a wonderful integration takes place in the infant soul, as a result of which the child becomes calm, radiantly happy, busy, forgetful of himself and, in consequence, indifferent to prizes or material rewards” (Montessori, 1995, p. 264).

Concentration is the key to self-mastery. This occurs when the body and the brain are working in complete harmony. The brain develops the way it is used. As children have more and more opportunities to concentrate, their brains develop in this integrated, harmonious way, which leads to self-mastery.

This is more than just a theory for Montessori classrooms. It is a practice. When people tour the Young Children’s Community and see one- and two-year-olds exhibiting deep concentration, productivity, and peace, they are in awe. They don’t want to leave the classroom because they cannot believe their eyes!

Independence

In the Montessori classroom, children learn to do for themselves. They take care of the classroom. They learn academic concepts from their own exploration with the materials and not from the teacher. This gives children a sense of competence. Competence and true confidence bring about self-mastery.

Freedom and Responsibility

This is a key of the Montessori environment. Children have appropriate freedoms balanced by responsibility. They may make many choices for themselves, bound by the natural laws of living in a community. They may move freely, but not interfere with another’s work. They may choose which work to do, but they may not choose not to do any work for long periods of time.

Freedoms

Freedom of movement: This is an essential element of self-mastery. How can children learn to discipline their bodies if they do not have freedom to move? They will bump into things, they will drop materials, they will bump into other people, they will walk too fast, and they will stumble. All of these physical experiences will refine their sense of control from the inside. They will enhance their mastery of themselves.

Choices: There are many opportunities to practice making choices. Choices of what to work on, how long to work on it, where to sit, what to study, what to read. Every time children make a choice, they experience what it feels like to live with the consequences of their own actions.

Responsibilities

Community: The responsibility the children have is to operate as productive members of their community. All of their freedoms fall within these boundaries. Living in a community is a natural way to encourage self-mastery. Ultimately, this will allow them to enter society at large independently. The classroom mimics a small community and gives the children plenty of opportunities to experience the natural boundaries of what this means-- not being disruptive, taking care of materials and the classroom, and having ownership of one’s physical body. Here, they will learn, “My rights end where your rights begin.”

What Can You Do at Home?

We lay the foundation for our children now. This process will finish in college and later. Today’s work plants seeds that will not be sown for decades. The same principles that apply in the classroom work for children at home:

Opportunities for Concentration

Practical life activities appeal deeply to young children. They see us engaging in self-care and care of our homes. They want to do this work, and they want to use their whole bodies. We can have real tools available so children can participate in this—a small broom, a small mop, a little sponge, a collection of washcloths in a basket. We can show them how to use the tools (one at a time!), and then give them opportunities to do that work in our homes, usually alongside a parent or caregiver. Remember that young children are not interested in the product. They will use the broom inefficiently, and they may spread water around more than actually cleaning it, and that is fine! A child’s purpose here is not to do it well. That is our purpose. Theirs is simply to do it. If they are doing the work, and they are concentrating, let them be. Over time, they will develop their skills and be able to do the work effectively and successfully.

There are many other prolonged activities we can do with children to support their self-mastery—washing potatoes, cutting apples, baking, washing dishes, polishing silver. All of these activities can be simplified appropriately for children of different ages. See Montessori From the Start by Paula Polk Lillard and Lynn Lillard Jessen for ideas of how to modify activities in the home for children.

The important thing for us is to find activities that we already have to do, and preferably that we also enjoy doing! Someone who does not like cooking can include children in gardening activities, or chores in the yard, if that is a place of enjoyment and relaxation. Children are very sensitive, and they absorb the nuances of our emotions and nonverbal communication that we are not even aware that we are expressing. Of course we have many jobs around the house we don’t want to do, and of course we can find ways to include our children in those jobs. But it is the work that we enjoy doing where our children will understand that work is pleasure.

Independence

Montessori taught us to consider the child as though they were asking, “Help me to do it myself.” This involves all the ways we let our children contribute to their own care and the care of the house. A true sense of competence arises when children see that they can do it on their own. This means that when babies are very little, we can talk to them as we dress them so they know what to expect and they understand that dressing is not something that happens to them. It means that when a baby is making an effort to reach a toy, we do not intervene and hand it over right away. We let the baby struggle a little and eventually work towards doing it independently. It takes observation and patience to time our intervention properly for our children’s benefits. It means that when toddlers are able to walk, we let them walk rather than carry them, whenever the conditions are appropriate. It means that our children have a chance to brush their own teeth before the parent has their “turn.” Independence translates to almost all aspects of self-care for children. We can think about all the things we do for them, and consider the ways we can slow down, show them how to do it themselves first, and give them turns. We do not want our children to develop the idea that we are their personal servants. Seeing that they are able to do it themselves will encourage their independence and give them a sense that they are masters of themselves.

Freedom and responsibility

Just as in the classroom, children’s freedoms at home will be balanced by responsibilities. They may play in the yard, if they don’t run into the street. They may walk in the parking lot, if they hold their caregiver’s hand. They may look at books, as long as they do not tear the pages. These are the boundaries of discipline that are built into everyday life. And here, the goal is to have the appropriate balance of freedom and responsibility. Which means: Do not have more boundaries than are necessary. For example, letting a child climb on a chair and see how it feels to fall is okay as long as no serious injury will occur. Imposing limits so that a child will not be mildly hurt is excessive and takes away the ability to learn for oneself. Similarly, do not allow more freedoms than necessary. Choosing between 10 shirts to wear to school is too many! A young child’s mind can handle two choices, maybe three, and sometimes no choices. This is a shifting balance between freedom and responsibilities or boundaries. It will change depending on a child’s age, their mood, the actual environment, and the schedule on that day. Some of finding this balance will come naturally to us, and our own self-mastery helps us with the parts that do not come easily. It requires observation, and sometimes a great deal of energy to determine what the balance is in any given moment. But it is worth it. Establishing this balance is one of the keys for children to develop their own self-mastery.

Final Thoughts

The ability to attain self-mastery makes us human. Animals do not have this kind of self-awareness, nor the tendency to continue to improve in life. It is a gift and a responsibility that we must attend to. It promises that civilization will continue to develop. It gives us a chance at peace. It grants wisdom and hope to future generations.

Montessori, M. (1967). The discovery of the child. New York: Random House.

Montessori, M. (1995). The absorbent mind. New York: Henry Holt and Company.

Montessori, M. (2012). The 1946 London lectures. Amsterdam: Montessori-Pierson Publishing.

Montessori, M. (2013a). The 1913 Rome lectures. Amsterdam: Montessori-Pierson Publishing.

References

Seek to Understand; Educate for Peace

Wed, 03 Jun 2020 17:23:07 GMT

"We shall walk together on this path of life, for all things are part of the universe and are connected with each other to form one whole unity."

-Maria Montessori

I was standing in our kitchen when our 18-year-old son told me about George Floyd. It is not a moment I will forget. I admit, I am often head-down, plunging into the next task around here. The news—any news—is hard for me to absorb. And this news, of a white policeman senselessly killing a black man, makes me so upset and makes me want to separate myself from the ugliness of racism. But these feelings, however real, do not help produce change in the world.

I am white and have lived a very privileged life. I have been one of those white people who has been afraid to talk about racism. Guilt, embarrassment, and confusion are familiar feelings to me around the subject of race and racism, despite my also very strong conviction, honest goodwill, and deep belief in living a life that respects all human beings. Yet, it is because of my desire to contribute to a just world for all children that I am committed to learning and moving past fears.

I have seen the difference in my own two children. Our 18-year-old son mobilized unhesitatingly to walk in the peaceful protest in Evanston last Sunday, and our 16-year-old daughter was outspoken about the reactions to the events and comments, or lack of, that she witnessed. They are growing up more aware of their surroundings and ways of identifying and discussing racism than my husband or I did. We started them off with core values at home and chose high schools with more diversity than either of us experienced. In their most formative years they attended Montessori school, where children learn to cooperate with others instead of compete, to include one another and collaborate, to be curious and empathetic. With the plasticity of youth, it is natural for children and adolescents to seek to understand the issues of today; they are prepared to put their beliefs into their actions and confident enough to speak up, to listen to others, to self-evaluate.

But more important, we adults also have to change and grow. We will make mistakes and we won’t always get it right, but we can get better. We have to take responsibility for our own selves and for our individual participation.

If you don’t believe that, now is the time to get curious and investigate. Because adults miss out on something great, and we even add to the hurt, whether consciously or not, when we stay mentally fixed. Don’t be someone who thinks they’ve got it all figured out. No one really does, and that’s the truth life constantly teaches us. To be truly compassionate, we have to stay open to hearing others, to really listen, and to seek ways we can support positive change. We have to take action, and that begins with examining ourselves.

Last year, I read a book that deeply moved me, The Sun Does Shine . It is the harrowing account of Anthony Ray Hinton’s 30 years of imprisonment on death row. He had nothing to do with the crime and was nowhere near where it happened. But it was easy to convict him and leave him in jail; he was black and lived in Alabama. He was finally proved to be innocent and freed in 2015. Can you imagine surviving that?! It is a possibility that exists for too many in our world. I was so deeply impacted by this book; the author had invited me into his world and for the first time, I saw a new reality, one I had previously known nothing about. I tried to get everyone around me to read it.

This fall, I listened to Malcom Gladwell read his book Talking to Strangers on audible. It begins with Sandra Bland, a 28-year-old African American woman, originally from Chicago, leaving a job interview in which she had just been hired in Texas. Sandra is followed by a state trooper, who comes so close to her car she changes lanes to allow him to pass. She is pulled over for changing lanes without signaling. The video recorded exchange results in her being pulled from her car and arrested. Sandra hanged herself in a jail cell several days later. This was 2015. True story, and not the only one. How does such a thing happen, Gladwell asks. How does one go from innocently changing lanes and failing to signal, to being in jail? And where did her absolute despair originate? The uncomfortable reality is that for a black woman who is treated without basic respect numerous times over her lifetime and who is living in a society where the expectations for just treatment do not apply to her, the insults accumulate. I cried through it. I couldn’t stop thinking about Sandra Bland. It changed my perspective.

At Montessori conferences in the past few years, the conversation about equity has become ever-present. The Association Montessori Internationale , the American Montessori Society , the International Montessori Council , Montessori For Social Justice , and the Montessori Public Policy Initiative give us particularly good speakers, resources, and education about equity and inclusion for Montessori teachers and administrators. They are asking us to consider how we can make real a world where our children—all of our children—will experience equity. For those in diverse communities or minority communities, the topic often rises quickly to relevance, one way or another. But in communities like Lake Bluff and Lake Forest, we have to make more of an effort to talk about race, equity, and inclusion. Our children cannot always see our beliefs on the topic in action on a daily basis. We need to create productive spaces to discuss these complexities. I have been told very bluntly that NOT talking about things is a mistake—and always a lost opportunity for our children and ourselves. In the absence of a parent talking about equity, children can too easily fill in the blanks with another person’s comment or behavior.

How Can Parents Help Their Children?

Start with good books that depict children with different skin tones, from various backgrounds, who practice different religions and customs, and from other regions of the world. Reading such books with young children familiarizes them with others and gives them the reference and language that you value all people, not just the kinds of people in your own neighborhood. Teach your children that all people matter to you—that there are ways these beliefs are reinforced in our language, actions, and society. And until black and brown and all minority individuals are treated as equal to white people, verbalize your support.

As a teacher, I’ll never forget a six-year-old saying one day to the group in my Montessori Elementary class, “Today, our brothers and sisters in Mexico are celebrating Day of the Dead!” This boy was white, part Italian, and had no literal brothers or sisters in Mexico, but I knew his mother used such terms of endearment with him and his siblings regularly. It was a moment of joyful empathy that all the children recognized easily. It raised their curiosity. It was started simply by a mother using language of kindness and empathy. Whatever comes most naturally to you, start with what you know and feel, and then deliberately share your care for other human beings and their experiences. It can be gradual and it can be gentle. But start. Start wherever you are.

How Can Parents Move Forward?

Here I have shared a bit of the personal journey I am still on. There are also resources to help me, and to help us, learn more. I mentioned just two of the books I found helpful. I encourage you to explore some of the resources below, too. By understanding our own conscious or unconscious biases, we have tools to be stronger parents and allies. Seek to understand. Be brave. Open up to an opportunity for learning and growth.

If this is not the beginning for you but the middle, please share your experiences and resources with other parents. Tell Forest Bluff Directors when you find a good book or resource, and show others what has helped you and your family. Share your questions with us. It’s an honor to walk together with you!

Dr. Montessori showed us that peacefulness comes from children feeling at peace, valued, and respected, inside themselves first, and then as they extend it to others through sincere acts of grace and courtesy. It starts inside you. It starts at home. It starts together.

Below are some resources; please share your own experiences and resources you’ve found, too!

For Adult Readers

Talking to Strangers by Malcom Gladwell
The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row by Anthony Ray Hinton
White Fragility: Why It’s So Hard for White People to Talk about Racism by Robin DiAngelo
Why Are All the Black Kids Sitting Together in the Cafeteria? by Beverly D. Tatum PhD
So You Want to Talk About Race by Ijeoma Oluo
Open Minds to Equity, A Sourcebook for Activities by Nancy Schniedewind and Ellen Davidson

To Read With Children

Young Children

Owen and Mzee: The True Story of a Remarkable Friendship by Isabella Hatkoff, Craig Hatkoff and Dr. Paula Kahumbu, with photographs by Peter Greste

(Even though this is about animals, the metaphor for friendships being possible when we seemingly have little in common on the surface but can help each other in friendship, is a powerful one. This is one of my all-time favorite books for children!)

All Are Welcome Here by Alexandra Penfold and Suzanne Kaufman

Last Stop on Market Street by Matt De La Peña

Peace by Wendy Anderson Halperin

Whoever You Are by Mem Fox, Illustrated by Leslie Staub

We Are Grateful: Otsaliheliga by Traci Sorell, Illustrated by Frane Lessac

5 years old through Elementary ages

I Can Make a Difference, A Treasury to Inspire Our Children by Marian Wright Edelman, Illustrations by Barry Moser

Preaching to the Chickens by Jabari Asim

Shining Star: The Anna May Wong Story by Paula Yoo

That’s Not Fair! Emma Tenayuca’s Struggle for Justice by Carmen Tafolla and Sharyll Tenayuca

Sit-In: How Four Friends Stood Up by Sitting Down by Andrea Davis Pinkney

For ages 12 and up

The Other Wes Moore: One Name, Two Fates by Wes Moore

Born a Crime (Young Adult edition) by Trevor Noah

For many more resources, here are some websites collected by AMI/USA:

Talking Race With Young Children – resource list curated by NPR.
Racial Equity Resource Guide – curated by Michael R. Wenger, with support from the W.K. Kellogg Foundation.
This Book is Anti-Racist – by Tiffany Jewell.
Our Liberation is Bound Together – by Dr. Nicole Evans, Faybra Hemphill, Daisy Han, and Katie Kitchens (Embracing Equity).
Anti-racism resources for white people – document compiled by Sarah Sophie Flicker, Alyssa Klein. Thank you to MPPI for sharing.

The views in this article are not aligned with any political party and are not intended to make a statement against any group, including those fair and forward-thinking policemen and women working hard to protect citizens and uphold the law with equity and justice. Cooperative, peaceful, and honest communication is essential to improve and support necessary reform in our country.

Montessori Classroom Principles Work at Home, Too!

Fri, 15 May 2020 18:03:38 GMT

This past January, many parents attended Forest Bluff School’s Coffee Discussion talk titled, “Living in a Culture of Anxiety: How Montessori Helps.” It feels like ages ago that we gathered in your homes and discussed this topic. So much has changed in our lives! But as I look over my notes, I see that the principles we discussed are still relevant today. Children need time, choice, grace and courtesy/respect, routine, meditative practices, and gratitude/optimism as a part of their daily lives to develop inner calm–perhaps even more than ever! There are great ways to cultivate these themes at home; please revisit them here in light of our current situation.

Time

In Montessori classrooms, children are not rushed; there is an uninterrupted work period all morning long. They can sit with a piece of work and look out the window and contemplate, they can think, they can repeat and try something over and over. They do things that to adults seem like a waste of time, but they are often working through something internal. By not interfering with their processes, Montessori teachers allow children to develop at their own pace, and we see that they develop their ideal pace for themselves. When adults respect this process and work with it rather than imposing their own agenda, children not only learn deeply, but they also learn to follow their own inner direction. There is always more happening than meets the eye.

AT HOME: Set up a work period of roughly three hours for every morning, and protect the space for concentration. Allow your children to dabble as they settle into focusing on something. Some children take time to get started, but may do best if you leave them alone and do your own work. Model for them by “minding your own business”! Children will eventually give up trying to get your attention and start to entertain themselves. As long as their activity is not damaging to anyone or anything, let go of your expectations and leave them be. Set a few simple guidelines, such as cleaning up after themselves before moving on to new work, and not disturbing adults or siblings. Roughly three hours each morning can include self-chosen breaks, refreshment and clean up time.

Choice

When children enter their classrooms, they are allowed to choose their activities from the ones they have been shown. This differs slightly by age group and development:

YCC: One- and two-year-olds may choose from anything they see available. Their concentration cycles are fragile at these ages, so if they begin working with something—anything—the adults try not to interfere, unless the child is handling something destructively and needs to be shown how to do it properly. If they decide to use it destructively again, the adult redirects them to something else or takes it away. The children learn to choose to control their behavior in this simple way, when adults are consistent and confident.

Primary: 3-6 year olds may choose only from what they have been shown by the adult in their classrooms. They have new choices added to their repertoire every week to supply variety.

Elementary: 6-12 year olds have more responsibility to choose a balance of topics. To help them manage their time and choices well, they record their work activities in a journal every day and review it once a week with their teachers to learn to make beneficial choices.

AT HOME: There are many ideas for work choices under the FBS Families tab on the website. Find something from each category and offer the choices to your child. If they are older, they can read the choices themselves and select what they would like to do. Your child’s Director can elaborate on the website suggestion lists in individual phone calls and will make more specific recommendations.

Grace and Courtesy/Respect

In Montessori, we give formal demonstrations on how to extend courtesy to others gracefully. Younger children are eager to mimic such demonstrations, so modeling behaviors is an important part of the Montessori teacher’s role. Grace and Courtesy covers topics such as how we carry a tray with two hands, how we walk slowly past a shelf without bumping it, and how we ask someone to pass an item. With children who are older than six, teachers use humor and reasoning to talk about behaviors and then the children practice them with each other.

AT HOME: You wouldn’t tell your friend what to do, how to do it, quiz them on what they know, or be punitive with them, and these are things adults have to be careful not to do when speaking to children, too. The Montessori approach cloaks us with mutual respect, so that children are invited to join adults as partners in work. When you ask your children to join you in your housework and tasks, you can invite them and then expect them to participate. This may require a “sit down” as family to set the course, but it is worth the initial effort.

A hidden positive in what we are all going through right now is that there is a REAL need. This need is not fabricated in order to teach our children work ethic and consideration for others—it is sincere! While we do not want to overwhelm our children with the full magnitude of what is happening in the world right now, they do witness the solemnity. They are the future, and they are more resilient than we are. They can handle being told that there is no room for distracting behavior right now and that their participation, between the walls of their own homes, is needed, valued and appreciated right now. Model the courtesy you expect from them, and they will follow suit.

Routine

In the classroom, the same schedule is maintained every day. Children know what to expect, and when something is going to happen. This regularity gives them stability and comfort.

AT HOME: Maintaining a daily routine throughout these days at home is tougher for some of us than others. Paula Preschlack, for one, had a hard time the first couple of weeks! But living with a routine is vital for the youngest children especially, and we all benefit. It can help to set reminder notices to alert you to change tasks and when to prepare and eat lunch, for example. You might write up a simple daily schedule to run the dishwasher once a day around the same time, go for a walk every afternoon between 3 and 5, and so on. This routine can be as loose or as strict as you need it to be, but the predictable rhythm is what counts.

Meditative Practices

Time for reflection and meditation is built into the classroom environment. Montessori recognized that engagement with work needed to be balanced with restorative practices in order for children to integrate what they had learned, and also to balance their minds. For the younger children, there is an activity known as “walking on the line” where children walk carefully around an elliptical shape on the floor. These quiet moments allow their bodies and minds to find peace. There also is an activity called “The Silence Game.” Here, the entire class sits in silence together for one minute or even 30 seconds (depending on the group). In this experience, they recognize how silence is something a community creates together when every individual contributes by holding herself or himself still and quiet. Such moments of silence also helps them to notice all the sounds happening around them, such as birds chirping, the wind in the leaves, or a distant lawnmower.

Throughout the classrooms, there are other informal ways of establishing these meditative practices. Children of all ages may choose to observe another child working, but only if they are quiet and do not interrupt. It can be restorative and also inspiring to watch another peer at work, and it allows a child moments of quiet reflection. There is also a spirit of patience in every classroom. Teachers do not rush children at work, and this allows them to be fully present for all aspects of their day.

AT HOME: Meditative practices at home could be simple rituals like lighting candles at meals, reading aloud at the same times of day every day, or walking silently for a few minutes in the woods or down your street to listen to the sounds of nature. Children can also play a game like “look for five things you can see from where you’re sitting, and then we’ll share what we noticed”, they can knead bread dough, or set the table. Even brushing one’s teeth can be meditative if you pay attention to what you are doing and slow down.

Optimism and Gratitude

The best “lesson” for optimism and gratitude is the adult’s own modeling. Montessori teachers aim to exude confidence and calm. They smile, they feel joy, and they express regular thanks. They are mindful of their language and attitude as they embark on their daily activities and talk about the future. Children are so sensitive and they watch adults very closely. One of the greatest gifs we can give our own children is to demonstrate a real sense of optimism and gratitude.

These principles also carry through in the way that lessons are taught in Montessori classrooms. Much of the history and science lessons are taught with the language of sincere gratitude for the human beings who came before us and for the elements of our universe that make survival possible. Similarly, a lesson known as “The Interdependencies Chart” explicitly presents the ways that the natural world, and we humans in it, depend on one another in multiple ways.

The teachers’ interaction with the children’s work cultivates these same themes. If a child has made a mistake, the teacher does not correct him or her directly. They simply notice and demonstrate again, with a quiet but distinct focus on what the child may have missed before. This gives children the confidence to try new things without fear of failure. Repeating efforts to try to improve is a part of the Montessori child’s mindset, for life.

AT HOME: Look for stories in books that generate optimism and gratitude. For elementary-aged children, I recommend The Railway Children and The Treasure Seekers, both by EB Nesbit, and the classics Pollyanna or Little Women. These make terrific read-alouds. We also recommend any biographies about figures who have lived through challenging historical times. For younger children, pick out your favorite books that make you, the reader, feel good! Share those over and over with your young children. And tell your own stories and those of your relatives.

You could also find a daily quote or a reading to share, and encourage your older children to do the same. Younger children can say a word before bed about the day, like “love” or “mommy”, or whatever word makes them think of this day. Prayers of gratitude and random acts of kindness—whether to neighbors, others, or within your own household during the day—go a long way. This is the time for it!

Optimism is born from gratitude! Children are optimistic by nature, but we are wise to feed this nature and cultivate it in ourselves. For adults, the tougher the situation we live through, the deeper the optimism that grows out of it. Dan Baker wrote about this in What Happy People Know, and this is a great time to revisit that book!

You're Developing Calm and Fortitude

We hope that reflecting on these elements of the Montessori approach—time, choice, grace and courtesy/respect, routine, meditative practices and gratitude/optimism—helps you to build the necessary calm and fortitude for you and your children during these times. The routines and connections you’re helping your children create at home will outlast this period of “homeschooling.” Your family will benefit from your current efforts to bring Montessori principles home, for many, many years to come!

The Stories of the Forest: Lichens, Fungi, and Mosses

Fri, 01 May 2020 18:42:16 GMT

How to Use this Post

My wish for you and your family is simply to go outside and exercise your scientific minds through observation. Each and every one of your children is already a scientist! Children are naturally curious observers, and the best nature walks are the ones in which I take a backseat and follow their trail.

The information provided in the following sections on lichens, fungi, and mosses is designed to be a quick reference or “mini-lesson” to generate interest. Choose just one topic each day (lichens, fungi, or mosses) and focus on that. Then, perhaps, the next day, or later that week, you can choose another and go on a walk focusing on that one! If I were to gather a group of children to talk about lichens, for example, I would weave together a short story using some of the terms and concepts included in my description. The younger the children, the shorter the story! You can always add more information in a later story if you decide to continue with the work. Then I would encourage further exploration with the suggested age-appropriate activities in the bulleted lists.

"The Stories of the Forest"

Many years ago, I read a book titled The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature by David George Haskell. The concept for this book has stayed with me because Haskell’s experimental design is powerfully simple. Every day for an entire calendar year, Haskell visited and studied a square meter plot of old growth forest in Tennessee and watched it transform. The motivation behind this project was imaginative: Haskell wanted to “tell the stories of the forest."

At the moment, we find ourselves limited to our backyards and nearby parks for exploring botany and zoology. Luckily, Haskell’s book is a beautiful and timely reminder that you do not have to venture far to enjoy, interact with, or study nature! All you need is a small plot of land.

The Power of Scientific Observation

Each chapter of Haskell’s book begins with a simple observation, one that we might not consider to carry much weight: “a slug meanders by," for example. Haskell masterfully uses his observations as a window into broader topics in biology and ecology. For example, what role do slugs play in the larger forest community? How do they facilitate decomposition and what would happen if that slug disappeared from the ecosystem? If we take a page from Haskell’s book, perhaps we, too, can open that window, and what better time to observe nature closely then when the plant and animal kingdoms are waking up with the arrival of spring?

Historic naturalists would spend hours outside with a notebook and a pencil, simply observing and writing. In fact, their published scientific papers would be pages and pages of those notes, often presented as a stream of consciousness. The scientific community has gotten away from that method in favor of a much more standardized approach (the famed scientific method), but those initial observations are the foundation of all science. Your child may be inspired to sit outside and write down everything they see in a notebook like the early naturalists!

As many scientists across space and time have noted, often the things that are inconspicuous in nature are the ones making the most impact on the ecosystem. Haskell certainly championed the less charismatic organisms on the forest floor. So today, I’d like to explore organisms that are very often overlooked: lichens, fungi, and mosses.

Lichens

Lichens are models of true partnership in nature. Although they present as one, unified entity, lichens are actually composed of two different organisms living in the same house, so to speak. And here is the most fascinating part: they are technically neither plant nor animal as a result. One part algae, one part fungus, lichens are systems of cooperating organisms and therefore excellent examples of symbiosis in nature.

Each part of the lichen depends on the other for survival. The fungal component, or mycobiont , cannot make its own food. Instead, its purpose is to determine the form or structure of the lichen. The algal component, or photobiont , captures energy from the sun and turns it into food for both itself and the fungus in a process called photosynthesis.

Depending on the type of fungus in the partnership, lichens take on many different forms. For ease of classification, they have been grouped into three general categories: crustose, foliose , and fruticose . Crustose lichens look exactly as they sound, like a crust on a surface. Foliose lichens resemble leaves and are often lobed. Finally, fruticose lichens have a branching and shrubby appearance.

Lichen can survive in almost every region of our planet, no matter how harsh the environment. In fact, there are approximately 400 species of lichen growing in Antarctica (compared to only two species of flowering plants!). They respond most strongly to moisture availability and their presence is an indicator of ecosystem health.

Young Children’s Community and Primary:

On every nature walk with young children, my objective is to reinforce language and fix specific terms. YCC children can learn the word “lichen” if you encounter one, while primary children may be capable of learning to identify it as either crustose, foliose, or fruticose.
Perhaps you might collect one specimen and create a “nature table” in your home. A nature table is a tray or basket of items collected from nature that rotate with the seasons. Having one displayed in your home is a beautiful way to connect your family to the outdoors and it also serves as a visual reminder that it’s time to get outside and switch out the specimens! As with any collection, it is important to only take one of each type of organism so that we protect them.

Elementary:

Go on a lichen hunt. Can you find all three types of lichen? Bring a photo of each type if that helps. Truth be told, fruticose are much harder to find, but I have never known an Elementary child to shy away from a challenge!
Look for patterns in lichen growth. Do they grow on rocks? On wood? Where exactly on those surfaces do you notice lichen most often? On the underside? Near the top? Can you speculate about how much light they receive in those locations?
Interestingly, lichens have a long history of use as natural dyes. Many crustose lichens are brilliant oranges, reds, and purples. What other materials in nature could be used to dye fabric? If possible, could you make a natural dye?

Fungi

Fungi take on many forms, but mushrooms are likely the most familiar to us. As nature’s most effective recyclers and decomposers, we would be lost without them, buried under miles of dead leaves and logs. Over the years, scientists have struggled to classify fungi because their characteristics are somewhat intermediate between plants and animals. Today, fungus is considered to be more closely related to animals.

If you were to go on a mushroom hunt, you might encounter a variety of types. For example, some have a distinct cap, others look like oysters and are aptly named “oyster mushrooms.” My caution to everyone searching for mushrooms is to look and not touch. While most mushrooms you encounter in nature will be perfectly harmless, some are poisonous, and it is best to err on the side of caution.

Young Children’s Community and Primary:

Incorporate mushrooms from the grocery store into an upcoming meal and have your child prepare them. As they do, name the parts together (cap, gills, and stalk; see the Illinois Mushroom guide below).
Go on a mushroom hunt! Do you see the cap, gills, and stalk?

Elementary:

Where do different kinds of mushrooms come from? Can you map the economic geography of mushrooms? Where do we get Portobello mushrooms, for example?
Truffle hunting is an activity involving dogs, and more famously, pigs! In fact, the ancient Babylonians and Sumerians searched for truffles. Throughout the course of history, truffles were a delicacy often reserved for royalty and the aristocracy. Consider exploring the history of truffle hunting!
Yeast, another category of fungus, is a crucial component of bread. Try baking bread from scratch using yeast! What effect did the yeast have on the dough?
How does decomposition work?

Mosses

Early mosses were some of the first colonizers to survive on land when life transitioned out of the water. Therefore, mosses are incredibly primitive plants and have been living on Earth for millions of years. They lack flowers, fruits, seeds and roots, which means they have a unique life cycle.

In the same way that butterflies and toads have two phases of their life cycle, mosses also have two distinct phases. The first is the gametophyte, more simply the green, leafy structure you often see, and the second is the sporophyte, which are tiny structures that emerge from the gametophyte. At the end of the sporophyte is a capsule, which will burst open to release a cloud of microscopic spores. The spores are the equivalent to seeds and will go on to create new moss.

Young Children’s Community and Primary:

There are many opportunities for sensory exploration with moss. Moss is often described as “carpeting the forest floor.” Encourage your children to feel moss with their hands and look closely. If you have a handheld magnifying glass, this is the perfect opportunity!
Can you see the sporophyte?
One of my favorite activities is making a terrarium and mosses are very often included!

Elementary:

Explore and diagram the life cycle of these ancient organisms
Our Kingdom Vegetalia material in the classroom is not exhaustive on purpose. Can you create a tree of classification for the mosses (i.e., Phylum Bryophyta)? Not far removed from mosses are the hornworts and liverworts. What makes them unique?

Field Guides

Lichens Field Guide (PDF)

Illinois Mushrooms (PDF)

Mosses and Liverworts of the Chicago Region (PDF)

Glossary

Lichen

Crustose: lichen growth form; flat with a “crusty” appearance; often red, yellow, or orange
Foliose: lichen growth form; resembling leaves; often lobed
Fruticose: lichen growth form; upright, branched, and “shrubby”
Mycobiont: fungal component of lichen (Greek, mykēs, “fungus,” and bios, “life”)
Photobiont: photosynthetic component of lichen (e.g., algae) (Greek, photo-, “light,” and bios, “life”)
Photosynthesis: the process by which plants convert the sun’s energy into food.
Symbiosis: long term association between organisms of different species. These relationships can be mutualistic (both benefit), commensal (one benefits and the other is unphased), or parasitic (one benefits, the other suffers)

Fungus

Cap: the top of the mushroom; resembles an umbrella
Gills: papery slits on the underside of the mushroom cap
Stalk: stem of the mushroom

Moss

Gametophyte: leafy stage of moss
Spores: the equivalent of seeds in moss
Sporophyte: thin shoot that emerges from the gametophyte and releases spores.
Terrarium: a glass container filled with moss, air plants, succulents, pebbles, etc. (essentially a mini ecosystem)

Through Darkness to the Light: Hope for All Children’s Future

Sun, 12 Apr 2020 18:51:14 GMT

I can honestly say that my heart has never felt more filled with wonder at this world or gratitude for human life within it. As I took my dogs out at 6 o’clock this morning, my first sight was of the full moon, still completely visible through the tree’s bare branches beyond the pond and pasture. When I turned east back toward the house, the brilliant red beams of the rising sun were just peeking through the tree limbs to the east; the moon and the sun at once! A glorious sight I had never seen at our house before. Then I received an image on my iPhone sent by my doctor son-in-law of the Virginia countryside by his home. He had taken it with his drone. Human ingenuity throughout the ages has brought us such wonder! Scientists around the globe, working together to defeat a common enemy to our health; inventions that boggle the mind, owned and operated by individual citizens; and the beauty of the earth that out of the darkness of winter each year brings us the light of spring in all its glory. Truly we are the most blessed of all the peoples who yet have lived!

True, right now we are facing an enormous challenge, one that seemingly arrived out of nowhere, COVID19, a shock to our daily existence; all turned upside down in a nanosecond. Here is how a young mother explained to me what parents are experiencing:

There is fear and anxiety. People are coming to terms with the idea that school might not be back in session until September. They feel overwhelmed by how to carry on their children’s academics. They are anxious about getting their own work done. And there is a general fear—that the world might be falling apart, that we brought these children to the earth, and now the unknowns of its future are right in front of us. It’s unsettling not to have our usual routines and sources of comfort.

And I think most people realize that they have to manage their own emotions because the home is a small space, and we don’t want to overflow on our children. Everyone is doing their best, but everyone is tired, too. My husband, now working from home and not at all prone to anxiety, said, “I am so much more tired than I should be for what I have done each day. It shows how much all this is weighing on my subconscious.” It is telling that he is carrying this, too.

And so we are for the near future in a time of great darkness. How do we get back to the light, to the hope and joy of the lives that we had been living? It brings to mind my father, and one of my earliest memories. He is sitting in his big armchair, home all day now in the Great Depression of the 1930s, reading and writing, a tension about him, thinking and looking distant. By the time I was six years old, I understood that he was not only worried about my brother, mother, and me. The responsibility for the families of the thirty employees in his small machine tool shop in Dayton, Ohio, weighed heavily on his mind, too.

I remember too from this time, my beloved brother, a year and a half older than I, sneaking out of his bedroom in his pajamas, and racing through the snow, barefooted, to his friend’s house next door. I knew this was terribly wrong of him because he had been put to bed with a sore throat, but I did not tell my mother. It was not long, however, before my anxious mother was returning home with him in tow, the memory made vivid for me because he got hot lemonade as medicine and I did not! In those days, before penicillin, antibiotics, and vaccines for childhood diseases, every cold, sore throat, and stomach ache was treated with the strictest bed rest. In spite of my mother’s vigilance—healthy diet, precise sleep and rest schedule, daily outdoor exercise and play—I spent days of quarantine at home for measles, mumps, whooping cough, and scarlet fever, mostly because of my brother who seemed to catch everything while I managed only to have chickenpox.

There were other periods of quarantine, too, and they were more frightening. When I was in the fifth grade, my whole class was quarantined for weeks. One of our classmates, who had appeared well and healthy when we were last with her in the afternoon, died that same night in the hospital from meningitis, a period of nine hours from onset to death. Both saddened and frightened, we talked on the phone with each other, and described the dreams we were having that she came alive again in some form that we could see, half believing that they could be true. After the weeks of quarantine were over, her mother invited us to a memorial “birthday party” for her where we were asked to sing Happy Birthday before an urn of her ashes. Even as a child, I knew that what we were doing—what for us as children was a bizarre event—was meant to console this mother in her anguish for her only daughter.

The health threat that frightened us most, however, was polio. During an epidemic, there were whole summers of closed swimming pools, movie theaters, camps, and parks—and no friends to play with. We were frightened by the risk of paralysis and being put in an iron lung, trapped and immobile.

And then one day, there was a new fear. I was at the riding stable when an older friend’s mother arrived with the news that bombs had been dropped on Pearl Harbor. At home that night, and throughout World War II, we listened to the radio, following the news of defeats and victories, bombings and devastation.

I also remember my dad, a 5’2” bundle of energy and purpose, striding down the hallway at 6 o’clock in the mornings to wake my brother and me, singing the words of a hymn from his childhood, “Awake for the dawn is breaking….” Then he was off and out the driveway to his factory and its, by now, hundreds of employees.

Close to the war’s end, I remember the ceremony when my father and his factory’s workers were given the Army/Navy E Award for supplying “precision aire” gauges for measuring airplane parts (to the thousandths of an inch for the first time in history) and a vital contribution to the Allied victories in Europe and eventually Japan. In 1947, my father took us along with him on a business trip to Europe that included a visit to English friends of our family. They had children the same ages as my brother and me. Sharing meals with them, we experienced how little food they had—and of what poor quality—even now two years after the war was over. We listened to their stories of the London bombings, and witnessed the devastation for ourselves as we drove through streets still piled high with rubble and the remains of demolished buildings. Just now I have finished a book about Great Britain in the first years of the war entitled The Splendid and the Vile by Erik Larson. I recommend it as an inspiring read in this moment of challenge in our own times.

By now, I was sixteen years old, and had spent the whole of my childhood and early adulthood in an economic depression, a war, and the aftermath of the war. The fear and darkness of our present time have called up these few memories of sadness and anxiety from my youth. But they are not truly representative of what occupies my mind today when I think of my childhood. It is memories of the light in life that are the strongest ones, and most often in my mind. I am reminded that we make a decision in every moment of what we choose to let our minds dwell on. In the words of the psychologist, Dan Baker, “We don’t describe the world we see. We see the world we describe.”

If we want to have happy lives, it is important to remember this truth and so I want to mention what I think of first when I remember my childhood. It is the games that my brother and I played indoors and out: cards all over the living room floor, depicting airplanes or routes for cars to follow through; Tinker Toy and Lincoln Log constructions; wooden bird houses made with the jigsaw, hammer, and nails; and paint in our basement workshop. Outside we dammed up the streams in the woods by our house with mud, leaves, and stones to make “lakes” for rafts and boats of sticks and “villages” of rocks, peopled with imaginary characters who had adventures of all kinds. We built tree houses in trees on a hill by our house, read books there, drew and sketched the landscape, and “spied” on the activities of the adults below us. All was exploration, imagination, and earnest activity of the kind that children thrive on. I don’t remember the adults being present at any such time, but perhaps they were watching from afar.

I do remember my mother reading to us every day, though: Bible stories, Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, Treasure Island and other classics, books about heroes of all kinds, and a series about young boys and girls surviving through hardship. I remember that my favorite of the latter was entitled Rough and Ready. My mother also told us stories of her own childhood—one of hardship—but nevertheless one that had a happy ending, as we could see for ourselves that she was happy in her love for our father and for ourselves.

One of my mother’s stories had a lasting impression on me. She told me the story she’d been told about my grandmother giving birth to her, her first child, all by herself, while my grandfather rushed from their farmhouse through the night with his horse and buggy to fetch the doctor some miles away.

(When later I asked my grandmother how she managed what seemed so frightening to me, as a child who thought she wanted twelve—yes TWELVE—children of her own when she grew up, my grandmother said in these exact words, “I always figured that I could do whatever my mother had done.”)

I have said that my mother described her life as one of hardship. That was, in part, because her early life was filled with the hard work of a farm household in those days: washing, drying, making and mending clothes, cleaning, sweeping and scrubbing floors, cooking, baking, canning and preparing food, growing vegetables, milking cows, and tending to chickens.

Mother even had picked cotton in the fields of Oklahoma for a year. Grandfather took the family there because his sister claimed to be having success drilling for oil. After a few years of no oil, and, I am certain, harassing by my grandmother (she was a strong person), the family returned to Ohio and my grandfather went to work for the National Cash Register Co. (NCR). Every spring he would talk about the crops in the farms outside Dayton and how high the corn was growing. Once I asked him if he missed his farming days. He said in a wistful voice, “It was never the same after we started using tractors.” Clearly, he and his horse, ploughing the fields together in solitude and quiet, had been important to him.

These are real events of the past that happened during my childhood, but events in themselves are not the lasting part of anyone’s life. It is the intangibles that accompany events that are lasting. It is the intangibles of life—love, courage, optimism, a sense of freedom—that see us through life’s challenges and give us a glimpse of a deeper level of reality than we can ever fully comprehend or articulate. It is these intangibles that my parents managed to make real for my brother and me as children. Somehow in our home there was always a prevailing mood of energy and confidence, a feeling of “We can do this.” The result was that we were not afraid to grow up. The world to us appeared as an exciting place, full of possibilities. We felt, too, that we had a part to play in it that was ours alone, with its own tasks and challenges to face. I think that my parents accomplished this solid base for us in our childhood by recognizing that adults cannot give any quality or knowledge to children directly, trying to shove it into the mind and soul from the outside.

Churchill said it best when he was praised for giving the British people courage in the first year of World War II. He replied that he had not given them courage. Rather, he had helped them to find their own courage, implying that it was there all the time, waiting for them to discover it.

So it is for all of us as parents—and teachers, too—to understand that our role is to help our children discover within themselves their God-given gifts of the human intellect and spirit, their curiosity and thirst for knowledge about the world, their ability to love and forgive others (as well as themselves), and above all, and especially in the darkest of times, to rouse the courage and optimism within them. You are bringing these intangibles—this deeper level of reality—into your homes for yourselves and your children in these times of significant stress: by not expecting too much of yourselves or others, including your own children; creating homes where kindness and patience prevail; and where appreciation for our lives and the lives of others is expressed by word and action.

As the American philosopher and psychologist William James (who had much influence on Maria Montessori) has written, “The deepest principle of human nature is the craving to be appreciated.” I feel this deep appreciation for each of you as parents who are helping us to build a school community worthy of the children entrusted to us at Forest Bluff. I am also filled with admiration and appreciation for all of those who in this most trying time are showing the greatest possible dedication, energy, and ingenuity in meeting the needs of our special community: our Forest Bluff Directors, Head of School, other members of our leadership team, classroom assistants, and our office and maintenance personnel (Cindy, Trish, and Steve). And to our children, my appreciation and love know no bounds. Just as Montessori said, you are truly “the hope and promise of humankind.”

Let us use this present opportunity to spend our time and energies in devotion to our children, helping them to understand that life expects much of each of us but that with God’s help, we have the courage to meet its ongoing challenges. In these most difficult times, the intangibles within us enable us to grow in the knowledge and love of our world and human life within it, and thus travel through darkness into the Light.

God bless you and your children, and know you are in my prayers and are part of my heart forever.

Putting on My “Montessori Teacher” Hat

Mon, 06 Apr 2020 19:57:49 GMT

Parents across the country were given a new job this month, with no warning and no training. Because of nationwide school closings, home school is now a reality for families. This has been jarring, upsetting, confusing, and overwhelming for many households. Parents with no plans to enter the educational field now feel responsible for their children’s school experience. Even I, a Montessori trained teacher with three years of experience in the classroom, never had this job in mind. In fact, two months ago, I said, verbatim, “The only way my children would ever be homeschooled is if someone else homeschooled them.”

Obviously, the universe had other plans.

What I have to my advantage right now are my Montessori trainings and my classroom experience. But what may be unexpected for most people is that I am not using this experience to help me teach my children. I’ve said it before, and I’ll say it again, I am not worried about their academics. If they want to do a research paper on black holes, then that is their business, but if they want to do puzzles, write stories, bake, and read, then I am happy with that.

What my Montessori teaching experience has given me is a way to conduct myself and manage my children during our “home school” mornings. (I put the home school in quotations, because my seven-year-old recently referred to it as “fake school,” and I couldn’t find a reason to argue with her). For most of my children’s lives, I’ve worn a “Mom” hat. But, in order for our mornings to go (somewhat) smoothly, I’ve need to put on my “Montessori teacher” hat. And while, on the one hand, I am always myself with them, this hat reminds me of some practices I can engage in order to help our mornings feel productive and peaceful for all.

So, what happens when I wear a Montessori teacher hat? What behaviors and expectations do I utilize?

Montessori Teacher Practices

Prepare the Environment

One of the first things we learn to do in the Montessori training is to prepare our children’s environment. At school, this means organizing the materials on low shelves; having paper, pencils, and other supplies available where children can reach them; and generally creating a room where the children can function independently without a lot of extra support from their teachers. At home, this looks a little different, but many of the principles remain the same.

Look around your home and do your best to make it a place where your children can work independently. Put their work, toys, supplies, and snacks within their reach. Put up the materials and food that you do not want them getting into. Make sure they know where everything they need is. Reduce the activities available to an appropriate number for your child so that they aren’t overwhelmed, and so that they can clean up mostly on their own. Every home environment will look different according to your own family and needs, but your goal is to promote independence and positive choices by reducing obstacles and distracting activities. (See an earlier blog post about helping children develop concentration at home )

Observe

Another basic tenet of the Montessori training is observation. Observation is an integral part of the Montessori method. Maria Montessori herself was a trained medical doctor, and used the scientific approach in all of her work. To truly observe is to watch what your children are doing without emotion or biases.

When you can utilize this skill in observation, you can come to a better understanding of why something is happening, what your child might need, or what needs to happen next. In our Montessori training, we are taught that the first thing we need to do when we encounter a problem in the classroom is to observe. This means that we take notes, physically or mentally, and we watch how it unfolds. What seems to precede it? Is this child truly frustrated or are they just struggling and are about to figure this out? Does this tend to happen at a certain time of day? Does this tend to happen in a certain area in their environment?

Earlier today, a parent asked me about a home school activity--she wanted to know if it was appropriate for the morning’s work. My first response to her was: Observe. How do they act while they are doing it? Do they clean it up on their own after? How do they act afterwards? Are they calm and content? Can they make their own choices about what to do next?

We can answer so many answers on our own, if we give our mind the time and space to see our children for who they really are and what is really going on for them at any given moment. By using observation, our children themselves can tell us what is working and what we might try next.

Connect, Not Teach

Even in the Montessori environment, teachers do not think of themselves as “teaching” concepts. We connect the children to the materials, and the children teach themselves through the materials. There is a famous story in Montessori where someone asked a six-year-old, “Who taught you to read?” She answered, “I taught myself, of course!”

The world teaches our children much better than we can. Our children teach themselves much better than we can. It is not our job as parents to teach our children, even at home school. Human beings are born with amazing intrinsic motivation for work and acquisition for knowledge. How else would we have created civilization, if not with an inborn desire for this? I do not need to convince or force them to learn. I just need to find a way to light their inner flame.

Given this trust I have in their own inner drives, I look for ways to connect my children to activities, rather than teaching or forcing. For my five-year-old, it has helped when I have done an activity in front of her. “Do you want to watch me write a story?” I asked her. Then I wrote a simple story very slowly in front of her: “The dog went out. He barked at a man. I picked him up.” I read it out loud to myself, smiled in a satisfied way, and drew a simple picture to go with the story. Before I even stood up, she was hustling to the paper cabinet to make her own story.

I take a similar approach for my seven-year-old. I do not want to be heavy-handed, or I will take over the ownership of her education. “I wonder how many houses on our block are blue,” I said to her. “I wonder how many are white. I wonder what the most popular color is. Do you know what a survey is?” I asked her. In this case, she did know, and she eagerly set off for an independent walk around the block, where she recorded house colors and took note of how many of each color she spotted.

We marveled at her results and then I said, “It is sort of hard to see what the most popular colors are. Do you know what a bar graph is?” I started to show her, and she hastily took over the paper. “I’ve seen people in my class doing that,” she said. And she completed it on her own.

Sometimes my musings and examples do not go as well. Sometimes my children want to grumble and do nothing. But if they are going to get excited about work on their own, it is always because I found a subtle way to inspire them by means of curiosity or example. It never comes from my demands or instruction. Connecting them to their world remains our best avenue for productive activity.

Speak With Authority

This is as simple as “say it like you mean it,” but it is surprisingly hard. It took me most of my first year as a teacher to learn how to speak directly and firmly to the children. By my nature, I prefer to be in conversation with people. I prefer reading how they are interpreting what I am saying, checking in on how they feel, and seeking approval. All of this is adaptive and positive for my relationships with adults, but with children it weakened their confidence in me. Every time I made a statement in the form of a question, or said “Okay?” at the end of a request, I eroded my authority.

While it is true that we are equals in dignity and humanity, it also is true that I am older and wiser. And while I want to show my children respect and kindness, I also want them to feel secure knowing that I am the adult so that they can be the children. They have confidence when I have confidence. I can say to them, “No, we aren’t going outside right now.” And then, “I don’t have time to talk about the reason now, but I can tell you later if you ask me.” They may resist and grumble, but ultimately, and through my consistency, they learn that they can trust me to make good decisions for our family.

I do not, of course, always talk like this to my children. We are often in conversation, making suggestions, asking questions, and making decisions. But I have this voice to fall back on when I need to make my point. My grandmother Paula Polk Lillard calls this “the unapologetic no.” It’s the way you say “No” when you know that you are in charge, and you are capable of making the best possible decisions for everyone involved. When you believe, they can believe too.

Freedom and Responsibility

Many people think of Montessori as, “That school where children can do whatever they want.” This is both true and not true. Children have the freedom to make positive and productive choices of work. They have the freedom to have time to reflect. They do not, however, have the freedom to be destructive, distracting, or disruptive. And they do not have the freedom to avoid work for extended periods of time. A child’s freedom expands and contracts along with their capacity for responsibility on a given day.

I use the same principles in our home. When my children are capable of responsibility and self-regulation, they have more freedom, as well as the privileges that go along with that freedom. They may make their own work choices in the morning, they may go on a walk around the block without me, they may listen to audiobooks in the afternoon, and they may explore baking in the kitchen.

When I see that they are having trouble directing themselves and being responsible, their freedom shrinks, and, in those moments, I lend them my discipline. I invite them to do their work next to me. I give them two choices of activities, in the hopes that making one limited choice and then having the positive experience of that work will help to regulate them. As I see their responsibility growing, their freedom increases. And, if today is a day when they need to borrow my discipline, then I will keep them close to me, and limit their choices for the time being. Tomorrow is another day!

Final Thoughts

None of this is magic. None of this is easy. None of this works every time. And there are some days when it feels like nothing works. There are some days when I have to excuse myself to the bathroom and cry. There are some days where I don’t make it to the bathroom before I start crying, and all we do is run around outside and listen to audiobooks and try to be kind to each other even though it is hard.

None of us were prepared for this. Parents, teachers, children, doctors, nurses, and the hundreds of other jobs that have changed suddenly with these extraordinary times. But human beings are extraordinary, too. We are going to learn things about ourselves, our neighbors, and our families that we never imagined. We will wear many hats during this time, and even while we struggle with the worst in ourselves, we will also find the best. This is a time for patience, kindness, and letting our hearts open to the possibilities inside of ourselves and the world.

Creating Security at Home: Self-Care and Finding Your Rhythm

Wed, 01 Apr 2020 20:24:38 GMT

This is not easy. It is not easy for anyone. The governor of Illinois, and governors across the country, have called for a “stay at home” order, whereby families and individuals need to stay at home except for essential errands. Schools, state parks, playgrounds, and non-essential businesses are closed. Social gatherings of any kind are prohibited. This is not a time to be thinking about being productive, scheduled, or perfect. There is no right way to do “this.” In fact, the harder you try to do it right, the more likely you are to burn yourself out emotionally and physically. You are home with your small children. They are not going to school (or anywhere, really), and the world feels like an uncertain place.

Now is the time for grace. Grace for others and for yourself. It is the time for compassion, flexibility, and kindness. We do not know when life will return to normal again, or what exactly that normal will look like. The way we care for our families, our days, and ourselves needs to be sustainable. It will require effort over an extended period of time.

In this spirit, it is important to be intentional now about our own self-care and the rhythm of our days at home. By keeping these thoughts at the front of our minds, we can work to maintain energy and optimism during these trying times.

Self-Care

In my experience, good parenting requires taking advantage of the self-care we have available to us at any given time. In this indefinite period of isolation, we do not have our usual options and support for doing this. Social distancing has drastically affected our day-to-day experiences. We need to think creatively and graciously about what we actually can do, given these constraints. Simplification and self-compassion will come before all of our usual self-care habits.

Everyone’s recipe for self-care is going to look different, but some common ingredients are: Exercise, the outdoors, good food, reflection, and connection with family and friends. If we have time to take advantage of all of these in one day, then that is wonderful! But even if we only have time for one, or a part of one, it still will make a difference in our overall well-being. We can try writing a list of things we can do for ourselves and then be intentional about doing at least one per day. We can carve out a moment in the morning before little ones are out of bed, or set aside time during nap or rest time. We can swap with our spouses, even just for 20 minutes, so we each get time to do what we need to do to fill ourselves up. I find it helps if I put my exercise clothes on when I first wake up so that I can take advantage of the first 20 minutes of relief I get in a day to stretch or workout.

Now is not the time to feel guilty about doing what is necessary to care for our emotional well-being. We can take a break from the news for a day or two, go on a walk while our spouses help our children with breakfast, take a nap while our children do the nap, and set up a time when we are “unavailable” while we call a good friend. Our children did not need us for 24 hours a day before we all got stuck at home, and they do not need us for 24 hours a day now either! Of course, the younger they are, the more supervision and attention they require, but now is a time to work towards just a little more independence than whatever we have now. Those extra minutes that they occupy themselves are all precious and okay to enjoy!

Our self-care provides a source of energy for our well-being. Our well-being matters. Children, especially the youngest children, are barometers for our own emotional state. Perhaps because they are still emerging from a non-verbal state, they are so sensitive to all of our physical and physiological cues. This means that our tension and our anxiety both become a part of our children’s immediate environment. Whatever steps we can take to defuse that is beneficial to our whole household, and this is the crux of self-care.

None of this is to say that it is not okay to show your child that you are sad or scared. These are normal parts of the whole human experience! It is okay to cry, to be anxious, and to lose your temper. The important part is that you recover from these states and show your child that you have regained your equilibrium with your words and your actions. A healthy self-care routine will allow you to stabilize more readily, which is good for your children, as well as your own mental state.

Note: The rest of this post is written with parents of young children in mind, but parents with children of all ages may find it useful, or at least interesting!

Finding a Rhythm

When I think about being home with the youngest children, I like to use the word “rhythm” rather than “schedule.” I think that an over-emphasis on a schedule can create stress and a feeling of failing whenever I do not meet the exact times and goals that I set out for myself. With endless time stretched out before us, our goal can be to settle into a rhythm that meets the needs of everyone in the household, and is developmentally appropriate for our youngest children.

The rhythm that we find is not entirely adult-directed, nor is it entirely child-directed. Maria Montessori said, “Follow the child,” and to this end, we can consider what we know about our children’s pace, capability, and needs as we sort out how to make the most of our days. As we experiment with Practical Life work, art projects, building games, and going outside, we may find that there are different times of the day when children are more receptive to activities than others. Perhaps the morning invites more time for independence as they are most rested from a night of sleep. And perhaps the afternoon is the best time for going outdoors, as their bodies are yearning for fresh air and big movement near the end of the day.

If children are resisting the same thing every day, we can step back and consider a way to work around it. Maybe they need time looking at books before they participate in cleaning the kitchen. Maybe they want to start by doing work with their parent’s attention, and then have their parent disappear into the background as their own interest and work ethic takes over.

I recently spoke to the mother of two young children about how she is (loosely) structuring during days under social-distancing. No routine is prescriptive for every family, so this is merely meant as a suggestion. Every family needs to establish their own routine based on their individual family’s needs. She told me:

"In the morning, my children (ages 2 and 4), wake up and read books in bed. They join me downstairs when they are ready for breakfast. We eat breakfast slowly, talking and telling stories. Afterwards, one will usually help me clean up while the other plays under my feet. They help for as long as they are interested. Once the kitchen is clean, we usually start on a baking or cooking project together, which I invite them to but do not require. They help with the parts they can, and then one might drift off to find something else to do. After our project is over, we either read books together or go for a walk. We have lunch around the same time every day, and then it’s nap and quiet time. After quiet time, we have a snack together, and then we go outside if we haven’t done that already. When we are ready to come in, they usually will want to play with their blocks and animals, or else we set up some opportunities for artwork—painting, drawing, gluing—or Practical Life. If it’s nice, we may even go back outside! Then it’s time for dinner, which I have either prepped in the morning with them, or I invite them to help me prepare now. If they are tired and having trouble being independent, now can be a good time for music or a simple audiobook. Or else I can set them up at the sink with water and dishes. They are always happy when water is involved! We have dinner together, a prolonged bathtime, and then it’s time for pajamas and bed."

A routine may look something like this, and it may look nothing like this, and that is okay! The purpose in sharing this is to give a sense of how to structure a rhythm that has flexibility built into it, rather than a schedule that makes a parent feel bound to it.

Trouble-Shooting

On any day there will be plenty of ups and downs! Children may fight with each other, resist naps and quiet time, resist activities, encroach on parents’ work and self-care time, and generally act like young children. There is no solution that will work for every child every time, but here are some ideas for when these arise:

Siblings Fighting

Solutions for this problem vary greatly depending on the ages and personalities of the children involved. The first and most important step is accepting that siblings arguing is normal and good! They are learning that other people have needs, they are learning that they cannot have everything they want, they are learning how to communicate, and they are learning how to argue and make up. Just because they are fighting, does not mean something is wrong! Once we can acknowledge that fighting is normal, we can ask whether their disagreements are something that is a problem for them, or are they just a problem for us! I used to respond to my children’s fighting with a hair trigger nerve. I hate conflict! And I felt like it needed to be resolved. But once I could take a step back and see that no one was being (badly) hurt emotionally or physically, I could give my children more space to work it out on their own. If it was bothering me, I could just step into another room. I was amazed at what they worked out for themselves.

When the fighting does become intolerable or unacceptable, it can be wise to give everyone a break from one another for a short period of time. This is not a punishment—it’s just a chance to take a breath! This may mean everyone playing in their rooms for a few minutes, or giving the older child some space while the adult occupies the younger child. We also can set up different work stations in the house for children, allowing each to protect their space as an area to be on their own. Similarly, if there is one particular object that tends to become a source of conflict, it may be wise to give everyone a break from that toy. This can be done in a positive way: “Everyone loves the doll with brown hair. I am going to put her in the closet for a little bit while we find a way that you can both play with her peacefully.” Then turn to another activity for a while.

Resisting Naps and Quiet Time

There can be many reasons that a little one is resisting naps. Sometimes they are overtired because they are not getting enough sleep at night, sometimes nap is starting too late or too early, sometimes they are overstimulated by activities that came before naptime, and sometimes they are distracted by too many toys and books in their room. Parents can experiment with all of these variables as they figure out the reason their particular child is resisting.

We used quiet time in our house to replace nap time once our children outgrew that, so that I could get a break in the afternoon, and so that our children could have time to rest and recuperate from the morning. Building in time for rest and reflection is an important life habit. For our family, quiet time means playing or reading quietly in your room for at least one hour after lunch. Some families choose to restrict this to only reading, and some families allow children to play quietly in other areas of the house. These guidelines will be unique to every family. If a child is new to quiet time, they can start with a short amount—maybe 15 minutes—and then work up to an hour over time. Expectations must be clear before quiet time begins, along with desirable (and reasonable) plans for what will happen after a successful quiet time—perhaps baking cookies or a walk in the woods.

Resisting Activities

What to do when little ones resist activities? The truth is that before the age of 6, and certainly before the age of 3, it is very hard for a child to do something they do not want to do. It is far more important that they learn to inhibit bad actions (hitting, yelling, spitting) than that they do exactly what a parent tells them to do exactly when they say to do it. If they are refusing to engage in an activity that a parent suggests, we can first ask ourselves, “Is this necessary? Do they really need to sweep with us?” The answer is “Probably not.” In these cases, it is best for us to let them choose something they do want to do, and invite them again at a later time.

Of course, there are some actions that we really do expect them to do: Perhaps clear their place at the table, or try to sit on the potty. For these kinds of cases, we can set up a logical chain of events that we know they will want to participate in. “We can read books together after you clear your plate. You can do it when you are ready.” Or, “We will play outside after you sit on the potty. It’s okay if you don’t go. All you have to do is sit. You can do it when you are ready.” By creating these chains of events, you remove the confrontation. They have a choice to make, and their lives will be better if they make the “right” choice!

Encroaching on Work and Self-Care Time

Again, solutions to this problem vary greatly depending on children’s ages and personalities, as well as the needs of the adults at this time. In homes where both parents are trying to work during this time under the “stay at home” order, with children at home and no child-care, I would use one of my favorite parenting phrases, “Surviving is thriving.” Finding ways to get work done with very young children around is a near impossible situation, and, again, grace and flexibility is bound to be a large part of these solutions. Parents working as a team, working in shifts, swapping in and out, and being creative and adaptable are of the utmost importance.

Babies need constant supervision, as well as a great deal of attention. If a littlest one always wants to be in their parents’ arms or engaged, the parent can start working slowly towards a little more independence. This means that when the baby is playing with a toy, the parent can be nearby but working on something else. When the baby starts to fuss, do not pick them up right away. See if they can settle a bit before picking them up. In this way, the baby can gradually build up stamina for being in their own company.

As children get a little older, they develop a better understanding for when the adult is not available. It is okay not to respond to a child’s every beck and call! A parent can say, “I love you and I am here for you if there is an emergency, but right now I am not available. I will be with you again in 10 minutes.” In this way, a child can come to understand that adults have lives and needs too. They feel safe and loved in their house knowing that their needs are met. Constant attention does not equate with security.

Activity Ideas

Practical Life

Set up a cleaning kit for your children and invite them to clean different areas of the house (walls, door knobs, windows, chairs, tables)
Put a little water in the sink and give them (not very breakable) dishes and kitchen utensils to clean for as long as they want
Find a crock pot recipe with a lot of vegetables and invite them to help you prepare the vegetables, dump the ingredients in the pot, and turn it on
A pouring activity: set up a few small pitchers or cups with a little water in them; show your little one how to practice pouring the water from one container to another
A spooning activity: set up two small bowls with a spoon; put a small amount of dried rice or beans in one bowl; show your child how to spoon the dried goods from one bowl to the other

Art

Set up gluing activities with different kinds of shapes that you rotate every few days or weekly (butterflies, flowers, leaves, circles, clouds)
Make your own play-dough and use it
Paper weaving (cutting strips of paper and then weaving them together to make decorations)
Use an easel or large piece of paper taped to the table for painting

Language

Go on a walk and talk about the different color houses
Make a set of color cards with cardstock and markers (Red, blue, yellow, green, purple, orange, white, black, brown); lay out the cards and then name the color and carry each card to something in the house that matches the color; play again, only this time, bring something to the mat that matches the color
For children who are learning their numbers: Make a set of cards with numbers on them (start with just 1, 2, 3); lay them on a rug or table; go into the house and choose one item to place next to the number one, two similar items to place next to the number two, etc.
Give them instructions for something to find in the yard—a green leaf, three rocks, two pinecones, etc.

Final Thoughts

During this time, one of the most important things we can do for ourselves that falls under the category of self-care and finding a rhythm is simplify. Now is not the time for us to create a home that replicates school, it is not time to worry about our children’s academics, and now is not the time to try to figure out the right way to do it. There is no right way. The most important thing we can give our children right now is ourselves—our presence, our stability, our calm. If we can find little ways to care for ourselves and guide our families into a rhythm that provides security, then we can be that safe place for our children. And our home will sustain them as we navigate these times.

Routines at Home: Creating Hope in Challenging Times

Wed, 18 Mar 2020 22:22:04 GMT

In Our Struggle, We Can Find Hope

My grandmother, Paula Polk Lillard, has often spoken of the unique challenges of raising our children in affluent times. While it would never be my choice to be in our current situation, I am able to see the wisdom in her observation. As a society, our children have not had to truly sacrifice their own comfort for the greater good. My children have not experienced what it means to defer their own plans and goals for the health and life of others in a direct, immediate, and enduring way. We do not know what the next days or weeks will bring. Certainly, the world will look different when we emerge. Some things will be worse. But we as people do not have to be worse.

In times of crisis, there also exists great opportunity. I am asking myself, Who do I want to be in this crisis? Who do I want to be after this crisis passes? I want to be stronger, gentler, more creative, more humble, more resilient, and more gracious. And I want my children to feel this, too. In Paul’s letter to the Romans he wrote, “Suffering produces endurance, and endurance produces character, and character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.” We are alchemists. Our hearts can transform this suffering into character. And if we have character, we have hope. This is a hope for many things: Hope for a loving community, hope for kindness between neighbors, and hope that even if our world is a more challenging place after this passes, it also can be a better place.

Montessori Routines at Home

As I think about my daily life with my children during this indefinite period of isolation, my first priority is to maintain their sense of security and well-being. They can endure much hardship if they continue to feel that our home is a safe and loving place. In this spirit, I am providing a gentle and productive structure to our day.

My children (ages 5, 7, and 9) are fortunate enough to go to a Montessori school. This means that they already know how to work, and they know how to be productive and self-directed. They have an incredible foundation for future academics. They also have three years in their individual classroom environments, which means that there is already flexibility and thoroughness built into their curriculum. Given this knowledge, I am assured that we have at least two months before I need to start thinking about their strict academic development. This frees me up to find a structure for their day that puts their work ethic and creativity at the forefront.

My goal for this period of time is to create an environment that encourages self-direction, concentration, and the cycle of an activity. If I can keep these elements of their Montessori experience alive, then I know that my children will have the capability of picking up where they left off academically when they enter the classroom again. Children love to choose, to work, and to complete their projects. We see this over and over again in the Montessori classroom. So, now I need to prepare my home environment to protect this: Self-direction, concentration, and the cycle of an activity.

This weekend, we had a family meeting. We told the children that every weekday morning from 8:30-11:30 would be “Home School.” We set up a shelf with supplies—graph paper, plain paper, lined paper, pencil sharpener, colored pencils, writing pencils, and scissors. They picked out journals so they can record their work choices during the morning. I told them that they can make any productive choice of work during the morning that includes a work cycle—something they choose, do with minimal help, and then clean up on their own. This includes puzzles, drawing, collecting leaves, baking, building, and other home activities. They can do any piece of work for as long as they want, but they need to put it away before getting out something new. They can work on their own, they can work together cooperatively, or they can observe what another sibling is doing, but they need to be respectful and quiet, just like they already are at school. At 11:30, we will clean up the work space just like they do at school—sweeping, putting away bits of paper, straightening materials, and pushing in chairs. Then we will make lunch, and our afternoons are for reading, being outside, and playing, which will include at least an hour of being quiet and independent so that I can maintain some degree of my own work, exercise, and relaxation routine.

The night before our first day, I wrote a list on our white board with just a few ideas. These ideas are not meant to be exhaustive, nor are they required. It is not my job to tell them what to do. In fact, that would interfere with their developing self-direction. These ideas are on the board for now, simply to connect my children to our home as an educational space. They are an inspiration meant to remind them of all the educational work that is available to them here even though they are not at school. I anticipate that during the next few days, I will swap out a few ideas and add new ones, to keep them thinking about what we can do at home. By the end of the week, we probably will no longer need this prop, but, depending on how long this period of isolation lasts, we may need another brainstorming session of ideas for work we can do at home!

I am writing this in the midst of our first morning. So far, my children have chosen leaf-collecting (which includes etching and labeling), puzzles, reading, a sand and cornstarch experiment that my seven-year-old found in a science book, building a robot with simple electronics, and making a booklet with names of animals and pictures. Every time they have come to me for unnecessary help, or have been loud or distracting, or have started to use a whiny voice with me, I remind them in my “teacher voice” that this is school, and that I know they would not do that at school. We have had this interaction plenty of times, but they always know what I mean! My sense of humility fully acknowledges that this is day one, and that the novelty will certainly wear off. But I am grateful for the way that they are rising to this occasion today.

I am also utilizing this period of time for an emphasis on chores and helpfulness. With no other pressures or time constraints, I can be assured that my children have both time and energy for doing work around the house. They can fully clean up after themselves, and they can help with the running of our household. I do not need to create an artificial urge to do chores. I genuinely will need their help for dishes, laundry, sweeping, food preparation, and other areas of care for our environment. This authentic need creates a spirit of collaboration and gratitude.

This evening, we will use this opportunity for family time. Amidst anxiety and turmoil, we have just been gifted that which matters most—unhurried time with the people who are most precious to us in the world. We have time for games, for reading together, and for conversations and questions that we have not always had time to finish. This time is an opportunity to support the transformation in my own children’s hearts. How can my words, attitude, and attention transform this new kind of suffering into their character? How can the stories that my husband and I tell, the love that we show for them and others, and the way we choose to treat and speak to each other transform suffering into character?

We do not know what the next few weeks and months have in store for us. We are prepared for it to get worse before it gets better. We are resolved to be a witness to the world’s suffering, and to sacrifice what we must in order to contribute to the well-being of others. Let us be alchemists. Let us keep turning towards goodness. Let us spread kindness, character, and compassion. And let the world fill with hope.

Talking to Children About the Uncertainties of Life

Wed, 11 Mar 2020 18:47:13 GMT

This post was originally published in 2017 and has been updated to include suggestions about how to talk to children about Coronavirus (See final section).

Talking to Children About the Uncertainties of Life

How do we talk to our children about unfortunate events such as terrorist acts, accidents, natural disasters, epidemics, mental illness, family deaths, divorce, or any surprise or situation that brings disappointment or painful emotions? There is no way to make these conversations easy, and there is no one-size-fits-all solution. But our children need these conversations, and we must be thoughtful with the words we use, knowing that they are watching us closely to learn about living with the uncertainties of life.

We actually prepare our children for what may come in life every day—mostly unconsciously, though sometimes consciously—through modeling behaviors, making comments in their presence, or by saying something that gets a conversation started. Adults help children to dig down their roots of beliefs to make them strong, to reach for the sky in their hopes, and to embrace the beautiful cycles all around us. The biggest gift we can give our children is to teach them to embrace and appreciate this life.

Most adults can recall moments, conversations, or behaviors they observed as children that helped them shape their own beliefs and attitudes for difficult times. From when I was five to 13 years old, several of the pets on our small farm died, from illness, accident, or old age. I was a big animal lover, so I was attached to each of them. What helped me to deal with such experiences were the hours upon hours that I spent in nature, the supportive community I was raised in, and the numerous little conversations I had with my mother. My mother had a very natural way of talking about life. She was very matter-of-fact about her spiritual beliefs; she prayed out loud and talked to God as if he were right there listening. She didn’t hide her tears or grief. She actually had some dire challenges of her own while I was growing up, and while she certainly did not go overboard by telling me too much, she spoke honestly if I asked questions. The impression she gave me was that hard things happen, that we can all handle them, that we have many resources for facing them, and that we are offered a helping hand by God if we seek it. (God in our family meant the Universe, the Spirits, or the power in Nature—we were free to choose).

Through these conversations and my time spent pondering in nature, I created my own ideas about how and why things happen and what we can do to survive them. I wrote stories and thought about life’s mysteries. I found ways to comfort myself with my thoughts. The fact that my mother admitted to the mysteries and demonstrated her strong faith that goodness, truth, and beauty will eventually always triumph over evil gave me that special blend of reality and hope to work with.

Now that I am a parent, I actively collect advice from different experts and think about how such wisdom fits in with our Montessori approach to parenting. Modeling is the most powerful way to teach our children anything. When we are dealing with our own adult sadness, it can be hard to know what to say to our children or how to act in front of them. Cynthia Waderlow, MSE, LCSW shares this advice: “We are authentic in our own experience of loss, and we want to witness the experience of the child.” She says, “We always want to promote language… to teach babies [and children] to engage, to enjoy social pleasures, to get needs met, to learn the power of narrative and to begin to notice others' experiences.”

Learning to notice another person’s feelings and to connect with a hug or eye contact begins in the first year of life. Even infants are picking up on how to empathize, comfort, and build positive beliefs. Modeling vulnerability makes us accessible to our children. Pastor Robert de Wetter writes in his Snowmass Chapel blog, “vulnerability is the key to a life of joy and purpose, and ultimately the path to connectedness with ourselves, others, and God...The path to connectedness is a willingness to be vulnerable, to risk being who we really are, not who we think we need to be, to share what is within the deep recesses of our souls, and to be real and authentic.”

We must be respectful that our children’s feelings and experiences, however, are not exactly the same as our own feelings and experiences. Dr. Alex Lickerman cautions, “Adults need to be aware of whether they are treating their children’s fears and emotions, or their own.” In fact, every psychologist I spoke with on the subject of helping our children with difficult emotions said this same thing: “Always start with questions, and listen to the child. Listen more, talk less.” Only after doing so will we have information to guide our conversations with our children. This is very much in line with Maria Montessori’s approach. If we tend to launch into lectures, we may give far more information than a particular child was ready to handle. But in small, tidbit conversations here and there, we can let our children know that they can come to us with any question or topic and we will answer them honestly and as best we can.

Sometimes our children may ask us to talk about something we’re not comfortable with. It is always an option to say, “I need to think about how I want to answer that very good question. I’m going to think about it and get back to you when I’ve had time to gather my thoughts.” This demonstrates that doing so is always an option. This buys a parent time to collect ideas, choose words, and present their more comfortable, confident self to their child. On the other hand, avoiding a topic altogether can isolate the very people we would like to help, and we don’t want to presume how anyone might feel. Stressing respect for every person’s own unique, individual journey, we can ask questions and reach out to invite conversation. Conversations can serve as conduits and connectors for all involved.

Children’s feelings and beliefs evolve over time as they mature. A child may tell you that she has come up with a theory you fear will disappoint her later, but it is important to acknowledge, accept, and demonstrate that it is always okay for each person to have his or her own feelings or beliefs. You can share yours, demonstrating that sharing thoughts is always acceptable and welcome.

Phrases for Dealing with the Uncertainties of Life

Over the years, I have collected ideas from different friends’ stories of announcing divorces, illnesses, or sudden events that affect their children’s lives. Here are some phrases I’ve heard that may be useful after delivering sad news:

“Here are some of the things you may see happen next…”
Tell the children what to expect, even unpleasant things they may witness, and balance it with equal mention of what good things they may witness, too.

“We cannot be sure what is really going to happen, but what I can be sure of is…”
If you cannot think of much, you can always mention that the sun will rise and set, some days it will rain, summer will come again, things that are comforting in their dependability. You can also mention the love that will always be there, the hope that people have for peace, and the efforts of good people.

“I am here to listen any time you want to share your thoughts, feelings or questions. So are, [list other trusted adults in your child’s life, such as certain teachers, coaches, parents, and other adult family members.]”

“The way you can help is…”
These suggestions should be something simple that they can accomplish, like, “To hold [someone’s] hand,” or to “Bring [someone] a glass of water,” or “Write a letter or draw a picture to send to [someone].” This someone could be a beloved pet, a specific person or a stranger to express compassion to. Just suggest one action, something that’s a choice, something achievable a child can focus on. It should be something that is actually helpful, because as Montessori pointed out for us, children need a sincere sense of purpose and real (even if small) contribution in the world.

And of course, in a gentle tone, we have the choice to say,

“I don’t have the answer right now.”

“It’s an excellent question. Maybe some day human beings will find out more about that.”

“You have noticed one of the greatest mysteries of life.”

“People do these things sometimes, and we cannot always know their reasons.”

Getting expert advice from books, religious leaders, therapists, and wise, older friends and family members is important for all of us in times of difficulty. I encourage you to model the practice of finding help so that your children will always know that there are resources out there for their own lives. Grappling with the uncertainties of life is both a private and a collective experience. Human beings need one another!

When things are especially hard, we can get down, which can affect our children. We need to take care of ourselves first (the oxygen mask analogy) and then model some coping techniques. One of the best ways of doing this is to deliberately foster gratitude and joy. Look for big joys and little joys to be grateful for. When we cannot be joyful, we can aim for a small pleasure. Turn your car the other way and spontaneously go to get an ice cream cone. Plan a celebration. Surprise someone with a picnic in the snowy woods, candles all over their bedroom when they walk in, a bubble bath with real flower petals in it, a surprise trip for no reason. Reach out with a random act of kindness to someone you have been thinking about or to a total stranger. Stop often and take in the smells of the woods or the beauty of a scene, and go looking for such delights. Set an alarm and go to the beach to see the sun rise. Make an outdoor fire and roast marshmallows. Go out in the rain or in the clear, cold air. Pause to gasp, “wow!”

Talk with your children about some good things that may happen in the future, helping everyone to look ahead with hope. Embrace all the good, because life is always “this and that.” Maria Montessori’s educational approach is grounded in reality but filled with hope for humanity, respect for nature, and faith in the unseen. When we approach this topic of talking with children about unfortunate things that happen in life, it can help tremendously to keep this balanced approach in mind.

No matter how we falter or struggle through experiences, the beauty is in the conversations and the connections that we forge during them. Every day is an opportunity for our children to build themselves into the strong, grounded, brave people that they will become. The connections between us all grow like a web that attaches us to one another, surrounds our children in community, and makes us a larger family.

Talking to Children About Coronavirus (March 2020 Update)

When talking about Coronavirus around your children, we suggest that you be matter-of-fact and respectful of others’ concerns. We also suggest that you avoid watching the news in front of them, so that you have agency in using the wording you think is most helpful for your own children and their specific ages.

You might explain, “There are tiny germs called viruses that can make us sick. They are so small that we cannot see them with our eyes, but they are inside us and around us. Most of them only make us a little sick. But some come from far away, and can make some people feel more sick. You might even hear about them on the news. Coronavirus is a virus that is difficult for some human beings, but not for everyone, especially not for children. We also all have tiny things inside our bodies called antibodies. Antibodies keep us healthy. We need to give our bodies sleep, good food, water, and positive thoughts, so that our antibodies can be strong enough to do their jobs really well every day.”

We recommend that, in Montessori fashion, you emphasize to your children, “Human beings are incredible problem solvers. There are scientists and doctors working together all over the world to learn about the Coronavirus so that we can keep it away from our bodies and make our antibodies even stronger than the Coronavirus. Maybe someday you will grow up to help with these things, too! But whatever you do when you are older, your job right now is to learn about whatever interests you from school and books, so that you can grow up to help people in your own way. Right now you can help people just by loving and caring about them.”

Stay informed:

Centers for Disea se Control and Prevention

A Comprehensive Guide to the Coronavirus

The “Montessori Today” Discussion Guide for Parents and Educators

Wed, 26 Feb 2020 20:54:33 GMT

More than a century after Dr. Maria Montessori developed a pedagogy based on her scientific observations of children, Montessori education is still considered a revolutionary approach, with its multi-age classrooms, self-directed learning, specially prepared environments, and sensorial materials. Perhaps the most revolutionary thing about Montessori education is its end goal: to allow for the optimal development—intellectual, physical, social, and emotional—of the whole child. This ambitious aim was the driving force behind Dr. Montessori’s life’s work, and a growing body of educational research now supports much of what she knew to be true through her own observations: Children thrive in academic and non-academic ways when given freedom and responsibilities in an environment that has been prepared according to their developmental needs.

While studies have shown Montessori students to outperform their non-Montessori counterparts on measures of academic skills, social skills, creativity, and executive function, the research on Montessori suggests that its effectiveness is largely dependent on the fidelity of implementation. At a time when t he demand for Montessori education is growing , it is helpful to have resources that allow parents and educators to better understand what an authentic Montessori education looks like. One such resource is Paula Polk Lillard’s book Montessori Today: A Comprehensive Approach to Education from Birth to Adulthood , which provides readers with a glimpse inside authentic Montessori classrooms and explains the philosophy, principles, and rationale of the approach. Covering topics such as the role of the Montessori teacher, the classroom environment, the Planes of Development, and the Great Lessons, Lillard bridges the theoretical underpinnings of the approach with its practical implementation across ages.

For parents and educators who seek to engage in deeper conversation and/or thought about the topics presented in Montessori Today, there is now a Discussion Guide to accompany the book. The guide uses quotes from the text and thought-provoking questions to encourage readers to examine their own educational experiences and beliefs about child development and education. By inviting readers to relate to the Montessori approach from a personal standpoint, the guide provides an accessible way for readers to think about and discuss the foundational tenets and core characteristics of an education designed to meet the needs of the whole child.

We encourage parents and educators to download the Montessori Today Discussion Guide and use it for individual reflection as well as small group discussion. Whether you are an educator looking to engage parents in meaningful discussion about Montessori education, a student considering a career in Montessori education, or a parent exploring Montessori for your child, the Discussion Guide can serve as a useful tool for reflection.

Universal Children: Manifesting Montessori’s Vision

Mon, 16 Dec 2019 17:31:03 GMT

We think different things when we hear the word diversity. Some may think of variety in skin color or socioeconomic backgrounds, others may think of different languages or cultures. Whatever your family, community, or school is like, understanding and embracing diversity and building connections between people is imperative. I am not an expert on diversity but will share how I believe Dr. Montessori’s approach guides and helps children to appreciate and value human diversity.

Consider what diversity means. In nature, we see that diversity indicates strength and balance: In a prairie for example, diversity among plants and animals creates a healthier, sustainable system, making them more resilient to environmental changes. Beyond being beautiful to look at, a diversity of prairie flowers is more attractive to the insects and wildlife these plants depend upon. In short, plants and animals work symbiotically to make a stronger ecosystem, able to withstand adversity and capable of sustaining life over many generations.

With human beings, this is true as well. When diverse peoples come together over a common cause, the symbiosis of their ideas reaches improved solutions. In The Innovator’s DNA: Mastering the Five Skills of Disruptive Innovators ,Jeff Dyer, Hal Gregersen, and Clayton Christensen found that innovators get their ideas from interacting closely with people who think and behave differently from how they themselves think or behave. In other words, we cannot come up with new solutions if we do not associate, question, observe, network, and experiment. This means that getting together with people who are different from oneself, and sharing what is different, is imperative to building compassion, solving problems, and fostering creativity.

This is exactly what happens in Montessori classrooms every day. Children are encouraged, by the Montessori approach, to be open to new ideas, to seek to understand one another’s perspectives, and to see the value of synergy. In a Montessori classroom, students make associations between subjects and topics; they ask questions constantly, embodying the Socratic method in every learning opportunity. Our students learn to observe first, and to look and to think, during their three-hour uninterrupted work periods every morning. They network with each other by interacting and finding out what one another is thinking. And they experiment as they create, whether it be with a Montessori material they have just been shown, or when testing an idea they’ve come up with.

Montessori's Approach

The cooperation of peoples working together was championed by Dr. Maria Montessori. Her educational philosophy and the lectures she gave around the world reflected her deep belief in the universality of human beings and the importance of working together in harmony. (She was so committed to this belief that she referred to herself as a “citizen of the world”—not wanting to be defined by a single creed, nation, or religion—and requested that her final resting place be wherever she happened to die, as a demonstration of the universality of her educational philosophy. Montessori is buried in the seaside village of Noordwijk in the Netherlands, where she died at the age of 81 while staying at a friend’s home.)

Montessori had realistic ideas and a deliberate plan for how teachers could help children to develop a spirit of inclusion within their own classrooms. In Education and Peace , Dr. Montessori wrote, “Peace is a goal that can be attained only through common accord, and…establishing peace is the work of education. We must convince the world of the need for a universal, collective effort to build the foundation for peace” (p. 24). Being open to diverse peoples and differing ideas begins by practicing these behaviors in one’s immediate community, as a child.

To help children understand that human beings are stronger when they work together, Montessori first establishes—“How are we alike?” This context, established from the beginning, is that we are all, first, human beings, no matter where or when we were born, what our customs or religious practices are, or how we may look. Children develop a sense of closeness, respect, and identity with each other as fellow human beings.

Dr. Montessori noticed that when children follow this line of thought, their own awareness and appreciation of others emerge, and they delight in finding differences. This way, diversity is a discovery of “Wow, look at that amazing way these peoples have found to meet their own human needs, in a different environment, culture, or religion.” They have a feeling of familiarity before they examine differentiation.

The Montessori Materials and Presentations

One of the ways this occurs is through the context of accounting for the whole world . When children are three years old, for instance, they hold their classrooms’ small globes in their hands, and learn the names of the oceans and the continents. They learn the names of the countries of the world on the large, colorful puzzle maps, tenderly placing each piece in its place and saying the names that are so interesting and beautiful: Mozambique, Pakistan, Guatemala . In these first, impressionable years of their lives, the Montessori children fall in love with the world and its words. They look at photographs of peoples from around the world in the Geography Folders and absorb the numerous ways of dressing, the different geographical settings of desert or jungle, and see the animals that live in various climates. These images all sink into their unconscious, absorbent minds in a stage of acceptance and enthusiasm for sounds and sights, before they have any cultural prejudice or hesitations to act on.

In the elementary classroom, children ages six to twelve learn about the earliest humans in context of the creation of the earth and the evolution of life forms. They ponder and discuss how the first humans must have lived, what challenges they must have faced, and how they must have worked together to survive. The love that bound humans together in cooperative relationship to one another, the hands they could use to build tools, and their minds that could think, create, and imagine, are emphasized by the teacher to guide the children in their own wondering and questions. The students learn about the Fundamental Needs of human beings (food, shelter, transportation, defense, clothing, artistic and spiritual expression) by asking questions and following their curiosity. In their explorations and research, elementary children discover the differe nt, clever ways that human beings meet these universal needs. Students look at the clothing, shelters, or foods of each culture with the eye of appreciation for humans’ collective fundamental needs.

Interestingly, we rarely hear reactions of “Eeewww,” even when the children find that in some cultures, people eat very different things, such as insects. Instead, it is more common to hear “Wow…I wonder what that is like!” There is an openness and a connection made by the realization that first, we are all human beings. A Montessori child thinks, “That person is a human being just like me. He developed tastes for foods as a child, just like me. He gets food from what is available around him, finds shelter from what is available, clothes himself in ways that protect him against the climate or to express his beliefs in the supernatural. By doing these things, he looks and acts differently from me. How fascinating—I want to know more!”

Religions and Celebrations

One area of finding similarities and differences is in spiritual and customary practices. In Montessori, exploring religions and cultures is part of the curriculum all year round. This is directed by the children’s curiosity. Their explorations of religions and customs connect to any area of the classroom.

For example, at Forest Bluff School this fall, students were invited, by their classmates, to learn about Diwali traditions and participate in celebrations. Some students generously taught their friends how to make rangoli, a traditional Indian art form that is made during Diwali and other Hindu festivals to symbolize good fortune and divine blessings. They invited classmates to light the candles in the beautiful brass diya in the school’s entranceway. Each day of Diwali, groups of children gathered and took turns lighting the candles. When acknowledging spiritual life in this fashion, a respectful hush falls over the children. They are pensive and observant. They respect one another.

Such spontaneous experiences differ from teacher presentations. In other settings, teachers may give a prescribed lesson to the entire class about a religion or culture; What we see, by contrast, is an intimate act of children learning from one another, in friendship and companionship. This personalization leads to a lasting openness for other cultures and a willingness to connect and identify with peoples around the world.

Montessori children likewise delight in learning about the history and customs of Jewish friends who celebrate Rosh Hashanah, Yom Kippur, and Hanukkah. Students are curious about their own heritages and those of their classmates. This evolves into many explorations and studies when the children reach their elementary years.

When Eid and Ramadan come around, children are eager to learn about their Muslim friends’ beliefs as well. Sometimes a teacher will begin the conversation by reading a book to the children about a religious celebration, and other times the children begin the discussion themselves. Sometimes a topic takes on a life of its own and the children pursue it in depth, and at other times, an event may only generate a little interest. But the children learn more each year as the calendar brings religious events and customary celebrations into view, again and again. The children love to learn the stories that belong to each religious event and the symbolism that corresponds with each.

Interestingly, when the topic of diversity is approached with this inclusion-first orientation that Montessori proposed, children notice the similarities between different religions very quickly. We see them point to what religions have in common:

-extended-family gatherings

-roles of respect for elders or special roles for certain family members

-candlelight

-sweets, special foods

-certain colors to symbolize something

-singing and/or dancing

-helping those less fortunate

-expressions of gratitude

-love and peace

The children delight in this realization: Major religions share so much in common! From this commonality, they then become fascinated by the specific differences that give each celebration or religion its character. Each one is special.

We find different ways to embrace different religions. This is an evolving process, one that never ends. For example, this year we learned Hanukkah songs and started to sing them with the children when talking about Hanukkah. Children in one classroom celebrated Diwali together by having a special lunch one day. At Christmas time, our school has a tradition of singing three Christmas hymns and Dona Nobis Pacem, a non-denominational song with Latin text that means “Grant us peace.” Students who are agnostic, atheist, Christian, Hindu, Muslim, Bahá’í, Buddhist, and Jewish gather together in our hallway for this event. It is a treasured moment where our school enjoys a harmonious feeling of togetherness, one that transcends all religions and differences.

In all of their singing, creating artwork, reading books, and learning together about religions and customs, the children share an appreciation for one another’s heritage and practices with a reverent tone. For anyone who hopes for a better world, seeing children take such interest and respect for one another’s differences is deeply moving. When speaking of war and strife, Dr. Montessori said, “An education capable of saving humanity is no small undertaking; it involves the spiritual development of man, the enhancement of his value as an individual, and the preparation of young people to understand the times in which they live” (p. 30 Education and Peace).

Diversity in Topics of Study

Children are naturally curious. Because Montessori children are free to choose topics of interest to research, there is great diversity in their work as well. Montessori’s collaborative educational approach makes room for intellectual diversity because there isn’t a predetermined curriculum that everyone must get through in a designated amount of time. If children want to investigate a language, religion, culture, or custom, there is encouragement, time, and space for that to happen. If they want to extend their learning further by planning to go out to see more—to the Dusable Museum of African American History, the Field Museum’s exhibits on various ancient cultures, or the Art Institute’s various exhibits from around the world—they can do so. The opportunities are limitless! When they do this, children find great value and meaning in these excursions because each is a personal quest, rather than an assignment from someone else’s agenda.

Unique Individuals Make Up Communities

Children in Montessori learn to look for the connections between any “us” and any “them” to find first what makes everyone human beings, before examining what makes us different. In the end, what makes us different might be the most important part of a relationship. For instance, when a child stands up for what he or she believes in, they are brave for being different. Becoming a community of different individuals is what makes us like a healthy prairie, one that grows together and synergizes for strength.

Appreciation for diversity is the result of inclusion. First, we must include, in order to gain proximity for understanding and fostering relationships as individuals. By beginning with inclusion and emphasizing human similarities, children come to see that they, too, create a beautiful balance in their differences, with respect for the value each person contributes. And most of the time, this all happens unconsciously, until it becomes conscious. Most important of all is that Montessori children develop a natural appreciation and respect for all peoples. This comes from the purity of their young hearts, and through the approach of Montessori education.

Resources

Please find out when and what your friends are celebrating in their various religions and cultures:

Major Religious Holidays and Observances 2020-2021

National Geographic Holidays Around the World Book List

References

Montessori, Maria. (First published 1949). Education and Peace. Vol. 10, The Clio Montessori Series, Montessori-Pierson Publishing Company.

Getting Your Children to Read at Home: Building a Family Culture

Sat, 09 Nov 2019 22:50:09 GMT

Take a moment to answer these questions for yourself:

What was your experience of reading growing up?

Are you happy with how much or little your children read at home these days?

Do you yourself get to read, ever? As much as you’d like?

Personally, reading is one of my favorite things to do. When I was a child, I was the youngest in a big family with older siblings who weren’t living at home by the time I was six years old. From then on, I was the only child at home with busy, working parents. We lived at the end of a very long driveway off a four-lane road and had no neighbors to speak of. It was me, the woods and fields, some animals, and books—a lot of them.

I would play by the hour, creating plot lines and characters with my toys. This imagination was fueled by the stories and illustrations in old classic children’s books that had been handed down to me, and by those my mother brought home for me from the library every Friday. My parents were avid readers, and my mother read all the classics to me before bed every evening. I vividly remember The Secret Garden, Black Beauty, Old Yeller, Little Women, and Treasure Island, to name just a few.

When my husband and I had our own children, we cherished the hours of reading to them every night in bed the way my mother had done for me. Those are some of our most special memories as a family, and this is one of my favorite topics to talk about with other parents. I am a passionate proponent of getting children to read at home.

Why is Reading Important for our Children?

In a world where jobs are increasingly taken over by machines, the qualities that will make our children employable will be those that make them the most “human.” There are things no machines can do as well as a human being, and I’m a firm believer that as a species, we will always crave human connection and keep coming back to it.

One of those human qualities is empathy. When we read a story from a book, we deepen our ability to empathize, to feel the feelings of another soul, to imagine what it must be like to be somebody else. When we hear the words someone else has put together in a unique order that could only belong to that very individual, we think, we imagine, we connect.

Another reason that reading is important is that it requires concentration. Children have to deliberately calm themselves down and focus their attention when reading. Repeatedly doing so fosters the muscles of concentration. Being able to concentrate well is necessary for learning new things, for reflecting, thinking, solving problems creatively, and creating something new.

Reading also nurtures communication skills, as children witness how others use words to form phrases, sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and entire books. So much organizing goes into building a story in words. Children soak this in naturally, by exposure. The more they do this, the better their own communication skills become.

Children also have to build the stamina for longer books where one has to keep track of storylines and characters. They have to really think about what is happening behind the scenes to comprehend and discuss texts in middle school, high school, and college. To do this well, children need practice. The only way to get that practice is by reading—a lot.

Another reason for reading is that students simply cannot “cram” for the language section on standardized tests before they take them for high school or college placements. The results of these tests, whether or not you value them, can determine students’ choices of educational institutions for all of their higher learning. The SSAT, ACT, and SAT have language questions that measure a student’s comprehension of sophisticated texts across subject areas, their understanding of the mechanics (grammar, punctuation, and sentence structure) of writing, and their grasp of rhetorical skills (style, strategy, and organization). The best way to prepare well for such tests is to read a healthy amount of good literature over many, many years.

Reading also enables our children to build libraries of knowledge in their heads. They educate themselves, in a sense, in ways that no classroom can supplement, on varieties of subjects as their interests evolve over the years.

Finally, reading helps children to build character, morals, and values. Children are faced with the question “Who do I want to be?” Harriet the Spy hurt a lot of feelings, and Little Lord Fauntleroy softened the heart of a grouchy, spiteful old man. Pollyanna was unfailingly cheerful until she herself befell a tragedy, and then eventually accepted the help from all those she had given so much to, when her companions young and old came to pull her up from the depths of her own despair. Children wonder, whether it be spoken or silent, “How would I deal with these situations? What are the options?”

How to Create a Culture of Reading

Now that you’re convinced that reading is important for your children, how can you get it going at home? Here are some suggestions:

Prepare the Space

Set the stage with nooks and inviting places to read.

Surround yourselves with books, and make them accessible to your children.

Remove obstacles, both psychological and physical (loud toys, video games).

Protect the Time

Make “down time” to relax, reflect, and read.

Whether the hour before bed every night or lazy Sunday afternoons, be sure to schedule in time when reading can occur naturally.

Model Reading

Bring a book with you everywhere you go. If you pull a book out of your purse when you have to wait in a line or sit in a waiting room, you will not only be modeling; you will feel calmer, more thoughtful, and be more present for your child and the people around you. This is when we often pull a smartphone/screen out. Try a book for a change. See what happens.

Go to the library regularly, and set reading goals for yourself if that helps you get going.

Read Aloud Daily

Read out loud to your children every single day! This is perhaps the most important thing we can do as parents to help our children build a lifetime habit of reading for enjoyment. One common time of day for this daily activity is right before bed. I recommend that even if the family is reading one book together, you also spend time alone with each child, reading aloud. This becomes a very special time when that child gets to connect with you and ask questions. Impromptu conversations, often very important ones, arise. This is one of the main reasons I love the classics so much: the topics that arise when reading them are the gut-level, value building, real stuff of life. You may end up talking about your feelings on lying, stealing, being mean, doing the right thing when it’s hard to do, and even death. During these special times, parents and children bond. We set up the chance to share thoughts and feelings and impart values.

What to read aloud? Anything that you enjoy. Read new award-winners, and look for books about other cultures, races, and religions. Biographies and nonfiction are wonderful, too. But don’t miss out on the classic children’s literature. The classics bring up universal human experiences. That’s what makes them classics. When choosing the right level, read books aloud that are just above your children’s own reading comfort levels to expose them to the cadence, sentence structure, vocabulary, and pronunciation that will flow easily from you, feeding their minds.

Some Considerations when Choosing Reading Content for Children

Youngest Children

Under age six, children need reality and books that help them connect to the real world. They also need support to become independent, integrate their bodies and their minds, and develop self-control and the ability to concentrate. Being read to helps them to develop their own clear language for communication.

Elementary-Aged Children

Children ages six to twelve need to use their imaginations, explore with their minds, and develop their power of reasoning and empathy for others by imagining how others feel. Provide book choices with compelling characters and descriptive worlds that allow children to become immersed in the literature. They need to be able to read and reflect, unrushed! They also benefit from time for creative play and socializing and unstructured time in nature to explore.

Oldest Children

Children ages twelve and older need to be welcomed into adult society, learn to solve their own problems, and have reflective time to ask, “Who am I?” They need to experience that they are needed by groups of people outside of their own families, in the community. We can give them opportunities for tremendous effort, a close-knit group that functions together towards common goals, some quiet time to reflect every day, and a role to play in the adult world. Books that touch upon some of these themes and encourage deep reflection on themselves and the world around them can help adolescents navigate these critical years.

For specific age-appropriate suggestions, see My Favorite Children's Books for read-alouds and Forest Bluff School's Book Lists.

Get to The Most Common Obstacle

If your children aren’t reading as much as you’d like, and you are doing the above things, then check to see whether there is an obstacle in the way. The most common obstacle these days might be in the form of screens. Technology today ishighly attractive to young minds who do not have the judgment that we adults have. Passive entertainment is a big draw. You may think that “educational” content or “how to” YouTube videos are worthwhile for your children. But ponder, “What else would my child be doing with that 30 minutes (or much longer, as is often the case)?” If they might be imagining something they cannot see, empathizing with someone else’s feelings, connecting through language, solving a problem, thinking original thoughts, reflecting on something they just learned, or calming their anxiousness, then they would be better off reading!

For our children, the effect of being entertained with screen time is deeper than it is for us—they are setting patterns for a lifetime. While research is giving us the hopeful news that our brains have plastic qualities all the way into old age, the message is clear: It's hard, hard work to change our brains later in life. Our children are in a precious stage of their lives, and childhood is when they lay down their patterns for life.

Recognize that obstacles of technological entertainment get harder to avoid as your children get into the Elementary ages and into high school. We really have to protect and defend the time and the space for reading. We have to make opportunities for reading a priority.

“Makeovers” at Home

Now and then your family may need a “makeover.” In my family, we changed the family room from a TV room into a library, surrounded by bookshelves on two sides, with a low shelf where we rotated puzzles, board games, cards, a globe, and limited art supplies. On the coffee table between the two couches we put a big Atlas and field guides of trees, wildflowers, and birds. We rotated the “coffee table” books on this table each week. This worked wonderfully because our children had lots of toys in other places around the house, but the library became our family room; the room inspired curiosity, reflection, discussion, and exploration. We were surrounded by books! This may spark some ideas for your own home.

One more word on technology for the future: Now that my own children are almost 16 and 18, they have smartphones for daily travel and communication and laptop computers for working at school. When we walk into our house, my children, my husband, and I place our phones in a charging dock in the kitchen. Our rule is that phones and laptops may only be on the first level of the house, never upstairs where our bedrooms are. The phones stay in the dock, stationed, when we all go upstairs to bed at night. The laptops stay in the kitchen area to be used for homework at the kitchen table or somewhere else on the first floor. In other words, no screens travel through the house. They have definite locations and boundaries that are visible and clear. This has made it a peaceful home where we laugh and talk with each other. I cannot tell you how happy we are that we created these boundaries!

What does go everywhere with us? Books! The house is filled with books.

Enjoy the Adventures!

To summarize, enjoy reading books for yourself, for starters. Fill your home with books, and make time for reading to happen naturally. Read out loud to your family. You’ll find that Heidi takes you to the mountains of Switzerland in simpler times, while Old Yeller takes you to the dusty West and shows what life is like on ranches and in hardship. Where the Red Fern Grows gives children an imagination for the wonders of the woods at night and the camaraderie between a boy and his brilliant hunting dogs. That’s a story that makes us pause—for a long time and often through gushing tears—and appreciate the animals in our lives and what they have given to us.

Books take us on adventures, they make us laugh and cry, they make us feel feelings. They make us think about things, about people, about life. Enjoy the adventures!

How Do Montessori Teachers Present those Magical Materials?

Thu, 10 Oct 2019 22:04:02 GMT

With children under the age of six, in the first plane of development, the Montessori-trained teacher invites each child to his or her presentation of a material. He or she speaks slowly and clearly, emphasizes his or her graceful, deliberate motions to entice children this age to imitate such self-control, and gives opportunity for the child to repeat the exercise many times. The “lesson” is driven by the child’s innate desire to focus and to mimic and internalize organized sequences and exaggerated movements.

A teacher working with children in the second plane of development, by contrast, must appeal to the very different characteristics that drive children ages six through twelve. The elementary-trained Montessori teacher, therefore, speaks and moves more rapidly. He or she asks questions to get the children thinking, wondering, and making connections to previous knowledge. The children’s curiosity drives the “lesson.”

At any age, the teacher invites the children to touch and move the materials as early on in the presentation as necessary and possible. The presentation becomes an interplay of watching, taking turns, and discussing. A presentation, or “lesson,” may be as brief as two minutes or last as long as twenty minutes, depending on the content and the children involved.

A Primary Presentation

In a Primary classroom, the teacher walks over to three-year-old Dominique, who is coasting along the shelves, looking restless. “Dominique,” she bends down and faces him, “I’d like to show you something new. Would you come with me, please?” Dominique nods and follows her over to a shelf. She again bends down and faces him, touching the edge of a tray on the shelf gently with one hand. “This is the Flower Arranging.” Dominique smiles widely at her and nods. “Here is how we carry it.” She squares herself to the shelf, reaches forward with both hands and carefully wraps her hands around the two outer edges of the tray, slowly lifts it, takes a step back with each foot, and stands up straight, holding the small tray in front of her waist. She looks at Dominique, who looks like he’s about to hop up and down, he is so excited. She replaces the tray carefully, straightens up, and says, “Your turn.” He squares off to the shelf, lifts the tray and holds it level at his waist, turns, and smiles up at her. She smiles, too, and then walks slowly to a floor table and sits down next to it. Dominique follows her, carrying the tray and looking down at it. He carefully sets the tray down on the table.

“We need something else. Come with me.” The teacher walks back over to a large vase of flowers on the shelf close to where the Flower Arranging tray was. She turns to Dominique, standing beside her. “Would you like to pick out a flower?” He points to one and his teacher shows him how to lift it out, holding the others back with her other hand. She invites him to choose another one, until they have three, which Dominique carries back to the table. Next, the teacher shows him how to carry a tiny pitcher from the tray. Dominique picks up the pitcher with two hands, as she has demonstrated, and follows her to the child-level sink in the corner of the room to collect water.

When they return to the table, Dominique’s teacher shows him, step by step, how to cut the flower stems, remove the extra leaves and stem parts, and put these into a small bowl that he can later empty into the garbage. She shows him how to fill the vase with just enough water and how to carry the tiny vase, with the flowers and a cotton doily from the shelf, to a child’s table and place it there.

At the end the teacher asks, “Would you like to make another arrangement?” Dominique nods and she tells him, “OK! You can take out the Flower Arranging whenever you’d like to. I can show you how we put it away when you are finished with it.” She smiles, walks away to work with another child, and Dominique walks to the large vase of flowers to choose three more flowers.

Every presentation is different, but some steps are the same: the teacher invites the child to a presentation, she (or he) shows the child where the material is on the shelf, so that the child can find it again next time and knows where to put it back. The teacher tells the child the name of the exercise and shows him how to carry the tray. She demonstrates how to put it back on the shelf, then invites the child to carry the material to a table, rug, or floor table. She shows the child how to do the exercise. She tells the child he can choose this material any time in the future or gives them any limits about it—such as, “Please come tell me when you’d like to do this”—if applicable. In other words, the teacher orients the child to what they are about to do, presents the steps to the exercise, and suggests it as a future choice for work. It is a very respectful way to interact with children and to teach them new things.

While every teacher, child, and exercise differs, the Primary teacher moves slowly and deliberately, is direct with her (or his) words—gentle and inviting, positive and clear. She appeals to young children’s desires to move, to touch and engage in the activity, and to focus their attention on details. She is calm, but quietly charismatic.

An Elementary Presentation

The Elementary teacher, by contrast, invites children to exercise their newly budding resourcefulness by asking them to bring various things to the lesson as needed, such as a clipboard from the cabinet, paper, pencil, or perhaps a ruler. The Elementary teacher appeals to the children’s social natures of six- to twelve-year-olds. She (or he) begins presentations by asking questions, and gets a discussion going right away.

In a Lower Elementary classroom, a teacher gathers three seven-year-olds for a lesson and invites them to bring a flat purple box of compartments to a table. She asks each to bring another component that will be needed for this lesson: the box of grammar symbols, which they are familiar with from previous lessons, and a purple box of cards that match the purple box of compartments. They sit down to face their teacher, and she begins, “Remember when we worked with the Verb Grammar Box? Well, today we’re going to talk about another part of our speech. I’m going to ask you to do a few things.” With a sly smile, she asks, “Would you please sit underneath the table?” The children giggle, look at each other, and then push out their chairs and move under the table to sit there, laughing. The teacher smiles down at them and nods. “OK, great. Come on back to your chairs.” The children do this. “Now, how did you know where to go?” They discuss this, and the children point out that she said the word “underneath.”

“So this word, ‘underneath,’ told you where to be, in relation to the table.” They concur.

She asks them to do a few more amusing things: “Tommy, would you go stand behind Debbie’s chair, please?” Tommy looks confused but stands and does this. “Ah, I see you’re standing behind Debbie’s chair. How did you know where to go?”

“Well, you said to stand behind her chair.”

The teacher nods, looking down and scratching her head. “I see. Sheryl, would you please put the tissue box on top of the supply cabinet?” Sheryl goes and does this while the other children watch, amused. Sheryl comes back, and the teacher asks, “Now, I’m curious, how did you know what to do?”

“Because you told us!” Tommy says, laughing.

“But what words told you?” They discuss this for a few minutes.

Then, the teacher turns her attention to the purple box of compartments and says, “I am going to show you how you can explore these words further. Let’s begin by setting these cards into the corresponding compartments here, and then we can read the first one together.”

After placing the cards neatly into the compartments of the box, Tommy, Debbie and Sheryl put their heads together and read the first card, sounding the words out loud: Set one chair opposite another chair. They do this action, discussing what “opposite” might mean.

Then their teacher says, “OK, let’s put the grammar symbols over the words, as we have before [in past lessons], for the article, noun, and verb.” They do this, then the teacher holds up a small, green, bridge-like symbol and tells the children, “Here is the symbol for these words that tell us where something is in relation to something else. We call these words or phrases the preposition.” The teacher places the small symbol above the card with the word “opposite”.

The three children read and act out the next card while their teacher watches them. This one reads: Arrange two chairs along the wall. Arrange two chairs against the wall. The children sift through the many one-word cards in the compartments of the box, searching for the ones that make up these two sentences. The cards from each part of speech have their own color-coded compartment. The children place the corresponding symbols above each word in the sentences they have constructed, then add the new symbol they just learned above “along” and “against”.

The teacher leaves the children to continue. They delight in reading and acting out each command, sometimes laughing, and generally having a great time. They rush back to the table to symbolize each sentence and to pull out the next card. This goes on for about half an hour.

Notice that Elementary Montessori teachers ask many questions. In other lessons of physics, chemistry, math, or geography, they might ask, “Why do you think it’s like that?” “What might that tell us?” “If we choose this amount, then what might happen?” Such questioning is not done to trick the children or to test them (although it does give the teacher much information about the child’s comprehension and self-expression), but as an invitation to figure it out together. It is done in a friendly, inquisitive manner. Every time a teacher gives a presentation, the child is oriented to another work choice in the room that is now available to him or her. In this way, the teacher exposes each child to their choices for work, expanding it over time, covering all subject areas during their three years in the classroom.

What Happens Next?

“Follow-up work” happens when a child chooses the material again without the teacher and works with it by himself or herself. (In the case of Elementary children, the child may also do follow-up work with a group of peers). A child might simply work through the exercise and replace it to the shelf, or she might produce pages of writing and illustrations. An Elementary aged child might produce a research report, or any number of artistic, language, or mathematical extensions of their work, when appropriate. He or she might conduct a scientific experiment, collect specimens, or make other numerous expressions of their expanding knowledge. In this way, the Elementary child’s growing body of knowledge may be represented by an original portfolio. The Elementary teacher will suggest ideas for follow-up work and will guide children to improve the quality of their work as they progress.

The Teacher’s Job & The Materials’ Job

The Montessori teacher’s job is to keep track of what he or she has shown each child, noting the child’s comprehension and progression. The teacher plans and makes adjustments where help is needed. While it may seem as though Montessori teachers do very little when they’re leaving children to do the work on their own, the Montessori teacher has the task of observing carefully and stepping in to guide children back to productive activity, if necessary. By giving these short and frequent presentations to many children, the Montessori teacher is always interacting and modeling industrious activity—all day long! With this teaching format, the Montessori teacher can cover the wide range of subjects necessary, with the varying abilities, learning styles, and interests that children have. She or he is able to meet individual needs in a classroom community in a natural and seamless manner.

The Montessori materials are not to be used as didactic materials for the teacher to teach with , but rather as learning materials for the children to learn by using . Dr. Montessori explained, “The work of education is divided between the teacher and the environment…The profound difference that exists between our method and the so-called objective lessons of the older systems [such as with Froebel’s teaching materials] is that the objects are not a help to the teacher. The objects are, instead, a help to the child himself…It is the child who uses the objects, it is the child who is active...”[1]

In the examples above, you can see how the teachers invite children to take part in the presentations and to touch the materials, or perform actions, right away. The children then continue with the materials long after the teacher has stepped away. The real learning occurs while the children work with the materials, after the teacher has left them. This is why it is so important that children spend time working independently from their teacher.

This makes clear that the teacher must know precisely how to present the use of each material so that the children can use it in a way that is truly useful. A Montessori teacher presents the materials in a definite sequence, progressing in difficulty, with each step building on the prior ones. Children make discoveries with the materials only when they are interested in that material and their minds are ready to comprehend, two conditions that a trained teacher learns to recognize and respond to. If a child works with a material repeatedly during a time of readiness, he or she may see something revealed in the materials; he or she discovers a truth independently. In this way, the teacher has an important guiding role, but she or he is not the center of the child’s learning experience—only the one who points the way.

Teachers give as many presentations on how to use the materials as possible, every day, to as many children as they see are ready for new presentations, or in some cases, re-presentations. There is a balance between presenting to or helping a student and leaving them alone to concentrate on their work and develop a deeper focus . Although the presentations themselves and how to determine when a child needs a certain presentation is taught in the teacher training courses, Montessori teachers must develop for themselves a sensitivity and awareness of what to look for when observing the children and making these determinations. Having many children in the room with only one teaching adult protects the children from having an adult interfere too much; it means that the children must develop some independence in their learning, and that they figure out how to learn by watching other children working. The children also help one another, so that their own skills and knowledge deepen through peer-to-peer teaching. In these ways, the children develop resourcefulness through their work.

Paula Lillard, for instance, recalls many instances of sitting down to show a child something for the first time, only to find that he or she understood the material so readily that a presentation was hardly necessary. In such situations, a child had watched other children working with the material and had been intrigued with it. Dr. Montessori called this “indirect preparation,” which eases the difficulty of learning. In this case, a child may have also observed Mrs. Lillard presenting a material to others and retained much of what he or she had witnessed. Delighted that the material was now in their possession, a child in this case might want to repeat what they’d seen others do, or might be ready for their teacher to go straight to a subsequent presentation with the material, which the teacher is free to do.

The Magic!

Having the flexibility to respond to each child means that the Montessori teacher can guide every individual to a material and its use most effectively. The timing, manner, and language that a teacher uses will be customized for the child or children he or she is working with. Like a guide who points the way, the teacher allows the children to teach themselves, through the materials. Graduates often say that in Montessori, they learned “How to teach myself.” This ability to learn by their own process was fostered in this intentional way and endures in their spirits, always.

[1] p. 149, The Discovery of the Child

Apple Activities With Your Young Child

Fri, 20 Sep 2019 20:07:56 GMT

Autumn is here! And with it, cooler winds, colorful leaves, and flourishing apple orchards. There are many activities for you to do with your young child all based around the beautiful apple. You may enjoy a trip to the apple orchard, as well as a Practical Life activity with the fruit in your own kitchen. Here are some ideas for you to try with your children this fall.

An Apple Orchard Excursion

Is there anywhere that feels more like early fall than an apple orchard? The sweet smell of fruit against the dry grass, the sun shining through the leaves, the feel of the apple as you pluck it from the branch. It is a wonderful place to take a small child. However, before you head out to the orchard, there are a few helpful steps to consider. First of all, do your best to find a true functioning apple orchard, and not a “fake farm.” How can you tell the difference? An apple orchard will have apple trees and possibly baskets to hold the fruit. A fake farm will have about a hundred other activities, including clowns, donuts, trains, mazes, and many other elements unnecessary to the production of apples. There is a time and a place for this kind of fun, but it is not an ideal outing for a small child. An apple orchard on its own is treasure enough for your toddler. (For families in Northern Illinois, Heinz Orchard in Green Oaks is a good example of an authentic, no-frills apple orchard.)

Secondly, once you have found this orchard, before you have even put your child in the car seat, take a deep breath. Lower your expectations. Now lower them again. You will probably have an idea in your mind about how this activity is going to go. You may be imagining your child laughing happily down the rows of apples and helpfully picking fruit and placing it in the basket. Remember that your child has no idea that this is how apple picking is supposed to go. Moreover, he does not care. If you get to the orchard and he is crying and uncooperative and having a tantrum, it probably means he is tired and you should just get back in the car with your three apples and go home. Letting go of expectations is a part of parenthood.

When you reach the apple orchard, assuming all is going well, you can let your child explore the trees at his own pace. If he wants to stay at one tree and pick every single apple within reach, then let him do that. If he wants to move along the row and pick one apple from every tree and this feels achingly inefficient to you, take another deep breath, and let him do that. Remember that this apple picking expedition is not actually about picking as many apples as you can. When you are with a small child, it is about his sensorial experience--the smells, sounds, sights, and feel of the orchard. It is also about his Practical Life activity here--the process of putting apples in buckets, the movements required to walk between trees, and plucking apples from the branches.

The apple orchard will also be a wonderful opportunity for language. You can talk about “blossom,” “branch”, “stem”, “trunk”, “ladder”, “worm”, and so on. He will connect the words to the sensory rich experience and store them in his absorbent mind.

Your trip to the apple orchard will probably end when your young child runs out of steam. As mentioned before, this may occur one minute after you arrive. It may occur fifteen minutes after you arrive. If he lasts longer than that, consider this excursion a rousing success. It is also important to be prepared for an unpleasant exit from the orchard. Even if the trip has gone very well, he may run out of energy just as you are leaving, and there will be tears. Speak to him gently and matter-of-factly about the trip home, and what you will be doing when he gets home. Please do not let this sadness take away from what may have been a very lovely outing for your family. This is simply what life with little children is like!

Making Applesauce at Home

Without a doubt, this second apple activity will not take place on the same day as the trip to the apple orchard. Unless perhaps your child takes a tremendous nap and wakes up with a great deal of positive energy and focus. So often, it is our own ideas about activities that dictate our schedule, rather than our children’s capabilities. They are usually up for one big activity a day, if that. Similarly, you should give yourself permission to pause this activity at any point in the process. If he is not interested in doing the work, then today is not his day. He may want to do one or two steps and then walk away, and that is fine. You can always come back to it another time or another day. Or you may simply finish the activity yourself. This work is for his development and not the productivity of the household.

So, once you have briefly assessed that your child is probably up for a slightly prolonged Practical Life activity, you can invite him to join you in the kitchen. The first step is always to wash hands and put on an apron, to indicate to him that he is ready to work.

Wash the apples . Set up your child at a table that is fitted to him. To the left, place a basket with a few apples. In front of him, put a low bowl or bin filled with an inch or two of water. To the right, put an empty bowl or basket for the clean apples. This left to right model is indirect preparation for reading. Model for him how you choose an apple and put it in the water. Then use a very soft scrub brush to gently clean all sides of the apple. Put the apple in the empty basket to the right. Give him a turn to do the work as he chooses. This may mean vigorously scrubbing one square inch of the apple, and this may mean cleaning every apple in the span of fifteen seconds. You can intervene gently once or twice to show your child how to clean all of each apple, but do not hover or insist on your own way. This is a process for him and he will learn how to properly clean apples eventually. But probably not today.

Dry the apples . Once the apples are clean (you can give them a going over in the sink while your child’s back is turned), you can show him how to dry them. Remove the washing tools and place a dry cloth in front of your child’s seat. Again, place the wet apples to the left of him, and an empty basket to the right of him. Show him how you use the dry towel to wipe off one apple at a time and then place the dry apple in the empty basket. Model looking for wet spots before putting the apple aside. Then let him do it. As with all practical life activities, you must not insist on your own way. If he wants to dry one apple and then he is finished, you can finish drying the apples.

Cut the apples. When the apples are dry and the apple drying materials are put away, you can set up an activity for cutting the apples. This is easily done with a tray that has a cutting board in the center, a bowl on each side, an apple cutter, and a child-appropriate knife (Available at Montessori Services ). Place the apple on the center of the tray and show your child how to use the apple cutter to cut the core out of the apple. You can put your hands on top of his as you push down on the cutter. Show him how to pull out the slices one by one and place them in the bowl to the left. Then discard the core. Now, show your child how to choose one apple slice at a time, place horizontally on the cutting board, and use the knife appropriately to cut the apple piece in half. Then put the cut apple pieces in the bowl to the right. Let him work at his own pace through as many apples as he wants, cutting each apple into as many pieces as he sees fit. The beauty of applesauce is that it does not matter! At the end of each apple, he can help you dump the bowl into a slow cooker you have set up on the kitchen counter.

Cook the applesauce. Depending on how many apples your child chooses to cut, you may end up adding some that you have cut yourself on the counter. For six apples, add half a cup of water and half a teaspoon of cinnamon to the cooker. Your child can help pour into the cooker if he is still interested in the activity. Cook on low for about six hours, then mash with a fork or potato masher (another excellent activity for your child if it interests him!) and enjoy.

There are many ways to enjoy the unique elements of fall with your family. These apple activities appeal to young children, and also give them a sense of contributing to their home. When you are enjoying your applesauce with your child you can reflect on the memories you made at the orchard and the work you did to create their snack, and you can thank him for his contribution to the family. It is a meaningful experience for a young child!

The Montessori Young Children’s Community

Mon, 26 Aug 2019 20:35:44 GMT

Why Go to School, Little One?

Sometimes people are surprised to hear that children can begin attending Forest Bluff School when they are only 18 months old. You may wonder, “What in the world can a one-and-a-half-year-old do in a school?” And yet, we know from research and observations that the first years of life are by far the most rapidly formative, important years of development, physically and psychologically. Dr. Montessori recognized that providing a special environment, designed to help young children in specific ways, makes sense. Once you see with your own eyes what the littlest children do in a prepared Montessori environment, skepticism evolves into awe.

In a Young Children’s Community of 18-month to 3-year-olds, we see children removing their own coats and reaching up to hang them on hooks at eye level in their cubbies, choosing work from the shelves that come to their waist height, and carrying materials to small tables or rugs where they decide to do their “work.” Once there, young children focus their attention on tasks that interest them greatly, using their hands, thinking through the steps, experimenting with the materials, and communicating with their teacher and fellow classmates.

At a time in life when they are intensely concentrating on developing body control, thought processes, and the abilities to communicate their emotions and thoughts, very young children benefit tremendously from being in a learning environment that provides activities that perfectly meet their developmental characteristics and needs. Manipulative materials provide opportunities to develop hand-eye coordination. Language materials give ample experience with new vocabulary and pronunciation aided by the adults in the room. Practical Life activities help children form understandings of sequences, muscle control, memory, and logical thinking. The roots of music, artistic expression, biology, counting, measuring, and more are presented in a rich learning environment that young children feel safe to explore. Most important perhaps, is the confidence that young children build in their daily successes and the awareness of others in a community with an understanding of their own role within it. This confidence gives children the springboard to learn and develop at nature’s pace, without being held back from lack of exposure or by environments that do not match their developmental characteristics and needs.

At Home

Being at home with their families is invaluable for very young children, too. Most parents find that when their 18-month-old children spend three hours at school, there is still plenty of time to connect at home as well, even when they attend a Montessori program five mornings a week. The continuity and regular morning schedule allows children to calmly settle into a routine that makes sense to them. While parents have their time to get things done without children in tow, young children get to go do their “work” at the same time. At lunchtime when they are reunited, parents can give their full attention to their children and still have several hours together after nap time as well.

If parents could provide all the opportunities and atmosphere for optimal development in our homes, a Young Children’s Community would not be necessary. But realistically, with our attention divided, the phone and door bell ringing, emails coming in, and so many complex demands in our home lives these days, it is more challenging for young children to develop the deeper focus and to access activities that truly help them in their development.

A Special Learning Environment

Bringing young children to a safe place where they have a peaceful atmosphere, respect, and attentiveness from trained teachers, and where they can move at their own pace as they become masters of their own bodies and minds, is a gift. The Young Children’s Community, with useful but tiny objects and perfectly-sized furniture, functioning refrigerator, sink, toilet, and toaster oven, all down at their level, empowers young children to boldly learn how to take care of themselves and contribute to others. Because Montessori teachers are trained to recognize developmental stages and needs, they are uniquely poised to help children when and where it matters most. The moments for language development, understanding processes and sequences for logical thinking, and setting the foundation for mathematical and higher thinking are attended to.

Furthermore, as human beings, we are designed to connect with others. Our young children have this need from the beginning of life. Their social development, self-awareness, and communication skills need attention to develop well in the early years. So, come to school, Little Ones! The Montessori Young Children’s Community is here for you at Forest Bluff.

Listen to Building a Fou ndat ion for Life to learn more about how the Young Children’s Community supports the development of children under the age of three.

Talking to Children About Money

Tue, 06 Aug 2019 13:36:50 GMT

A Tough Topic for Many, an Essential Topic for All

Money can be a topic wrought with emotion and social confusion. Children pick up on the ambiguity, the uncertainty, and the power of this mysterious subject—one that they encounter, in some way or another, almost daily. How do parents introduce them to this aspect of their adult lives? How do parents explain the complex feelings they themselves may have about the subject? Talking to children about money—something that for an adult might involve feelings of shame, insecurity, or maybe even resentment—can be challenging. Parents can try to stay on a surface level in conversations, but children pick up on the emotions and judgment that lie just beneath that surface. Wherever they consider themselves to be on the financial security/success scale, parents can’t get away with being vague for too long.

As Ron Lieber explains in The Opposite of Spoiled , whether a family is high or low or somewhere in between on the national scale of incomes, not talking to children about money is failing them. Instead, he says, embrace the opportunities to pass on life values. He encourages parents to start discussing the subject even if they haven’t figured it all out for themselves yet. Just get started and work through it, he advises.

Talking to children about money is complicated further by a constant barrage of messages from others—from the media and advertisements that are everywhere that children turn. Lieber calls this an “engine of envy” and a “torrent of longing” that presents temptations to children and young adults every day. If parents don’t say much, children will form their values from elsewhere.

Montessori and Money

Dr. Montessori embraced this topic as a fascinating study in human exchanges and agreements. She encouraged educators and parents to let children handle real coins and paper money, and to study how different civilizations created monies to address issues that arose with trading goods and exchanging. In the Lower Elementary Montessori classrooms, 6-to-9-year-olds use real coins and paper money for counting and making combinations that are relevant in current culture. Children work through mathematical equations using money combinations and solve word problems about real-life situations. This gives them familiarity and confidence with the subject on basic levels. They also learn about economic geography by studying where certain goods are manufactured in our country and in the world, using stamps to create their own ink maps. They study the progression and transformation of goods, such as wheat as it is made into bread. The children investigate all the persons who are involved in such processes, from the miller, to the baker, to the storekeeper, to the truck drivers, and so on. This builds an attitude of appreciation and an understanding of economic sequences and relationships.

In Upper Elementary Montessori classrooms, children ages 9-12 learn more about world economies and taxes, and through some presentations from their teachers as well as their own studies of different topics, their knowledge and understanding of finances grows.

In the Secondary Level , adolescents in Montessori programs begin to make crafts and sell them to participate in a local economy and raise funds for various school activities. They plan service trips that require a detailed budget, created by a student finance committee. At Forest Bluff School, students also balance their own classroom account and walk to the local bank to make deposits and withdrawals. The Secondary Level adolescents’ discussions about the financial world extend from articles in the periodicals that come to the classroom daily, including the Wall Street Journal that relays the stock market activity and The Economist that gives a global perspective on issues of the day.

Talking About Values

It is crucial, however, that parents and extended family members address the topic of money from home and outside of school as well. Wise mottos on this subject are easy to find. Basic ones every child can benefit from are:

Spend less than you make. Money can create interest when in the bank where it is being used and builds interest over time. Borrowing money means a person is spending more, not less, and companies might benefit if they can entice a person to spend.

Build a work ethic throughout life. From a Montessori perspective, this begins at birth, believe it or not! It is about valuing effort in the infant who is trying to do something for herself or himself. Parents help their child immeasurably, for instance, when they patiently and unobtrusively support a 15-month-old who is attempting to button her own shirt or pull on her sock. The simple act of giving the child the time and space to dress herself (rather than take control of the situation because it’s faster and easier for the parent) establishes a precedent for the child that she is already an independent, capable being who can accomplish great things with focused effort. These early experiences with self-reliance and persistence lay the foundation for a strong work ethic and a can-do attitude. At each stage of childhood, there are relevant challenges that adults can support their children to embark on, encouraging a strong work ethic from the beginning.

Money is about human values , not about stuff . Everyone knows the sayings Money can’t buy you happiness and You can’t take it with you, but the behavior children see all around them competes with these ideas. It’s important to discuss advertisements with children to help them develop the ability to take a step back and discern accurately.

Today’s surrounding culture will give children ample soil for developing their views about money. This is why it is so important for parents to talk about the subject and to see the conversations as wonderful opportunities to pass on enduring values.

Young Children

With very young children, this can be done simply by modeling values in one’s daily choices and activities. A parent can begin thinking about why he or she made simple decisions, such as whether or not to purchase something—a certain food over another, for instance. A parent can do this, knowing that before long, their young children will articulate these very questions in the form of “Why can’t I have that Pop-Tart instead of this orange?” When they ask such questions, a parent might answer, “It is important to me to give your growing body the nutrition it needs to be healthy and happy. That’s my job as your parent.” (Note: This is a statement that involves no negotiating ! If these are personal values, then they belong to that person. Realize, the parent is in charge of this, not the children.)

Elementary, Ages 6-12

As children get older and they notice their parents buying their clothes at a discount store instead of where a friend goes shopping, this is an opportunity for parents to verbalize the choice. A parent can steer answers towards their values. Instead of saying “we cannot afford…” or passing judgment on what “other people” do, a parent can explain that they want to have money for other things that they value more than name-brand clothing. This models and exposes children to decision-making and personal values.

When children ask their parents, “Why does that man drive an expensive car?” that parent has an opportunity for a discussion, which can always lead back to what they value and how their values are shaped. Adults can honor other people’s choices nonjudgmentally, since one often doesn’t always know why other people make the choices they make. A parent may decide to share the message that “the most important things in life are not things —they are experiences and people and stories.” And yes, sometimes these are represented by things, but they are not the things themselves.

Beyond the commercially-produced games that one could buy that teach children about money, parents can make up games with coins and dollars, to help their children learn about finances. For example, in The Seven Habits of Highly Effective Families , Stephen Covey explains a game one family played to help their children learn basic principles of finance right in their own living room. In sum, they set up the room with four stations: a pretend “bank,” a “store,” a “credit card company,” and a “charity” stand. Starting a stopwatch to keep track of the time, they gave the children “jobs” to do, such as folding laundry and sweeping, and then paid them a dime for doing this work every few minutes when a timer went off. Then the stopwatch alarm went off again, and the parents stopped the children to let them either spend their dimes at the store, use it to borrow more from the credit card company, put it in the bank, or some combination. They resumed the work cycle, and then another bell went off, signaling time to collect on—or distribute— interest ! Experiencing what happens when one has borrowed, versus seeing the money grow in the bank, made these children understand something that many adults still have trouble getting used to! The promises that come in the junk mail about how “easy” it might be to spend money one does not actually have may be leading a generation of young people to confusion. But by talking about this and playing simple games, parents can get the basic ideas across and have fun doing it.

Adolescents and Young Adults

Adolescence is when the more subtle and complex aspects of investing, taxes, money management, and economies in the wider world become fascinating. Adolescents are beginning to realize they will need to be independent from their parents someday, and the internal feelings can be daunting. They need conversations about how it all works and how they are going to make their own way in the future.

At Forest Bluff, we encourage families to tell their adolescents ages 12 to 15 that these are “skill building years” when they should not expect to be paid, but should seek out internships, apprenticeships, and jobs in businesses outside of their family circle. This way, young adults learn customer service, how to talk with strangers, how to be helpful, how to get a job done well, what people value in the workplace, and how it all works. Most importantly, they get to be a part of it.

Young workers will see people from all walks of life. They’ll notice those who take constant cigarette breaks and those who stay late to finish packing boxes. They’ll come into contact with rude customers and might witness random acts of kindness as well. By showing up on time and acting responsibly, adolescents may be promoted to working behind the desks or interacting with customers. Many will find that employers want to pay them when they find that their work contributes and that they are dependable. It can take time to prove oneself, and this is, in itself, a lesson of how the workforce operates. Having one’s contributions valued is incredibly validating for a young person. Starting at these jobs by working for free in their early teens typically leads to building skills that make children employable at sixteen—the age when others might be trying to find a job for the first time, with no real experience under their belts.

A Family Culture Moving Forward

Families that talk about their values and about money, who plan together and work like a team to support one another, will find that finances can be a natural part of their family lives. Parents are wise to talk with their children about what determines the true wealth of any family: These can be thought of as human capital, intellectual capital, financial capital, and social capital. On any level, a family can look at what areas they may need to invest in: intellectual capital means education, experiences such as camps or courses, eventual careers, and the coaching and mentoring the family might be able to invest in. Social capital has to do with philanthropy and helping others in one’s communities, whether by giving time and volunteer energies, or with financial donations ( The Legacy Family , Hausner & Freeman).

A common question is whether children ought to be paid for chores . The research shows strongly that paying children for actions that ought to be normal parts of daily living—such as tidying up one’s things, helping to make meals, carrying groceries into the house, or taking out the garbage when it is full—backfires. Is anyone paying the adults in a family to do these things for the rest of the group? If children are paid, then how are they being prepared for normal adulthood? Studies show that children who do choresfor which they arenot paid are happier, healthier, and more successful, not only in life but academically as well. Contributing to the life of one’s family or group builds values and character, a collaborative mentality, and maturity. It prepares them for life.

Making It Last

Parents may choose to avert their family’s attentions from making opinions about money or judging the decisions of friends, and instead focus on the idea of passing on values from generation to generation. A warning to wealthy families comes in the proverb of “Shirtsleeves to shirtsleeves in three generations” or “Rice paddies to rice paddies…” or “Orange grove to orange grove…”. In any culture around the globe, there is a common pattern of younger generations losing the wealth passed on to them. If given money without learning to carefully and conservatively build financial stability, a family can lose the work ethic and values that created the success in their previous generations. So, this passing on of values should be a constant concern in any family, wealthy or not. Every parent hopes to raise children who can build financial security and prosperity in adulthood. A focus on values guides parents to think about the realities of adulthood when making decisions with their children and discussing money. In the Montessori approach, the goal is not to educate children for another level of schooling, but for life!

Dr. Montessori said about money:

"It is clear that we cannot give all these different notions that ought to be developed to the child all at once, but one should give practical possibilities of studying the different sides and by means of material, gradually go through the different stages throughout the ages…you will see how easy it is to render clear to the child these first fundamental steps…It forms a real study that must develop gradually as all the other studies do" (1939 AMI Journal article from Montessori archives).

So, in the spirit of the Montessori approach that encourages us to connect with our children on all subjects, talk about money this summer, play some games, and embrace the opportunities to express your heartfelt life values with your children.

Games for Children

The Game of Life by Hasbro

Cash Flow for Kids by Robert Kiyosaki

A New Resource for Parents and Educators: “Montessori from the Start” Discussion Guide

Wed, 12 Jun 2019 15:36:40 GMT

Education Begins at Birth

Dr. Maria Montessori, a trained physician who specialized in pediatrics and psychiatry before establishing her own educational philosophy and approach, recognized that tremendous brain, motor, and personality development occur during the first three years of a child’s life. These observations, once considered revolutionary, are now widely accepted among early childhood professionals and researchers.

Given her understanding of the earliest years of human development—in which the child, from the moment he is born, uses all his senses for the important work of constructing his own personality and intellect—Montessori believed that education begins at birth. Accordingly, she emphasized the importance of preparing the home environment and caring for the youngest of children in a way that supports their intrinsic drive to learn and need for independence.

Montessori from the Start

At Forest Bluff School, we offer Montessori parenting classes about Dr. Montessori’s theories and her recommendations for parents of very young children. In each session we discuss ideas and offer practical suggestions to help parents in meeting their children’s needs for: independence in self-care, coordinated movement of the whole body, language acquisition, and the gradual development of a self-controlled will. The inspiration and guiding principles for these parenting classes come from Montessori from the Start: The Child at Home, from Birth to Age Three , coauthored by Forest Bluff School co-founders Paula Polk Lillard and Lynn Lillard Jessen.

Montessori from the Start was written to be a resource for parents wondering how they can best support the development of their babies and young children within a Montessori framework. In explaining how the Montessori approach of hands-on learning and self-discovery relates to babies and young children, the authors refer to Dr. Montessori’s suggestions for raising infants and the materials she created for the care and comfort of babies. Since its first publication in 2003, parents and caregivers have turned to Montessori from the Start when seeking advice on feeding, sleeping, toilet training, and more.

The Discussion Guide

To further support parents and schools who wish to engage in deeper conversation about the topics presented in the book, there is now a Montessori from the Start Discussion Guide , with thought-provoking questions to accompany each chapter. We encourage parents and educators to download the Discussion Guide and use it for both individual reflection and small group discussion. At Forest Bluff School, we gather with parents in guided conversations throughout the school year. The feedback we most often receive from parents is how reassuring and helpful it is for them to share with each other their parenting challenges and successes.

When leading a small group discussion about Montessori from the Start , we recommend focusing on one particular topic or chapter that can be explored in depth, such as preparing the home environment or the child’s need for real-world sensorial experiences and objects. The questions for each chapter begin with a pertinent quote from the book, which can be used as a springboard for conversation. For example, in the chapter titled “Discovering the World” the authors state:

It is important now to take time to think about the organization of the home… Does it make sense? Is it ordered, simple, and functional? Is it beautiful? We want the baby to discover an orderly environment and thereby incorporate this order within her own mind (p. 47).

Questions to accompany this quote are:

What are the areas of your own home where it is the most challenging to create order? Are there areas that are naturally organized? What are ways you have found that make it easier to have an orderly home?

The above quote and accompanying questions could themselves inspire an hour-long discussion about how to best organize a home for the needs of the young child. Once parents get talking and sharing ideas, the discussion may take on a life of its own. We suggest introducing new questions and quotes on an as-needed basis, to guide the discussion back to the topic at hand, rather than trying to “get through” a predetermined number of discussion questions.

In addition to providing context for the questions, the selected quotes are helpful for parents who may not have read the book in its entirety. At Forest Bluff School, we believe it is important to invite parents to participate in book discussions even if they have not yet had an opportunity to read the book. The Montessori from the Start Discussion Guide was written such that it can be used regardless of whether or not someone has read the book, as many of the questions require self-reflection and thinking about one’s own child. For example, in making the point that the youngest of children need experiences with the real world—rather than screens and fantastical realms—the authors state:

This is the time [12-18 months] to begin the habit of a daily walk with your child. This walk should be a meandering one, one that follows the child’s mission, not the adult’s. The child stops to inspect everything… In our accomplishment-oriented lives, we lose sight of the joy and beauty of living in the moment and of savoring the details of life (p. 85).

The accompanying questions are ones that any parent can ponder:

When have you had the experience of slowing your own life to your child’s pace? What did you notice about the world during these times? How did you feel? How did your child respond to this period of time that was adjusted to her own pace?

Whether you are an educator looking to engage parents of young children in conversation about Montessori-based parenting principles or an expectant parent wondering how you can prepare your home for your newborn, the Montessori from the Start Discussion Guide can serve as a useful tool for reflection and inspiration. Given what we now know about early childhood brain development, it is clear that Dr. Montessori was right in her assertion that the youngest of children are doing the critical work of constructing their intellect and personality from the moment they are born. By thinking about and sharing ideas about parenting from a Montessori perspective, parents can feel more confident about their choices when deciding how to best support their child’s early development.

PDF of Montessori from the Start Discussion Guide

PDF of Montessori from the Start Abridged Discussion Guide

PDF of Montessori Today Discussion Guide

Cultivating the Scientific Mind: Montessori Science, Part II

Fri, 10 May 2019 21:06:51 GMT

The continuation of this article (see Part I), now referring to Montessori science for Upper Elementary-aged children and adolescents, is partly based on my notes from lectures in the Adolescent Orientation Studies in 2018, given by John MacNamara. Some phrases and sections are almost word-for-word John MacNamara’s, so we can thank John for his generous wisdom!

John MacNamara was trained as a Montessori teacher in Bergamo, Italy in the 1970s by Mario Montessori’s closest collaborator, Camillo Grazzini. John has been teaching classes of roughly forty adolescents in a combined seventh and eighth grade classroom at Ruffing Montessori School in Cleveland, Ohio for the past 47 years. As a mathematician and scientist, he often speaks to the integration of these two disciplines and to the wonderful ways that the Montessori approach of education allows children to explore and develop their minds with all disciplines interrelated.

Experiential Learning

In order to become a scientist, the learning cannot be abstract; children need to develop understandings by doing . Montessori educator John MacNamara emphasizes this point by saying, “Hopefully, there will not be a lot of teaching going on in my Montessori classroom, but there will be a lot of learning !”

In all of the presentations that a Montessori teacher gives, he or she works from the general to the specific, from the whole to the details. When children come to Upper Elementary Level, the expectation is that they will explore, propose ideas, learn how to organize and plan, and be intentional in their work. When the Montessori teacher sees that Upper Elementary children need a new piece of information to carry on their work further, he or she gives the relevant presentation—such as graphing, ratio, or how to make a chart to analyze and compare data—and the children can incorporate that new tool of knowledge into their repertoire.

It is important to recognize that this is backwards from the way we are used to thinking of schooling. But as a text book has already decided an order and what answers should be found, if the teacher teaches with a set list for every child, the child’s energies will quickly disengage and go elsewhere. The child’s energies want, by nature, to fix upon a path of his own designing, and so, Montessori teachers must notice children’s interests and pepper the way in front of them with more wonderful nuggets to choose from. When a child grows up this way, exercising his will and his ability to choose, every day, he becomes a person who chooses, who directs himself, and pursues passions with purpose. The Montessori child has been allowed to find out how to steer himself, and so this is what he does into adulthood.

This is really quite simple, although most Montessori graduates think it odd that everyone they meet in adulthood isn’t this way. I hear them say that they often wondered, “Why would I do something just to impress people? Why do people do that?” Montessori students don’t learn the game of performing to get a grade and then remain disinterested in the content being discussed. That kind of boredom is foreign to them. Instead, Montessori children are doers, they are learners, and they are excited about life! They seek to understand, and they have years of experience pursuing new information to form their structures of knowledge. This is a direct result from the way they were treated as scientific learners with the Montessori approach.

What Students Do

The Montessori Elementary curriculum begins with science on the very first day of every year with the first Great Lesson about the universe, and the threads of scientific study and exploration continue every day in the classrooms. As the children work their ways down different paths of interest, the classroom becomes a rich breeding ground of questions and answers between the students themselves. In describing what has happened this spring in her Upper Elementary classroom, Forest Bluff Director Regina Cyvas Sokolowski explains: “There are a number of constructions that came about from the children's own ideas; they may have been inspired from a conversation in a lesson or while talking with their classmates, but the beauty of the uninterrupted work period is that they are given the time to explore these ideas. Sometimes they bring in, or research, diagrams. Then they gather classroom materials or even bring in things from home to make their constructions.” Recent examples of such work include:

One group constructed an electric car. They brought in wheels, a 9-volt battery, and some wires from home and found towels, hot glue, cardboard, aluminum foil, and some other supplies in the classroom. By soldering and connecting the wires and lots of trial and error, they got it to move!

Another group wanted to construct a freezer. They had researched items that would serve as good insulators and had to tweak the original diagram they found which suggested using dry ice. Instead, they used many layers of cardboard, felt, and duct tape and then tested it by putting ice on one side and their lunches on the other. The ice did not melt, and their lunches stayed cool! For aesthetic purposes, they decided to add some LED lights and wheels so that it could be portable.

After a discussion of the scientific method and how to construct an experiment, a group of five children designed paper airplanes, which they tested over seven trials each and then averaged the distance traveled. They repeated the trials by adding some coins to the airplanes so that they would weigh more to see how it affected the distance traveled.

A number of children studied the heart and the circulatory system after a lesson on that topic. One girl traced herself and then did a life-sized drawing of the circulatory system. Another girl made models of parts of the circulatory system using clay and acrylic paint.

Earlier in the winter, some children chose to dissect baby sharks to investigate other body systems. They mail-ordered the specimens and made an appointment with a local surgeon to come be their resident expert to assist them at the school for their two-hour dissection.

Several students built pulley systems, following a brief lesson that introduced the concept of a pulley. Students explored the idea and those of other simple machines to create chain reactions. The class discussed the clever drawings of artist Rube Goldberg, and many students were further inspired from that discussion. As is the case with many things in a Montessori classroom, the children got excited by each other's ideas, so they had five or six of these chain reactions constructed within a few weeks’ time. Some of the children went on to build miniature gondolas and zip lines as a continuation. A few were even battery operated!

This is just a sample of scientific explorations, which ebb and flow and migrate into different subject areas over the months and years in our classrooms.

All such science activities are supported by the adults but not directed by them. The students direct themselves, and to witness this is inspiring. One morning, the three boys making an electric car asked me to be the adult to be present in the Parent Child room while they used a hot glue gun and a soldering iron. They had all their supplies laid out on a floor table, their face masks were in place, and they were ready to proceed. I did my paperwork off to the side but looked up and watched now and then, seeing that they were handling everything responsibly. I was so impressed! It was like watching three little men, and even their comments to each other demonstrated their maturity and focused states of mind:

“You are like a surgeon’s assistant, you know.”

“Yes, now, hold these wires here off to the side if you would, thanks.”

“Careful, now; the wires are drooping there…”

“Oh! Are you OK? Sorry about that.”

“Here we go. Please hold your hand steady. Don’t move.”

To watch the intense focus of these three boys, ages ten and eleven, and their smooth movements and collaboration was amazing. I noticed the fine motor control and finger dexterity necessary for such maneuvers, which Montessori students develop from their youngest ages with the Montessori materials and activities.

In the Secondary Level, the adolescents move through units of scientific study on topics of chemistry, physics, and anatomy, for example, although science is integrated into all aspects of the curriculum. Science relates closely with mathematics, for instance, because all of our math work and math seminars deal with scientific notation with exponents and scientific concepts. Most importantly, “math encourages students to refine their reasoning powers,” Secondary Level Directors Matt Robbins and Elisabeth Miles explain. “They learn to question and to prove how they know what they know. There is an ethical development that happens through showing your work, being honest with yourself when you need help, and following through with your stated goals.” This ethical development transfers and relates directly to work in the sciences.

Spontaneous scientific exploration occurs in the Secondary Level as well. This semester, a girl studying music designed and conducted an experiment and then wrote the results in her Independent Study Project, following the structure of the scientific method. This past fall, students learned about anatomy and physiology by studying human body systems. They designed and conducted their own experiments with the scientific method and then embarked on a study of the human brain, involving a visit to Lake Forest College to meet with professor Shubik DebBurman and his team in the Neurons, Brains, to Behavior Lab.

Independent Thinking for The Later Years

With traditional science experiments for adolescents, the conclusion is already known before the students begin the experiment—the results and procedures to follow are already known as well. But with the Montessori approach, students ask the questions and determine how to proceed to find an answer. They develop an independence and a willingness to take risks, leading to real scientific thinking. They create their own experiments and practice scientific inquiry in action. As their interest piques, they may also conduct self-study and research to further their knowledge and love of science.

Math and science formulas are not the first things Montessori students learn, which is the pattern of teaching in conventional programs. In conventional settings, curricula, textbooks, and workbooks teach formulas to memorize . Instead, in Montessori, we present strategies to develop. Students work with strategies, and they develop their own unique strategies as well. The students have to understand what is behind their strategies as they use them, which makes them really think things through. The formulas the students discover through their work are their points of arrival, giving them the thrill of discovery just as the first scientists felt.

We must always keep in mind that we are aiming to help children develop their own sets of strategies, not to teach them to memorize isolated strategies such as shortcuts, invented by others. This latter, popular approach of most science programs leaves students without the foundation they need to build for themselves. Think about it: if students forget the shortcut a teacher taught them, they will be lost. This is why it is imperative that parents and other math or science programs not “help” our students by giving them shortcuts. Shortcuts are wonderful strategies children will invent on their own if they are really engaged and ready to find them with their own minds. When we hand shortcut procedures over to children, we hand a crutch without the context and foundation the students needed to truly reach the epiphany for themselves. Every mind works a little differently, so each scientist needs the chance to develop their own strategies.

Framework Matters

Establishing a framework of information for each individual is important, too. Eventually, learning procedures without a conceptual framework will get you into trouble in science and math. John MacNamara tells us that Dr. Montessori said, “To teach details is to bring confusion. To establish relationships between things is to bring knowledge.” In the Elementary program, we begin by giving students the framework of the entire universe with everything it holds. The basic laws of physics and chemistry that give our earth shape, gravity, states of matter, heat, etc., are presented to the children in a series of key lessons that help elementary students to form structures of knowledge and simultaneously ask questions they want to find the answers to. In this way, our children are scientists from their very first day. They begin to develop the frameworks of scientific inquiry and how to set up research as well as experiments with a hypothesis, listing their materials, describing their procedures for what they plan to do, and reflecting on the results of what happened afterwards.

This practice, which begins formally at age six in the Lower Elementary, evolves to higher levels of sophistication by the time students are in middle school and can use more advanced equipment to inquire about their interests. Eventually, they will be able to use and understand advanced equipment like centrifuges and how they may be applied in science experiments. John MacNamara required his adolescent students to be serious and official about their work, so the data they collected would be real. Needless to say, this was a lot of fun for them, and they learned a lot while doing it. Simultaneously, many other experiments were going on, but from these more gradual studies, students see how long it can take to get the results of some investigations. It takes stamina to return to the same ongoing study over multiple months or years. The thrust of the work is rooted in the students’ curiosity. MacNamara says, “The role of Montessori education is to interest the student profoundly in an activity that he or she will bring all of his and her potential to.”

Asking Original Questions, Pursuing Answers, and Expressing One’s Findings

In Montessori programs, the teachers capture the children’s attention and stimulate their thinking by asking intriguing questions and by demonstrations that show phenomena, without providing answers. In guiding the students to access what they already know, Montessori teachers begin any new presentation by helping students to orient themselves. Students then want to fill in the new blanks by acquiring more information by their own research, experiments, and investigations.

The teachers help their students learn how to plan and carry out purposeful experiments that relate to their questions. They show them how to report what happened accurately, with the vocabulary and language that accurately communicates. Children are taught, from age six onward, how to design an experiment, repeat a scientific demonstration, and record their data. While very cursory at first, by age nine children are taught to transfer their data into graphs, tables, pie graphs, and other clear formats. By age twelve, students are shown how to present their data with percentages and ratios. Using these formats in such relevant ways makes them more meaningful, accessible, and familiar before students graduate to middle school.

Scientific Thought as a Natural Development

John MacNamara explains, “It is as ridiculous to think of math or science as a subject to be taught as it is to think of any ability to be developed. Do you say, ‘I taught my child to talk?’ or, ‘I taught my child to walk?’” Try thinking of the development of children’s scientific minds and mathematical minds the same way. We do not teach math and science to children; we give them the world to observe and wonder about, and through our linking them to interact with the environment—through their unique experiences and activities—our children develop themselves as mathematicians and scientists.

This is the beauty of Montessori education: we are not teaching children to go through the motions; we are treating them as the creating thinkers they are, developing their own thinking processes. These processes become the children’s individualized ones, that make sense to them, that they can understand, remember, use again and again, refine, and develop further as they add more experiences. Every day, our children are building their scientific minds and having fun doing it. And as John MacNamara says, “It is the not knowledge but the act of learning that grants the greatest enjoyment, in any subject.” When there is enjoyment, there is full engagement and a lasting impact. What more could we want for our children’s education in the area of science?

The Birth of the Scientific Mind: Montessori Science, Part I

Thu, 11 Apr 2019 21:18:23 GMT

It Begins with Observation

To help our children develop scientific minds, we first focus on their powers of observation. Babies observe their surroundings from birth. However, the ability to observe well must be cultivated throughout childhood. Being able to still oneself, to notice the sounds, smells, sights and details surrounding you is key to becoming a good scientist. Children need self-discipline and self-restraint, as well as the patience for deep thought, wondering and observing. Young children need to watch the natural world in order to understand the basic laws of science and how things work. They need the time to quietly watch and understand the real world, to create small experiments, to wonder, to ask questions.

Under the Age of Six

In the first three years of life, our children absorb a large collection of sensations and experiences that form their psyche, or who they become. They gather impressions of heat, darkness, rough surfaces, smooth surfaces, tastes, smells, breezes, largeness and smallness, and so on. This unconscious absorbing process happens through their interactions with the world, and the more young children directly relate with the real world and acquire as many impressions as possible, the more full their “library” of resources for understanding the real sciences of physics, chemistry, botany, etc.

From ages three to six, children take the chaos of all these impressions and begin to organize it in their minds. Through the Sensorial Materials in the Montessori Primary classroom, children begin to recognize differences of three-dimensional sizes with the Pink Tower, of width with the Brown Stair, and of length with the Red Rods. This begins a foundation for scientific discernment and investigation. Young children naturally explore and are drawn to compartmentalizing and distinguishing very subtle and minute differences. This is the purpose of working with the cavities and the cylinders of Montessori’s Cylinder Blocks, for instance. By working with the specially-designed Sensorial Materials, Montessori children investigate and begin to make sense of the world.

Next, the Montessori teacher gives the language to name these differentiations, and children begin to own the information in a more conscious manner around ages four, five and six. The Pink Tower cubes are small, smaller, smallest ; the Red Rods are long, longer, longest and short, shorter, shortest . The children can differentiate that “this rod is longer than that one but shorter than this other one.” By the time children reach age six, the Montessori environment has helped them to explore and catalog much about the world for themselves, and our children now have the knowledge to express what they see and experience.

Thus, at very young ages, our children have gathered information about biology—animals, insects, plants, leaf shapes, and the smells, sights, behaviors, and sensations of many things in the natural world. They have collected impressions of geography and of measurement, of liquids in vessels and of temperature. They recognize qualities in their surroundings:

“That stick is longer than this one!”

“This leaf is a certain distinguishable shape and it has a scientific name. It is a different shape from this one over here, called a hastate leaf.”

“Florida is a land form in the water. I can see that it is a peninsula !”

The world lights up for them because of their new knowledge. Montessori children acquire a strong foundation of science, while simultaneously developing control of their hands and body movements and the ability to focus their attention on learning—all before reaching the first grade!

The Elementary Years

Montessori alerted us to a great change that happens around age six: “Education between the ages of six and twelve is not a direct continuation of that which has gone before, though to be built upon that basis. Psychologically there is a decided change in personality, and we recognize that nature has made this a period for the acquisition of culture, just as the former was for the absorption of the environment. We are confronted with a considerable development of consciousness that has already taken place…thrown outwards with a special direction, intelligence being extroverted, and there is an unusual demand on the part of the child to know the reasons of things.”

To meet this reasoning mind that wants to explore the intellectual world more than the physical world, our plan of education changes to match the new characteristics and needs of the six- to twelve-year-old. Instead of giving children experiences for distinguishing and discerning information that we can see, touch, smell, hear and taste, we now tell the children stories that ignite their imaginations and plant seeds of interest in a wide variety of topics, all interrelated—as they shall find—which they are then inspired from within to pursue and learn about. The Montessori Elementary teachers tell a story first about the creation of the universe, and the children burst with curiosity. They ask: “Why? How? When? How is this possible!? Is that what really happened?” Their own exploration of facts and scientific information begins as a fiery quest to educate themselves—a quest that goes on and on, as new information begets new questions and vice versa.

The first story is called God with No Hands to accentuate the mystery of how this first explosion that created our universe—as far as humans have been able to relate—happened without hands causing it or carving its parts. The children then look to atoms, protons and neutrons. They learn how molecules behave when heated and when cooled. They learn about how some molecules attract one another and others repel, and about all the drama of science in early space. This first story gives a foundation, a source, on which the children can focus their wandering, wondering minds as they begin to uncover for themselves the history of the universe and everything in it. From there, the children build an inner scaffolding, placing each new bit of information they discover into the structures they themselves design in their minds, each one making sense to that particular child with his or her own way of thinking. In this way, Montessori children create their own science educations, with help from the teacher who offers presentations that give clues and bits of information that each child can take and arrange neatly into his or her own mind as they go along.

In the presentation of that first story, the teacher sets up and conducts several experiments which make lasting impressions that inform the children on basic scientific facts. All matter settled into one of three states, for instance: solids, liquids, and gases. The children see the ice cube, the water in a glass, and the empty glass of air and understand that everything is in one of these states. Later they may discover that there’s more to this, but this is the start of understanding all matter in the universe and how it is categorized.

A simple new piece of information, discovered in this way, now becomes enlightening—children begin to see the world around them anew:

“This table is a solid!”

“That orange juice is a liquid!”

“The space inside my glass before I poured the orange juice in was gas!”

And they begin to flood with more questions:

“Where did the gas go when I poured in the liquid?”

Their inquisitive minds surge forward on a never-ending journey of discovery, one that is happening all the time, whether they are in school or elsewhere. This is how the scientific way of thinking is cultivated in the early years and sets our children up for deeper study in the Upper Elementary and Secondary years and throughout their lives.

The First Months: Developing an Outlook for Life

Fri, 08 Mar 2019 20:46:00 GMT

Long before neuroscience revealed that rapid brain development happens in the first years of a child’s life in a way that never happens again, Dr. Montessori pointed out that it must be so. Simply look at how children learn to speak, walk, and understand so much of what is happening around them by their third birthday, and you realize that a very special kind of brain is at work.

Dr. Montessori wrote, “…the truth emerges that the child has a type of mind that absorbs knowledge, and thus instructs himself. This is easily proved by the child’s acquisition of a language—a great intellectual feat. The child of two speaks the language of his parents, though no one has taught him” ( Education for a New World ).

Montessori proposed that children have a special ability to absorb new knowledge because there is an “inner teacher” that gives human beings the ability to teach themselves, guiding little children towards what they need to learn in order to survive and become a part of their human community. To respect and help this natural guide, adults need to pay attention to the environment they are providing for infants and young children, placing what is most useful for their development within easy reach. Next, we need to give infants and young children freedom to interact with the environment that we have thoughtfully prepared. This is an important aspect of the Montessori approach: every child is a unique individual who will carve a unique path for himself or herself. The freedom to make choices is imperative for this natural process to occur within each child.

“Education begins at birth,” Dr. Montessori often said. This is true in the sense that we adults do not “teach” children; they teach themselves. When we adopt this perspective, parents can understand how important it is to consider the needs and sensitivities of their infants at home, from the very beginning. This is a natural desire for parents; our instinct is to protect, nurture, and marvel at our newborns and infants in their rapid, daily acquisitions. We can see before our eyes their seemingly magical abilities at work. We want to do everything we can to help them and to remove obstacles from their paths.

Preparing Your Home for a Newborn

“Scientific observation…has established that education is not what the teacher gives; education is a natural process spontaneously carried out by the human individual, and is acquired not by listening to words but by experiences upon the environment…” (Montessori, Education for a New World ). Education, therefore, is everything that a child is learning in his or her life.

Providing an environment for infants to live in and to explore is the first thing parents do, even before their infant is born. Clearly, the first consideration is that infants have spiritual needs such as love, protection, and care. But in a physical sense, infants need four things: nourishment, hygiene, sleep, and movement. Not only do you need to set up your home for your infant, you need to set up your own strategies for yourself in order to prepare for any accidents that may occur along the way. So, that's why when setting up your home for your infant, you need to think of these four areas as guidelines to help you organize your space to prevent any dangers and so they can learn. Your infant will need an area for:

nourishment , which may be a nursing chair or wherever their mother’s body is if she is the source of nourishment
hygiene , to bathe them and change their diapers
sleeping , which may be a floor bed or some other safe infant bed
movement , which will be a flat, safe space on a floor mat or a blanket where they can roll, inch, and move.

For each of these areas, it is important to consider that your infant is developing every minute. Offering your eye contact, touching them gently, and speaking to them are natural ways to feed your infant’s needs to develop and to communicate.

We will elaborate here on just one of these four areas for the purpose of this article: your infant’s area for movement .

Movement: Things to Look At, Move Towards, and Grasp

Putting our infants on the floor, a rug, mat, or blanket—as much as we can and wherever we go—gives them the gift of being able to move and to interact with their surroundings. Doing this sends a powerful message: You are the main participant in your life . This mindset sets the stage both for you as a parent—as a supporter of your child’s development—and for your child to develop independence, confidence, a realistic sense of him/herself, and response-ability: the ability to respond to one’s surroundings.

Infants are people, too! In fact, they are arguably in the very most important stage of their lives; from the moment they are born, they are either sleeping or working on developing themselves. “Working” in this context, whether it is effortful or easy, can be thought of as a need and often a pleasure. Nature drives infants and children towards activities that are developmentally rewarding. Here is what we can give them to help:

Things to Look At

The least-developed sense when your infant is born is that of sight. Dr. Montessori and her collaborators designed mobiles that can be hung about one foot above newborns to offer something attractive to look at so that they can naturally work on developing their eyesight. These can be handmade if you are crafty and enjoy projects, but they are also available through MontiKids , an excellent on-line provider that sells high-quality Montessori materials and access to on-line demonstration videos and information. Montikids mobiles and materials for infants were designed under the advice and guidelines of an Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) trainer and are perfectly suited to developmental ages and stages. They are also beautiful, durable, and meet US safety standards.

Besides such mobiles, we do not see any reason to expose your infants or young children to anything but what nature provides for their eyesight and brain development. The natural movements of leaves and branches in the wind, birds and insects at work, the stars or clouds in the sky far away, the glistening of water, the reflections in window glass, and the infinite shades of color all around us provide endless information for our infants and young children. All of this is useful for their foundation of understanding. You don't have to put your child in front of a screen for them to see different colors and shapes. The development of eyesight is vital in babies. Mobiles that move by the air currents in a room, or from being pushed into motion by your hand, give proper stimulation for the newborn’s developing eyes. Your calm and simple surroundings in your home and the movements, sounds, and sights of your daily life offer countless impressions for your infants. Because we do not know enough about the long-term effects of looking at screens for newborns and young children—and many studies suggest drawbacks—we do not recommend putting screens in front of your infants to entertain them. See our post on screen time for more information on this topic.

Mobiles are useful for eye development for the first few weeks, but as infants become more interested in moving and grasping, mobiles are no longer needed and can be moved to a higher location.

Picture books—and the interaction and language exposure that we give our infants when we read aloud to them—are some of the most valuable items in a child’s early life. There is a strong internal magnet, it appears, that draws infants and young children towards people who are speaking to them. We can feed this human need by reading aloud to our children daily and often. See The Enchanted Hour: The Miraculous Power of Reading Aloud in the Age of Distraction for more information on this vital topic.

Photographs and artwork also offer color, shapes, and images, of course. Keeping the home simple and uncluttered draws children’s attention towards the beautiful, thoughtfully chosen items that are present. “Keep it simple” is a good motto for setting up your home—and for raising young children. In our culture, we put a lot of pressure on ourselves to do everything, be everywhere, and excel, as parents. But it is far more important to be relaxed, at ease, and present with our infants and young children. So, when providing things to look at, tend towards the simplified approach, which will also help make your home safer when your infant begins moving around in it.

Things to Move Towards

In our infants’ first environments, we can thoughtfully provide encouragement for their development and movement by placing a few simple structures in place. The first is a floor bed or mat that our infants can roll, squirm, and scoot on. Placing a low mirror at the height of this surface provides something very interesting to look at, inspiring your infant to lift his or her head and build torso and neck muscles as they gaze at themselves, you, and other reflections in the mirror. An infant’s desire to push up and look at the mirror drives the integration of his structural muscles and his growing intelligence about the world around him. Like building blocks, each stage of physical development evolves into the next when we provide an environment that encourages such self-directed movement.

Infant rattles made of natural fibers such as wood, soft metal, or cloth can be placed a few inches away from your infant so that he/she works to reach for it and eventually scoot toward it. As his/her body strengthens through natural movements on this surface, supply some rolling toys that will encourage further pursuit.

Many household items, such as a wire whisk, a smooth wooden spoon from the kitchen, or a soft nail brush from the bathroom, can also be wonderful objects for your infant’s exploration. (Just check any item first to be sure they are clean and safe for your infant to put in his/her mouth).

Keeping items on a low shelf in your infant’s bedroom or in an area for their activity is a safe way to display them. As your infant begins to move across the room of his or her own accord, this shelf of a few items will be a great attractant. To avoid having too many items out at once, keep some in a bin in a closet and rotate them. A basket on the floor also makes an orderly and convenient location for a few toys down on your infant’s level.

What’s the Point, Right Now?

Why does it matter whether our infants scoot, crawl, or have the freedom to move in their first year? It is not some benchmark scorecard we are after here: the physical capabilities of the body are important for their relevance to the child’s mind and evolving sense of self. Learning is directly linked to the connections and collaboration between the mind and the body. When an infant thinks a thought and their body can respond with movement, there is a feedback loop that refines and refines until more control and better precision of movement is achieved and more deliberate thought is carried out. This is a natural progression that occurs when our infants and young children are supported to explore, move, and think for themselves.

As they grow older, it is important to protect these times and spaces in our homes for our children to just think, explore, and “work” on things that nature drives them to do. It could be building with blocks, looking at picture books, drawing, or playing with toys. The independent play and the comfortable relationship with one’s surroundings, when not being entertained by an adult or by screens, begins in this first year of life and continues as our children develop their unique personalities.

To give a long-term example of how this might evolve, when our sixteen-year-old son fixed the tv cabinet door for me the other day, which was rigged with wires in a complex mechanism, I watched and thought, “I’m not sure he would have developed the patience, curiosity, problem-solving skills, or dexterity to figure out how to do that without so many hours of just exploring on his own as a child.” I myself certainly could not figure out how to fix these sliding cabinet doors. But as a child, our son was always tinkering and building, creating and thinking. I’m grateful we raised our children with lots of free time to explore their surroundings, seeing now how it pays off in their life skills and traits as young adults.

It’s not just that our son could fix something that was broken; it’s that he has these skills of problem solving, curiosity, and responsibility that will transfer to every aspect of his adult life. He consciously feels capable, just as an infant can unconsciously feel capable. This young man feels curious, and he can direct his hands to do what his mind is thinking, which are tendencies that began in his first year of life. In a gradual progression, our children develop these natural traits, following some internal “teacher” that we cannot see, all the way into adulthood. By not replacing these natural drives with our own adult desires to control or dictate, and by not obstructing them by keeping our infants in carriers or cribs when they ought to be moving about, we allow this natural process to unfold in our children.

With this in mind, I encourage you to notice how much time each day your infant is spending strapped into a car seat, stroller, or carrier; these items, which are necessary for safety and convenience, fix our children’s bodies in one position. When you make an effort to carry your baby in your arms or put them on the ground wherever possible, you are promoting their physical and intellectual development. You are encouraging them to use their structural torso muscles and to become actively engaged with their surroundings. Ultimately, you are helping them to develop confidence in their own abilities and a positive outlook for life.

Providing limits, boundaries, and routines is also, of course, an important aspect of our parenting, which balances with the freedoms we are emphasizing in this article. For more information on these topics see our blog posts on choices and limits and developing inner order .

Being the Parent of Newborns and Young Children is Important Work

Dr. Montessori spoke and wrote about child development and her positive educational approach from the early 1900s to the 1950s, through the two World Wars. She expressed the idea that children have within them innate abilities that—if nurtured and supported—help our children to grow up with confidence in themselves and a developed ability to work in harmony with their surroundings and each other. This was something Dr. Montessori referred to often at the conclusion of her talks. In a lecture from 1946, she ended by saying, “Human teachers can only help the great work that is being done, [inside the children as they teach themselves] as servants help the master. Doing so, [adults] will be witnesses to the unfolding of the human soul and to the rising of [individuals] who will not be the victim of events, but will have the clarity of vision to direct and shape the future of human society."

When you help your infants and young children at home and it is exhausting and demanding work, remember that your task is a special one! You are helping your children to get the best start in life—and to lay down the foundations of their characters—as people who realize their own abilities, feel respected for what they can do, and, therefore, feel empowered to affect their surroundings and other people, with respect. Your children absorb this way of interacting and this way of being from the attitude you treat them with in these early years. Do not worry about “teaching” your little children facts or feats; your task is to prepare a suitable environment for them to learn in, be a model and a source of love and language for them, and respect that they have in them an inner teacher that directs their development naturally. As a parent, you are the provider and the protector of this very special process.

A word about pacifiers: After the first weeks when a crying infant may benefit from the comfort of a pacifier, it is wise to dispose of them so that your infant uses all their mouth muscles and shares the sounds and expressions of communicating with others around them. Most speech pathologists will point out that many children who use pacifiers past their purpose develop habits of speaking and tongue motions that are not helpful in developing clear speech. Because communication is so integral to one’s developing personality and connection with others, we want to prioritize the healthy and natural progression of speech. In addition, having a pacifier in one’s mouth hides the expressions of smiling and lip motions that expressive infants are practicing when trying to communicate with us. Just as we want to give our children freedom to develop their abilities to move, we want to remove obstacles and allow freedom for their speech development as well.

In Pursuit of the Correct Answer: The Role of Process and Discovery in Montessori

Thu, 07 Feb 2019 23:17:03 GMT

Changing our View of Education: A Positive Approach

The positive nature of the Montessori approach, with its emphasis on process and discovery , is central to why it works so well for children in their development. When Dr. Montessori lectured in London in 1946, she pointed out that conventional education focuses on mistakes. Think of your own experiences and how your schooling was structured; you will probably remember that there was constant attention given to your errors. Avoiding errors was the thrust of the system. Even with a few enlightened, kind teachers here and there who emphasized process and exploring bravely, the main message for how you were to learn things was by having your mistakes pointed out to you daily in the form of testing, performing in front of classmates, and reaching for the one “correct” answer to each question. This emphasis, by design, encourages children to lose confidence in their originality. And, yet, we know that developing unique perspectives is invaluable. Thus, the very thing that makes society prosper is being discouraged on a daily basis in our conventional school model.

You may be wondering how there could be another way to teach, when there are certain areas in life where there really is just one correct answer. Mathematics and science are not a matter of opinion, for instance. There are facts that children must learn in order to succeed in some areas. Which is more important: the process, which leaves room for originality, or the answer, which must be consistent with the truth? The answer is both, and Montessori’s approach allows for this interesting dynamic to play out in the classroom, as it does in real science laboratories and in sophisticated math discussions. Dr. Montessori discovered that there is an alternative way that children learn about exact answers.

Discovery and Ownership

Through the materials and how they are presented by the trained teacher, Montessori children in an Elementary classroom search for the paths to find the true answers; when they get there, the results they come up with are their own discovery, just as if they were the first mathematicians to discover them. The result of this repeated experience makes children view mathematics as the wonderful puzzle that it is. The idea of being embarrassed at arriving at an incorrect answer is foreign to these children, for whom the taste of finding the right answer is so sweet that they want to explore other avenues and learn more. Mistakes are integral steps in every journey, and this reality becomes familiar and acceptable through repeated experience.

The Montessori materials guide children to find the ways that work, making the adult corrector obsolete in many cases. For instance, when two children do long division problems together with a material called Racks and Tubes , there are many places they might err. They could start off incorrectly by placing the tens board to the right of the units and work through the whole problem incorrectly, only to find at the end that their answer is incorrect (either by bringing it to an older friend who can do the problem longhand on paper, to the teacher who can check it, by using another math material to do the inverse problem and see if it matches, or by checking it themselves against a calculator). They go back to their work—puzzled—and like two detectives, they re-examine how they set up the problem (which is often when they will identify this first mistake), or they employ a friend to see if they can identify where they may have lost the path. In my experience as a Montessori elementary teacher, this is when the fun really begins if the adult supports an attitude of curiosity about finding the error.

Children will repeat a problem over and over, sometimes eliminating just one of several mistakes at a time in the same math equation or process. The important thing is for the teacher and community to support the quest to get to the end, so that the children do not fall into a habit of giving up too easily or repeat making the same mistake so many times that it gets ingrained! By keeping tabs on their progress, the teacher can see when to step in and point children in the right direction, perhaps making an observation and/or asking a question: “Oh! Wait, I see—look where your units board is. Do you remember where it belongs?” This is usually all that is needed to get an “Ah-ha!” and a delighted, re-energized effort to try the whole thing again. Children are remarkably resilient, especially when working with a friend and being allowed to own the whole process of the math equation. When they finally, leaning over the calculator with suspense, find that they have achieved the correct answer by their own efforts, it is an excited triumph that feeds the urge to tackle more and more problems.

Very rarely have I seen children want to get to the answer easily so they can quit. There are some who will be tempted to use a calculator to find the answer and just write it in, sometimes several times, to create the illusion that they have accomplished a lot of “work.” You may be surprised to hear that in a Montessori environment, that is actually the exception and not the norm. Teachers usually catch that pretty quickly, but even if they didn’t, and even if other children did not point to it and demand that the child work honestly and just as hard as they do, the child who does this often abandons the practice after watching others glean the internal rewards of sustained efforts and true glory of finally getting that answer. As children experience this quest again and again, they hone their skills each time. Eventually, the exercise becomes too easy for them, and they are ready to advance to another math process that brings them to their next level of challenge.

Developing Persistence

To describe all the ways children might err in the process of long division with Racks and Tubes would take too long here, but I’ll give you a sense: One child may write the problem down differently than their companion and, therefore, lay out some incorrect amounts when distributing the beads to be used—a mere flipping of two numbers, perhaps. This carelessness will eventually be discovered, and both children will realize the importance of double-checking with each other before they begin. They also might place the working number of beads in the wrong category or confuse the order of the categories (units, tens, hundreds, etc.). Again, these are mistakes that reflect the need to double-check their layout before they begin the process.

Another place they may err is in physically dropping a bead or beads, losing them as they spring across the floor and losing count of how many were in the bowl to be distributed. This reminds them to slow down, be careful, and focus on their physical movements. They could also lose count or forget a step if they are interrupted by conversation or stop what they are doing to attend to something else in the middle of their process. This would illustrate the importance of sustaining their focus on the task at hand until finished. Finally, they might write the numbers down in the wrong order at the end, showing again a need for more careful, focused attention and awareness.

Sometimes, two children actually have two different answers written down, and they’ll be perplexed about which one is correct, garnering more discussion and a backtracking of their steps. Watching all this is incredible; the amount of teamwork, social interaction, struggle, humor, fun, and agony that can accompany such a process as doing a long division problem is positively brilliant in the sense of integrating all aspects of a child’s development as a person and a mathematician. For a Montessori teacher, bearing witness to such self-discoveries is joyful. It is a special experience to spend one’s days in an Elementary Montessori classroom with children working with the Racks and Tubes! It can take more than an hour for children to complete a challenging problem if you account for the self-correcting they may need to do, but the learning that occurs is immeasurable. And the more children work with such processes, the faster they achieve success each time, fueling their desire to tackle more challenges all over the classroom.

This is just one example of how Montessori fuels the development of children’s resilience and perseverance in a very direct and effective way. And because a Montessori classroom is a vibrant community where everyone is working simultaneously on different things and seeing what others are doing, the practice of pushing oneself until achieving success is contagious. Children will stop and help each other, discuss and share a conundrum, and sometimes get intrigued with each other’s experiences of learning. The learning is therefore—in economic terms—a positive externality, meaning that the network of students spreads newfound information via witnessing and sharing experiences; this happens naturally in a Montessori elementary classroom because of children’s gregarious social behavior at these ages. This is another example of where Dr. Montessori designed an approach that employs—rather than fights against—the developmental characteristics of children in this stage of life between ages six and twelve, specifically, their tendency to be very social and to always want to find out what their peers are doing.

In the above example, students may use the mantras they learned in their Primary years (ages five and six), such as “The units always go on the RIGHT” and “We always begin with the UNITS” (“except in division, when we begin with the highest category present”). Students love these little cues, and when the Primary teacher says them each time she is with children in a math presentation, the children often chant along. There are just a few such mantras that carry over from Primary to Elementary, so children tend to remember these. We have found that children benefit from having such important points of interest brought to their attention regularly, so that they can commit them to memory.

When working on math and science, the children in a Montessori classroom don’t just value the exactness of a true answer; they love that there are answers to find, and they see each exact answer as a part that connects to a greater whole, creating a universal balance in which each component matters. With the Montessori approach—where the processes of discovery appeal to our children’s developmental characteristics at each age—finding correct answers is fun, sometimes eventful, and always intrinsically rewarding.

Watch AMI Elementary Trainer Kay Baker discuss Montessori math for children in the Second Plane of Development (ages 6-12).

Screen Time and Your Child’s Development: A Montessori Perspective

Thu, 10 Jan 2019 20:49:24 GMT

In a previous blog post, A Montessori Guide to Technology and Teens , we explored how we can help our adolescents begin to use technology responsibly, as part of adapting to the adult world. Here we will discuss a Montessori perspective on the role of technology and screen time for younger children, under age twelve.

What’s the Big Deal?

These days, messages from marketers are strongly pro-technology for children, and even some educators are strongly pro-technology. Everyone has their own experiences to base their judgments on; if you’ve seen negative results in your own family, you might look to the current research to validate your sense that technology is not a good fit for childhood. Conversely, if you’ve had positive or neutral experiences with your children using technology, then you probably think people are going bananas over something minor. Either way, most parents don’t have the time to conduct a thorough Ph.D.-level investigation before deciding whether their child can have that video game or the latest digital device they just opened under their grandparent’s Christmas tree this year. So, what are we to think about this debate over technology for children, and what do we want to steer our children towards in our own homes?

When we look at this issue from the perspective of a Montessori approach, we consider: what children need for optimal development, the importance for a child of building their foundation for life, preparing your home environment, basing your decisions on observations, and keeping your long-term goals in mind.

What Children Need for Optimal Development

Dr. Montessori pointed out that under the age of six, children need reality so that they can form their understanding of it. They need to touch, feel, taste, smell, move and experience the real world. Human beings are sensorial learners when young. From their sensorial explorations, young children learn things about physics, textures, and qualities of the world. Consider that no screen can provide this information in a natural or full-sensory way. Children need to discover for themselves what kind of structures collapse under pressure and which ones don’t, and to figure out why by exploring and experimenting. To be effective, this has to happen in reality, not virtually.

Dr. Montessori wrote, “There are many who hold, as I do, that the most important period of life is not the age of University studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age of six. For that is the time when man’s intelligence itself, his greatest implement, is being formed… The child has an intelligence of this unconscious type, and that is what brings about his marvelous progress. It begins with a knowledge of his surroundings. How does the child assimilate his environment?” ( The Absorbent Mind ). The young child does this with an intense sensitivity, awareness of, and interest in all that is around him, and this is accomplished with an absorbent mind that seems to soak in information with ease.

Between ages six and twelve, children are on a quest for intellectual information and want to seek it out for themselves. They continue to explore with curiosity, but now on a more sophisticated level. They actively form their reasoning abilities and social cognition. They need to play with other children to figure out how to get along, strengthen their bodies, and build things from their imaginations. Children these ages need to play with other children and interact to develop their own skills of collaboration, reading social cues, and communication. There is no virtual substitute for this kind of learning. The more time spent developing these abilities, the more adept a child will be. It can also be helpful for children to simply read a book. It can be fiction or non-fiction, but books provide ample opportunities for learning and thinking without any distractions.

Building the Foundation

Some parents will wonder, “But how will my child know how to use the computer well? He will be so behind his peers!” Joe Clement and Matt Miles, co-authors of Screen Schooled: Two Veteran Teachers Expose How Technology Overuse is Making our Kids Dumber , explain that this is as silly as thinking that anything having to do with technology today will be the same by the time our children are adults. They ask, “What lessons in technology are we going to teach five-year-olds that will still be relevant when they enter the work force sixteen years later? This would be the equivalent of elementary schools of the 90s replacing time spent teaching reading, writing, and arithmetic with lessons on how to program your VCR.” Instead of spending time with technology, we need to allow our children to focus on building themselves as learners, thinkers, explorers, and communicators.

Another parent concern might be, “There are times when my child just can’t be patient, and rather than getting irritated with her, I’d rather let her watch something (on a screen) so I can make the dinner or get some quiet. Especially when we are on an airplane or in the car.”

Here we have to stop and ask ourselves, what did parents used to do at such times? Sure, our lives are more hectic than perhaps in the past, and parents may be more stressed, but these are very important opportunities, if you can see them as such. Recently, I sat down on an airplane and a young mother sat across the aisle from me with four little children. She had an infant on her lap, a two-year-old, a three-year-old (I picked up that this was a cousin), and a five-year-old in seats alongside her. Holy cow, I thought, this is going to be a loud, stressful flight! But just as I assumed this mother would pull out some screens to get everybody occupied, she started talking with them. She played itsy-bitsy spider, she asked them questions, she hugged and kissed and laughed with them.

I noticed that this mother was not the source of the children’s entertainment, however. She was calm, quiet, and relaxed. The children climbed around, played with toys, talked to each other and colored on a coloring book throughout the flight. There was some crying, and this mother naturally looked fatigued when it was time to de-plane. But I marveled at how she had taken this time with her children to interact with them. This was two hours of language development and learning how to relate. This mother had chosen to just be with the children. Because they were not all competing for her attention the whole way, it seemed that they were probably accustomed to entertaining themselves.

This is key: our children will NOT learn to entertain themselves or calm themselves if their long, boring, or uncomfortable moments are filled with screen time or a digital toy. This is an incredibly important skill, one that comes front and center stage when children feel anxious, worried, or self-doubting. While young adults in college are reportedly having a harder time than ever with anxiety, stress, and depression—so much so that the University of Chicago, Stanford, and many others now offer undergraduate courses in learning to handle strong emotions—our children need to begin learning these skills, naturally, from very young ages. We cannot know for sure yet, but it seems logical that the constant use of smart phones, laptops, tablets, etc. could be a factor in this trend of anxiety;the first thing experts recommend to calm one’s mind is to focus on your breathing and to notice the present moment…and to put those devices away.

How about other parental concerns, such as, “My son feels weird when he isn’t sure what other kids are talking about outside of school,” or, “We go to my daughter’s cousins’ house, and they cannot take their eyes off the screens. My daughter ends up lonely because they won’t stop playing their video games and engage with her.” My advice is to talk to your children (and your relatives) about ways to respond to this. Suggest an experiment: let’s see what the children do and how they act after a couple days together without technology. After initial protest and boredom, most children will surprise us by enjoying the things that all children enjoy—playing creatively and interacting, using their imaginations, and being physically active. Letting them come up with the ideas of what to play and how to play fosters an appetite for more of the same.

Here’s another concern: “My son stares at screens in the airport and in stores. Maybe if we let him spend a little screen time at home he wouldn’t be so attracted to them. He’d get over the allure.” This sounds logical, but because of the apparent addictive nature of technology, especially for young children, this is not something you de-sensitize your child to. The focus needs to be instead on maximizing your children’s natural interactions and experiences in life, making them stronger and more capable of controlling themselves when they face temptations. The warnings about the addictive nature of technology for children are growing, and the only ones protesting are the marketers. When you see pro-technology test results, check to see who funds that researcher; most often, it is a tech company. The unbiased research that is coming out every month now strongly shows negative effects on children.

Another common belief is that technology use is all around us, it is part of our world, and it isn’t going to go away, so we have to learn to live with it. This may be the case, but learning to live with it should not mean allowing our children or ourselves to develop addictions to it. Although most of our households today have an Internet connection and multiple smart devices connected to it, there are ways to limit children's screen time. If talking to them about it or setting verbal restrictions do not help, you could try alternative measures like talking to your Internet provider about parental controls and monitoring services.

There is a growing awareness in the past year about how drained, anxious, overstimulated, irritable, or burned out people feel after using technology for many hours. We are now seeing a wave of interest in controlling our use of technological devices with programs and apps, rather than letting them control us and our behavior. We will continue to learn more about how to live with technology as such an integral part of our daily lives. In the meantime, I urge parents to stick with what we know is healthiest for our children’s development. The early years are critical in building the foundation for their lives. Technology is changing rapidly, but the needs of human beings are relatively consistent and do not change.

To understand how developing themselves as people will set our children up to be the innovators of the future, turn to Walter Isaacson’s The Innovators , an excellent book about “how a group of hackers, geniuses and geeks created the digital revolution.” What struck me most about this fascinating story of the evolution of computers is that the people behind these machines were creative thinkers and collaborators. The very skills that drove their success as computer designers were ones that develop away from computers in childhood. In adulthood, we are ready to think more abstractly and build off of the base of our abilities of concentration, teamwork, reflection, imagination, and understanding of the physical world and how things work. Abstracting is a leap of the mind that happens because of all that has come before. Building this base is where our focus needs to stay with children. This is why tech experts in Silicon Valley keep their own children off screens at home and deliberately choose low-tech schools. (See the articles Silicon Valley Parents Raising Their Kids Tech-free —and it Should be a Red Flag and A Dark Consensus About Screens and Kids Begins to Emerge in Silicon Valley .) If these are the choices of experts at the forefront of the technology industry, parents would be wise to take notice.

Prepare the Environment

“Isn’t technology just part of the prepared environment my child is growing up in?” The key word here is prepared . Children do learn from what they are exposed to in the environment. What Dr. Montessori referred to as a prepared environment for children to learn from was the emotional, social, psychological, and physical environment that surrounds them. Young children learn through direct interaction, facilitated by their five senses: touch, smell, taste, hearing and seeing. The more senses are integrated in use simultaneously, the more complete the learning experience, and the more attentive a child’s mind becomes. This is attention directed by one’s own will , a very important step towards developing self-control and self-discipline.

Parents must ask themselves if a screen provides an environment that has been prepared for their child’s best development. Has the content been prepared to be suitable and to match his/her developmental needs? Or is it designed by experts—whatever their degrees and expertise may be—to allure children and make them want more and more? The more time a child spends with technology, the less time is being spent directing their own will or making their own decisions. Furthermore, they are sitting without moving while thinking. As Dr. Montessori pointed out, “When there is motor and physical activity, you can see a more important kind of education, a kind of education that takes the force of life into account…If we do not take [this] into account, we miss the best part of education” ( London Lectures ). In this sense, “education” is all the learning our children do throughout their days. Since Montessori made her initial observations about the importance of movement in the learning process, there has been an abundance of research that shows that movement and cognition are intertwined. For a review of the research, see the chapter on movement and cognition in Dr. Angeline Lillard's book Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius .

Base Decisions on Observations

Dr. Montessori’s work was built upon her observations. She watched children interacting with their surrounding environments and made discoveries based on these careful and repeated observations. I encourage you as a parent to make your decisions about how your child is responding to the environment, or to technology, with careful observations. Is your child—of any age—more relaxed, alert, rested, cooperative, content, curious, and communicative after spending time on a screen? If he or she is irritable, flitting from thing to thing with little concentration, easily frustrated, or impulsive, these may be clues as to how the screen time affects him or her.

Young children are far more sensitive than adults, as they are sensorial learners. Their nervous systems are more sensitive. As adults, we need to be aware and responsive to how technology affects them. Children differ as individuals, and some may handle screen experiences with very little observable effects while others are thrown off for days in their mood, behavior, and impulse control. For sensitive children, it is totally unfair to expect them to handle exposure to screens and then to control themselves and forget about the stimulation they just received.

As suggested by recent research and Richard Louv’s Last Child in the Woods , time outdoors in nature encourages reflective thought and helps us to feel refreshed and calm. Likewise, getting our children out into the woods—to smell the air and flowers, experience the mud and leaves, see the sky and clouds, and hear the birds and wind—will have positive effects on their moods and outlook. Take notice of how your young children behave and feel after such times.

Keep Your Goals in Mind

Our goal is help our children develop a strong ability to focus and concentrate. This will be put to the test when they are surrounded by distractions. As a Forest Bluff alumna recently told us, this ability to focus is critical for her as a medical student working in the hospital atmosphere, with so much going on all around and stressful pressures. She notices that many people have trouble sitting down and staying focused to get very important work done, even in medical school. This ability is one she says she formed as a child at Forest Bluff, during invaluable years of brain development. We as parents need to prioritize concentration , not only for this reason, but because all learning depends on the foundation of being able to attend —to focus one’s attention and stay with a train of thought by one’s own power—in order to be productive in a meaningful way.

Sep Kamvar, a former Google executive, associate professor of the MIT Media Lab, and founder of Wildflower Montessori Schools, explains how technology interferes with the ability to attend:

"With sudden or novel stimulus, like a ball moving across the screen or a page-change instantaneously from a button press, our biological response is that the blood vessels to the brain dilate, and the blood vessels to other major muscle groups constrict. Cortisol is released, heightening mental arousal and sharpening visual and auditory perceptions, and attention is heightened. Evolutionarily, this response protected us when we heard the rustling of a tiger. In television advertising, it’s used to sell products. And on the short-term, it appears to work.

The problem, of course, is that the child becomes habituated to these jolts and loses their natural capacity for attention.

In Montessori, the whole focus is on developing a child’s intrinsic capacity for attention. The ability to learn derives from the authentic development of that capacity. To compromise attention in order to learn math more quickly is like killing the goose that lays the golden eggs."

When you have established capacity for attention as a developmental priority, align your decisions with your desired outcome. Technology rapidly changes every year, and we still do not know what the long-term effects of our daily use will be, especially in children. Why take a chance through this experimental phase? We have enough discouraging information already about the negative effects of technology use and so few positives to make those risks worthwhile. See the references at the end of this article for research that gives compelling reasons to be concerned about how technology is affecting learning, brain development, and social interactions, specifically the Wall Street Journal article How Smart Phones Hijack Our Minds and the Developmental Psychology article Learning on Hold: Cell Phones Sidetrack Parent-Child Interactions , both of which cite other related reports.

Deciding Your Course of Action

Based on our experiences over the past 35 years with children and the growing body of research on how technology use is negatively affecting young people, we strongly urge parents not to give technology devices to their children enrolled at Forest Bluff, including screen time at home. For excellent research on how brain structures are negatively impacted by screen technology, read How Has the Internet Reshaped Human Cognition? When children are developing their brains and learning to function, control their impulses, regulate their emotions, pay attention, and remember new information, they need real life experiences.

Our children will all see screens and might occasionally play with a friend’s or a relative’s device when in other people’s homes. But we do not recommend giving your child a device or granting them screen time in your own home on computers, phones, TVs, handheld digital devices, etc. There are so many other wonderful ways to spend time that will give your child the developmental advantages of building creativity, powers of reflection, curiosity, interest, physical strength, empathy, and relationships. A healthy approach is to build on a strong, intellectually rich childhood before entering the world of technology. Our children are forming the foundation for their characters, choices, and intellects from time spent outdoors being physically active, reading, in conversation, and contributing to the life of their homes by collaboration. First and foremost, they are learning how to be good people.

Technology is easy to learn in just hours; these other traits take years to form. In the end, you have to consider: “What’s the trade off?”

Fostering Your Child’s Imagination: Fantasy vs. Reality

Fri, 07 Dec 2018 19:14:47 GMT

When our son was four, I was surprised to see him actually lick a photograph with his tongue. He sat back and stared at it, and then said in a bewildered tone, “Aunt Lisa’s poodle doesn’t taste like a chocolate poodle.” At the same age, our daughter waved her hand at a photograph of her grandfather and smiled. I asked her, “Do you think Grandfather can see you?” She looked at me with surprise and said, “Yes, of course—he’s looking right at me!” Such experiences remind us that even though they seem so aware of what is real and what couldn’t be, our children under age six cannot yet make these distinctions consistently.

On a Quest to Build a Person

To understand children’s perspectives and motivations, remember that from their first day of life, infants begin their quests to become complete human beings, adapted to their time, place, and culture, to connect with others and eventually, to contribute to this world. Every one of us begins with a hunger to learn as much as possible about everything around us, and we use this information to build ourselves as people—to build minds that think and know, and bodies that we can control to carry out actions as we think of them.

When Dr. Maria Montessori observed infants so long ago, she acknowledged that because infants and young children experience a unique stage of life with rapid growth—forming the foundation for their lives—we need to give special thought to their surroundings. Specifically, Montessori recognized the very intimate relationship between movement and cognition (thinking abilities) in young children. Considering this connection, it is important to present the real world to young children, as they cannot discern between reality and fantasy just yet. With no experience of the real world, they crave important information about living within it, relating to others, and working in harmony with their surroundings.

Thinking and Moving

Young children need constant opportunities to move their bodies in response to their thoughts. We must allow and encourage them to think and move simultaneously because this relationship between movement and cognition is so fundamental to human thought structures, to understanding the world around us, and to becoming effective. Specifically, this helps infants and young children to understand their surroundings and develop their spatial awareness and understanding of their world. This means that virtual experiences with screens—or even looking at books and images—cannot replace the developmental impact of a real experience of moving one’s body to explore the world.

It has been proven that when infants, for example, are not permitted to move and, instead, are carried through areas (such as infants in car seat carriers), this reduces their cognition. In Montessori: The Science Behind the Genius , Dr. Angeline Lillard explains:

“Studies have shown that when people move themselves through space, both real and imagined, they are better able to represent that space than when they are passively moved through it or do not move at all. In one study, ten-month-olds watched as an experimenter hid a toy under one of two cloths. On four such trials, the infants were then allowed to crawl to where they could remove the cloth and get the toy, and on four other such trials, they were carried to that place (at crawling speed) by their mothers (Benson & Uzgiris, 1985). On the crawling trials, most of the infants found the toy at their first try (by removing the right cloth) on most of their trials. In contrast, only 1 of the 26 infants had this level of success when they were carried to the hiding location. The act of moving themselves in space, rather than being carried, apparently allowed the infants—all of whom were developmentally able to crawl—to better keep track of the spatial layout of the environment.” In sum, Dr. Lillard writes, “When one moves with a purpose, there is a sense in which one’s body is aligned with one’s thought. Thought guides action…Montessori education capitalizes on body-mind connections” (51).

Such studies show the importance of crawling and moving one’s own body through real space in order to create mental maps of one’s surroundings, to understand, explore, and develop one’s physical abilities. There is no known substitute for this developmental need. We can respond by putting our young children on the ground to move and encourage them to carry their own things when they can. Talking with our children about what they see and experience also aids their understanding. There is a big difference for a two-year-old who walks out of her classroom on her own two feet, carries her tote bag to the car alongside an adult, climbs into her car seat and then talks with the driver about what they are seeing out the window during the drive home. Contrast this to being picked up and carried, having the tote bag lifted from her hands, being placed in the car seat, and watching a screen during the drive while the adult talks to someone else on the phone. The first scenario helps the young child build herself, connect with her world, and connect with other people—in essence, to become human, which is her innate, driving urge.

Young children will look, listen, touch, taste, and sniff to explore their world and engage all parts of their minds and bodies. The integration that occurs during such exploration is fundamental for human development. It prepares our children’s minds and bodies for emotionally and intellectually rich and interesting lives.

Offering Reality as Much as Possible

Plastic has many terrific uses, but when it comes to toys for infants, plastic is pretty uneventful; the taste, textures, and temperature are mainly consistent. In contrast, when we can give infants toys made of real materials, such as metal, wood, or cloth, their senses experience a wider range of physical qualities: the child learns that metal can be cool and smooth, wood can be warmer and has a different texture and taste, and cloth can be soft and pliable. Infants make many distinctions with their sensitive hands, mouths, and noses as they explore objects. A stick from outside has a smell, a taste, a feel and a certain stiffness or flexibility. It may have knobs on it, tiny scratch lines, or flakes of bark coming off. There is so much to find out about something as available as a stick from outside! An infant’s mind takes in all the minute impressions and absorbs the information, enriching his thoughts and driving his movements as he pulls his head back to look at a stick, feels it with his hands, passes it from one hand to the other, touches it all over with his fingers, and even puts it in the corner of his mouth to chew on it. (Well, maybe yuck, but it’s up to you!)

Think of how this experience contrasts with a child sitting passively and tracking images on a screen with his eyes. With a screen, all the information is coming in visually, and mainly one’s eyes are distinguishing colors and movements of light images. This is a very one-dimensional experience, perhaps with a backdrop of voice, but no other sensations. One’s mind is not invited to think as the body is not invited to move. Any thinking that happens does not influence or change what is happening on the screen, so thinking is not encouraged by the activity.

Connecting Through Reality

Young children, in their desire to connect with others, need to find binding ideas to commune about. Adults and children can talk about trees, flowers, water, books, sounds, music, bodies, the sky…anything they have had mutual experiences with and have some knowledge of. These are all touch points that people can find in common. In contrast, the latest cartoon character, electronic game, icon, or fashion fad leaves some people out of the loop, and thus makes this material less available for connection with other people. Young children may find themselves isolated when they ask Grandpa about their latest favorite cartoon character, “Doraemon,” and cannot get a flicker of recognition or interest. They may be able to connect to others on this topic, but a conversation about trees is one that any person can immediately converse and connect about. The reason that talking to young children about real things is so enjoyable is because their curiosity plays to adults’ desire to share information, and we can all connect over reality.

Understanding Fantasy

There is a difference, which Dr. Montessori explained, between imaginative thought and fantasy. Fantasy is thinking of something which is not before our eyes and which does not adhere to reality. We often use the word imagine when we really mean fantasize , so this can be confusing. But there is a difference, in the way that Dr. Montessori used these words.

Fantasy means that you can make a complete departure from reality if you wish, which can be fun for those of us who are secure with reality. Adults have created cartoon characters to do impossible things: in movies, we can make people fly through the air; they make things explode by looking at them with their eyes; beams come out of people’s hands, and so on. We can fantasize that things can happen that cannot happen in our current reality and make them look real by using our technological inventions. But we cannot fantasize things into reality.

Fantasy explains an actual departing from reality. We say “that’s a fantasy” when we mean that it couldn’t really happen. When a person fantasizes frequently, we find that we cannot connect with them. This happens with adults as well as with children. When a child comes into a classroom and spends the day fantasizing that objects in the room are talking to one another and flying through the room, for instance, the adults and children around them have a hard time connecting in conversation and working with that child. To be productive, we need to start by connecting in a base of reality.

In contrast, there is a direct connection between imagination and reality. A person who has studied the laws of physics can use that knowledge of reality to imagine something new which does not yet exist and then—in reality—create that thing. We can also imagine how another person may feel, or, when reading a novel, we can picture a scene and empathize with the emotions of the characters as they are described to us through the written word. We can have an emotionally transforming experience. This is the imagination at work.

Imagination is incredibly important, and Dr. Montessori believed that it should be employed and exercised when it begins to emerge in children most strongly, between ages six and twelve. This doesn’t mean that children do not imagine before age six, but this is the stage of life when it emerges most powerfully and productively. Being capable of telling the difference between fantasy (that couldn’t really happen, perhaps ever) and imagination (I am picturing something that could happen but is not in front of me right now and may not even exist yet) starts to occur consistently around age six, when enough experience with reality gives children a base for making this distinction. This is when their minds actually start to reason and think more abstractly. Young children under age six crave experience with the real world around them because they have a natural drive to collect information to feed this important ability to imagine.

What Young Children Need

The main takeaway is to give your infants and young children real experiences in their immediate surroundings. Avoid movies, TV programs, cartoons, and books which are the product of other people’s creations, and allow your children to touch, feel, and be active in the immediate, real world. So much important development is happening every day in young children’s minds, bodies, and personalities from being active and connecting with other people and immediate surroundings. All in good time, your older children will begin to use their imaginations to create new things, to dramatize possible social relations, and to play for hours, using their own, unique imaginations. With developed imaginations that grow out of real experiences in the real world, our children will invent and create many beautiful, useful, and brilliant things and find solutions that will make this world an even better place.

Suggested Toys & Items

Here is a list of Suggested Gifts for Children , according to age. The items on this list provide a range of sensorial experiences and allow children to engage with the real world, rather than screens.

Additional Reading

Pretend Play and Fantasy: What if Montessori was Right?
by Angeline S. Lillard and Jessica Taggart

Natural or Man-Made: What Do Children Need First?

Mon, 12 Nov 2018 22:28:47 GMT

Nature or "Supranature?"

What “worlds” do our children need to be exposed to for understanding the world they are growing up in? Do children raised in cities really need to be taken out into the country to see grass and trees and lakes, if their immediate world is the infrastructure and people of their city? Do our little children need to learn how to use computers and iPhones when they are young, so that they will have an idea of how the abstract world of technology works by the time they need to use it on a daily basis?

These are questions many parents and educators ponder, and the answers coming from all corners vary greatly and passionately. I always try to look at these questions through the lens of the Montessori approach. As the bumper sticker of a fellow Montessori teacher asks, “What would Maria Montessori Say?”

We know that Dr. Montessori emphasized the importance of preparing a special environment for our children to learn in, and we also know that she believed the child’s developmental task is to adapt to his time, place, and culture. Another idea that Dr. Montessori explored was the importance of sharing the marvel of man’s accomplishments, or the world of manmade things, which Montessori called supranature . She used the word supra , meaning on top of , or out of (not superior as a value but as a position ). And she used the word nature , meaning the natural world with its elements and life, which interact to create a surviving balance of: air, water, land, plant life and animal life, interacting with the sun.

Dr. Montessori drew a cursory depiction of the interplay of these elements and life forms, called The Chart of Interdependencies . On it, we see representative drawings of the sun at the top, then water underneath, then land, then the plant kingdom below and to one side, and the animal kingdom to the other side. There are arrows back and forth between each of these natural forms to spark conversation amongst elementary-aged children about the interdependencies that exist in nature. Below this web is a small black circle that represents the manmade world, and stemming from it are several groups of human families, and arrows from one to the other and back to the natural world consisting of sun, air, water, land, and the plant and animal kingdoms.

This interdependent human world includes everything that humans have discovered, invented, and built. Again, Dr. Montessori called this supranature : everything humans have built on top of nature, and which depends on the balance of the natural world and interaction with it. The message here is that we have accomplished many wonderful things that have made us more comfortable and successful as human beings, but that living in harmony with the balance of the natural world we live in is vital to our survival. This realization invites conversation about the moral implications of our inventions and actions and prepares our elementary-aged children to consider the responsibility that comes with our freedoms.

How Do We Connect?

This past summer in a Montessori Orientation to Adolescent Studies course held at Beacon Academy , one teacher pointed out that the environment for the adolescents attending this Montessori high school is not one of nature, but that of a city. We pondered, “How do we help these adolescents to realize their responsibility to other people beyond the immediate surroundings, and ultimately, the relevance of the natural world and its interconnectedness? What is here, in this city environment, that could make them care about the earth’s resources and understand their part in affecting the world?” It is one thing to talk about such morals on an abstract level and to tell young people to care, but in Montessori education, we are always looking for ways to connect our children to the more concrete realities that will ignite their own curiosities, investigations, moral development, and actions. This connection to the land, how nature behaves, and our intimate connection to it and to all people, is an important aspect of Montessori’s plan of education, particularly for adolescents.

The answer we explored in this conversation was that, because everything is connected, we can find our way to the natural world by starting with the immediate environment, wherever that may be. One colleague demonstrated this by asking, “Where does the air we’re breathing in this room come from?” We help our children start the curious journey that leads back to the natural world. When adolescents answer that this air comes through a vent system, created by humans, to get the air from outside to us, this leads to other questions: How does this vent system work? How and when did humans figure out to build that? Where does the oxygen outside in the city streets come from? Where are the trees in the city, and by looking at a site map of our city, can we find the areas with the highest concentration? Does it matter how much oxygen is in the air and where, and does the movement of the air currents affect the oxygen levels in certain areas of the city? These questions may motivate students to venture out into the city with measuring devices to find the answers to their questions, and their research may lead them even further.

Another beginning question might be: “Where does the clean drinking water in our building come from?” Students may then wonder, how did it get here, through what pipe system, and where is the origin? Does it come from Lake Michigan? How far away is that and where does the water travel? Where and how is it cleaned so that we can drink it? What bacteria and minerals are in it before and after it gets cleaned? How do the original minerals get into that water? Is it related to the types of rock under Lake Michigan?

One question leads to another, and each one takes curious adolescents closer and closer into the inner workings of our natural world, on which everything in our supranature—our man-made world—interacts and ultimately relies. Understanding this interaction, the ways it works, and the role that humans play in creating, guiding or controlling this interaction, is not only important for our adolescents as they enter adult life; it brings meaning to their lives and brings them into immediate contact with their individual sense of purpose, making any work they choose to do meaningful and connected to other people—past, present, and future.

Preparing Younger Children for Their Later Years

As for the question of whether little children need exposure to iPhones and technology in order to understand it, one must first ask how we help younger children prepare for their elementary years and adolescence, when they can grasp abstract ideas in meaningful ways and appreciate interconnectedness that cannot be seen, but must be imagined with a more advanced ability to think and reason. To prepare for each stage of life, children must have their developmental needs properly met in age-appropriate ways so that they can be absorbed. Very little children need direct contact with the real world in order to love it and connect with it. Unless they love the world around them, our children will never have the motivation to ask the questions that will lead to further investigations, or develop morals to care for the earth and their surroundings. We cannot expect older children to care about things they have not experienced and learned to love by direct, meaningful interaction from their earlier years.

Because young children explore through their five senses, they can only understand and fall in love with the natural world of flowers, trees, fresh air, lake water, mountains, and rivers by touching, smelling, tasting, hearing and seeing them for real. A little bit of exposure can go a long way; perhaps you don’t need to spend more than a few hours here and there in the grass of a park, at the edge of a pond, or exploring the bark of a tree in order to give your children the experience of how beautiful and marvelous the natural world is. Research continues to suggest that the natural world has calming and healing effects on people, so we know that the more exposure the better. When nature is far from where you live, aim for the immediacy of the experience over the amount of time spent. If your young children can touch, smell, hear, and see actual nature—with you there to model your feelings of respect, awe, or appreciation for it—they will develop a love for it, too.

Very young children do not yet have the structures or experiences necessary for comprehending the abstract world of technology, and because of the ways screens can distract our children from their more immediate surroundings, it is logical to conclude that time with technology is not well spent until a person has a firm grasp of reality and an appreciation of what it provides. Technology is, after all, created by humans as abstractions on top of the natural world.

When children are older and have developed an individual love and appreciation for the real world, they can investigate the inner workings of how computers are made, why they behave and react the way they do, and the history of the people who invented them and how they made their discoveries. They may, by the time they are adolescents, be curious to try to make a computer themselves, or an iPhone, or to examine the social and moral behaviors of people interacting through them. Their questions can lead them to many original studies, the results of which they often want to share with others.

To help a child become a young adult who wants to (and knows how to) collect new information and share it, and who understands both the natural and the technological world, and who most importantly, loves and appreciates these with their interdependencies, should be our goal as parents and educators. We must focus on young children’s needs for connecting to the real world as a foundation for their character development and understanding. We must be aware of the needs elementary-aged children have for connecting with other people face to face, so that they can understand and become curious about the more abstract world of interconnections in nature and between nature and peoples. And we must aim to support our adolescents to comprehend, care about, and want to investigate the technological and supranature world humans have created, so that they can carry the torch of exploration further with a love and understanding of the interconnectedness of this real, natural world and the abstract world humans have created. This ultimate goal must be on our minds, always.

Expect the Best, Prepare for the Worst, Survive the Fall Trip

Mon, 29 Oct 2018 22:35:15 GMT

The Secondary Level students, their co-Directors, and I recently returned from a two-week fall trip to a non-profit outdoor camp in Hudson, Wisconsin. On the very last day of the trip, as our vans pulled up to Forest Bluff, I heard several children declare something to the effect of, “We survived!” or, “We all made it back in one piece!” I laughed and cheered along with them because there was some truth to their excitement; the trip was a lot of work and we accomplished something very special as a group without incident. But what might have seemed so daunting (and risky!) to the children at first was made entirely manageable by their thorough preparation and attention to detail in the weeks leading up to our departure.

The fall trip is the first of three trips taken by the Secondary Level students during the school year. These trips are the cornerstone of the Secondary Level program at Forest Bluff School, not only because they encompass about five weeks of the school year, but also because they are so formative for our students. Maria Montessori described adolescence as a time for valorization, to build confidence in one’s capabilities and to join the adult world (See the blog post titled The Four Planes of Development: Child Development in Four Questions to learn more about adolescents). The fall trip in particular, during which we carry out service projects for a camp, directly engages the children in real, adult work, which very often includes sizeable demolition and construction projects. The long-term value of this work is evident; the camp is peppered with structures built by former Forest Bluff students: amphitheaters, lookouts, archery ranges, and wildlife restoration projects, to name a few. These are lasting reminders of the work a group of highly independent twelve- and thirteen-year-old children are more than capable of producing in a very short amount of time.

Yet, before any of that incredible work can start, the children are hard at work here at school. Each of the three trips is markedly different from the next, complete with a new packing list, new menu, new expectations, and new challenges. As a result, preparations for the trips begin well over a month in advance, and in our particular case this fall, essentially day one of the school year. As a newly-invited participant, it was clear that the preparations operated like a well-oiled machine, forged by years of experience from both Matt Robbins and Elisabeth Miles. In fact, this was Matt Robbins’s 37th out-of-state trip with a group of adolescents.

Many of those past trips played an important role in the planning of this year’s fall trip, as the classroom houses detailed records of all of the trips taken in the history of Forest Bluff School’s Secondary Level program, all 23 years. Current students are constantly refining and building off of those notes and records, which fosters a real sense of school community and appreciation for past students’ successes and tribulations. This same strategy of sharing knowledge is carried out in real time, as the current second-year students who have been on this trip before assume leadership roles and guide the first-year students through this intense, yet rewarding process.

Committees for Efficiency

The first week of this school year, the students were grouped into committees specializing in gear, safety, finance, food, and transportation, each with their own, unique responsibilities, but all dependent on one other. Entirely student-run and organized, the committees regularly report to the class on their progress. The Gear Committee checked backpacks and communal supplies (e.g., cook kits, tents, etc.); the Safety Committee was in charge of inventorying and replenishing all first aid supplies and collecting insurance information for each child; the Finance Committee created and maintained a budget; the Food Committee created a menu for all 15 days of the trip and purchased all of the food for their meals; and finally, the Transportation Committee rented the vans and navigated us to the camp.

Once those preparations were well underway, the classroom hosted an all-day gear seminar to practice using the equipment. We set up all of the tents in the front lawn and took turns starting the cooking stoves. For other trips, this gear seminar might include testing the water filtration systems or fitting backpacks. Every child was involved in this process and put their hands on the equipment.

Another very important, yet more subtle aspect of the gear seminar was the class discussion. It is one thing to have all of the equipment and supplies you need, but it is equally important that each child feel emotionally prepared for what we are about to do. So, the co-Directors shared memorable and funny stories from past trips (which resulted in a lot of laughs and diffused some of the nerves in the room!), talked about the type of construction work we could expect to do for the camp, discussed strategies for effective communication, recommended best practices for personal hygiene, etc. It was an opportunity for students to ask questions, learn more about our day-to-day lives at the camp, and it was also a time for motivational speeches! We were about to embark on a physically-demanding adventure, so building confidence and camaraderie right from the start would be the key to our success.

And finally…after all of the trips to the grocery store, after inspecting every seam of the tents looking for tears, after crunching the numbers, and after we were sure we had enough Band-aids in case every single child developed a blister, we were ready. Having returned from the trip, I can confidently say that all of the tireless preparations resulted in a wonderful experience. Over the course of two weeks, we restored a horse stable, painted a huge red barn, and re-built a changing station for the day camp. Any issues or challenges, such as the occasional minor injury or food shortage, were swiftly addressed by members of the respective committee. I may have been a third adult on the trip, but I learned pretty quickly that the students were so prepared, high-functioning, and independent that there was virtually nothing for me to do other than show up and do the work right alongside them!

The Four Planes of Development: Child Development in Four Questions

Tue, 25 Sep 2018 20:30:10 GMT

In this article we examine the Four Planes of Development observed by Dr. Maria Montessori, describing some of the hallmarks of each plane and how Montessori education is designed to meet the needs of children in each plane. For a more general overview of how Montessori education is informed by children’s developmental needs, see our previous post, An Education that Matches Children’s Development .

As an educational approach, Montessori is unique in taking child development into account at every level: physical, psychological, intellectual, and social. This approach is a product of Dr. Montessori’s keen observations of children from a range of social classes, in many countries, on three continents, over more than 40 years. Montessori educators today continue to make observations that are consistent with her findings a century ago.

Dr. Montessori found that all children exhibit characteristics and needs for healthy development in four distinct stages, or planes of development. Understanding and recognizing these planes of development provides parents and educators with a guide to how we can best help our children. One way you can understand, identify, and remember these four phases is by thinking of the questions children seem to be asking us with their behaviors and developmental needs: “What is That?” between ages zero and six, as children explore the environment around them; “Why is It?” between ages 6 and 12, when children explore the abstract world intellectually; “Who Am I?” between ages 12 and 18, when children develop their unique adult identities; “What Will I Do?” between ages 18 and 24, when our children turn their attention to making unique contributions to their world.

The First Plane of Development (Birth to Age Six): “What is That?”

“There is in the child a special kind of sensitivity which leads him to absorb everything about him, and to adapt himself to life.” (Montessori, The Absorbent Mind )

Infants and young children are in a “discovery mode.” They are driven, as if by an internal force, to interact with the environment and absorb all the information about the world that they can get. Think about it: Infants want to explore with their mouths and hands; they are constantly in motion, making sounds and listening, looking everywhere. They want to touch everything they can, to taste, to move. Infants and young children acquire information about the world primarily through their heightened senses of touch, smell, sound, sight, and taste. It is naturally a self-centered time because little children have an immense task to focus on: building the foundation for a life, a body, and a personality.

From her observations, Dr. Montessori deduced that young children have absorbent minds that can soak up incredible amounts of information, seemingly effortlessly by comparison to older children and adults. Young children acquire language, the ability to walk, dress themselves, etc., and as a result, function as humans on a basic level, all in the first few years of life. Children under age six can do this because of the outstanding capacity of their young brains to make millions of neuronal pathways. At no other stage of life do we develop so rapidly and in such major ways.

Young children ask what everything is, in a constant quest for words. They seem to want to possess their environment for themselves, and so ask for the names of—and essences of—everything around them.

The Educational Environment for The First Plane of Development

If we keep the young child’s quest in mind, we see that infants and young children need us to support them by providing environments that are rich in reality, culture, communication, nature, and the best of human interactions. We can help young children by removing obstacles so that they can be in direct relationship with the surroundings they so eagerly want to explore.

Adults must be models of behavior for children in this absorbent phase. We want to give young children the chances to move their bodies and thus learn to control their movements, to do things to care for themselves and for their environments. Through such interactive experiences, young children develop self-esteem, become more and more independent, and form a sense of belonging to their community as contributors, through their physical actions.

Dr. Montessori designed the learning environment at school with appealing activities in our Young Children’s Community and Primary classrooms. These involve practical life activities that are purposeful and real and sensorial materials that help children refine their senses and learn the names for comparisons such as heavy, light, thick, thin, and the degrees of such qualities, such as heavier, lightest, thicker, thinnest, and so on. While making sense of the impressions they are collecting, young children crave physical and sequential order; in our classrooms, there is a place for each item, and we present things in a simple, attractive order. We offer many opportunities to develop motor control and the ability to concentrate, so our young children can become the masters of themselves in our classrooms. Through all of these carefully designed activities, our youngest children build themselves, naturally and joyfully.

The Second Plane of Development (Ages Six to Twelve): “Why Is It?”

“A greater curiosity arises, which can never be satisfied; so will last through a lifetime.” (Montessori, To Educate the Human Potential )

Around age six or so, we see some striking changes occur: children’s hair becomes darker, their limbs become more elongated, their knuckles stand out where dimples may have been before, their adult teeth begin to replace their “baby” ones, the proportion of their heads and bodies changes, and they do not get sick as often. Cognitively, six-to-twelve-year-olds can imagine things that they cannot see (fantasy books like Harry Potter appeal), and they can reason (they want to find out why the earth goes around the sun, not just that it does). They seem to want, more than anything, to be in groups of peers. They are practically obsessed with rules and social behaviors, they want to understand right from wrong, and they want to see justice done—so they tattle on each other to see what the adults will do. They make up clubs, they exclude some children and include others, and they worship their personal heroes like sports figures, historical figures, or fictional action figures. This stage of life is when important aspects of social organization are established in children’s development.

It is also a time of rigorous mental work: children in the second plane of development are fascinated by information and have multiple interests. They seem to want to be everywhere at once, sometimes leaving a mess in their wake! The attention to detail that attracted them in their prior years now morphs into a desire for efficiency and more abstract thinking. They delight in making inferences and connections between bits of information. This is an important time of consciously creating their own organized structures of knowledge.

The Educational Environment for the Second Plane of Development

Montessori designed a learning environment that would appeal to the children’s need for rich intellectual stimulation, collaborative work, and opportunities to develop their relationships, their abilities to empathize, and their personal moral frameworks. The environment encourages the children to ask “Why?” and to seek out the answers to their innumerable questions by exploring the world of information.

The Montessori classroom for children ages six to twelve encourages—and in many cases, necessitates—that children work together collaboratively in pairs or small groups, so that they can experience and practice how to do so effectively. This is a critical aspect of this stage of development. Instead of fighting against the urge to be together, Montessori capitalizes on this sensitivity by giving productive work as the central focus for learning social interaction on a deeper level. These experiences are necessary because they give elementary-aged children opportunities to think about and navigate the abstract world of interrelationships and human nature.

Intellectually, we present aspects of the abstract world to Montessori students as a web of connections and historical structures that enable them to create their own unique organizational logic. Through stories of the beginnings of our universe, life on earth, human history, man’s creation of written language, and man’s discovery of the mathematical world, children’s imaginations are stirred and their awe is awakened, inspiring them to explore and acquire as much knowledge as they possibly can. To watch the children’s enthusiasm and drive as they experience this quest is amazing!

The Third Plane of Development (Ages Twelve to Eighteen):

“Who Am I?”

“ …This would result in a ‘valorization’ of his personality, in making him feel himself capable of succeeding in life by his own efforts and on his own merits and at the same time, would put him in direct contact with the supreme reality of social life.” (Montessori, From Childhood to Adolescence )

Dr. Montessori observed dramatic physical and psychological changes occurring at approximately age twelve and recognized the need for specific support in this stage. Dr. Montessori called adolescents “social newborns” who undergo a kind of “rebirth” as their now confident, capable, fully-grown childhood selves morph into newly developing adult bodies and minds.

Adolescents do not want to be treated as children anymore; they are eager to embark on their journey into the adult world. They are highly sensitive and easily hurt, as if nature gives them heightened awareness to ensure that they not miss any of the subtleties in the “traffic signals” of social interactions that they will need to understand as adults. This intense insecurity is why young adults need to have authentic, confidence-building experiences where they face concrete challenges and learn to overcome them in supportive environments through their own effort. Doing so repeatedly helps adolescents build their personal repertoires of strengths for adult life.

This is a fragile time physically, when children get sick more easily again, and feel alternately and abruptly energized and then tired, because they are growing rapidly and changing into adult bodies. They need support to experience risks and gain confidence, but also to develop the empathy they are alerted to at these ages. They need close friends and a supportive, team-like community while they are defining themselves. This is the beginning of the child’s next task of building their newly-adult selves. It is a time of self-reflection, of asking “Who am I?” with a sense of overwhelming anticipation. Dr. Montessori saw this as a quest for what she called valorization : to be recognized and appreciated by the adult group they want to enter, through their own actions and visible contributions that are real and valued .

The Educational Environment for the Third Plane of Development

When the children reach adolescence, they need a new, different environment to match their new, evolving needs and characteristics. The educational environment must give adolescents opportunities to prove their worth to themselves and to interact with adults who can be mentors. This can happen through physical work, such as working land on a farm, growing and harvesting food, cooking meals, building fences and necessary structures, or serving others through volunteer work. Adolescents are very interested in economics and how adults survive and live and, thus, crave experiences of raising and using money to care for their group. Having a “micro-economy”—where they produce goods and sell them—can serve this need in adolescent Montessori programs. The collective work they do helps them to understand how human society functions and orients them for their quest to identify themselves as individuals within it.

The generous and sensitive nature of adolescents grows through these experiences as they enter adulthood. Their feelings of self-worth and confidence develop as they become aware of their contributions, which are acknowledged by the adults in their communities. Rather than just hearing about it or reading about it, the adolescent who experiences these aspects of human life and interaction develops himself through it and emerges with some answers to “Who Am I?”

When a farm-like setting is not available, we find other ways to connect our adolescents to nature and provide them with opportunities to prove their worth, learn to work together for their survival, and connect with the adult world as contributing members. At Forest Bluff, our adolescents do this by selling crafts they have made, interacting with adults in the village at the post office and bank as they make transactions for their classroom and school, caring for the prairie and land around the school buildings each week, and planning the safety, transportation, food, equipment, finances, and service work of the three camping trips they go on each year in remote natural settings. Their trips involve working together to solve problems, survive as a group, and serve the adult world through physical work, leaving behind a real contribution with structures they build for other organizations.

On the intellectual side, the third plane of development is a time of deep reflection. Adolescents are drawn to reading and discussing literature, examining scientific ideas and the mathematical contributions of others, and expressing themselves through writing, athletics, music and other art forms. Collectively, these and the above experiences serve the question “Who am I?” with the valorization and confidence our adolescents need to develop as they enter early adulthood.

The Fourth Plane of Development (Ages 18 to 24): “What Will I Do?”

“ An education capable of saving humanity is no small undertaking; it involves the spiritual development of man, the enhancement of his value as an individual, and the preparation of young people to understand the times in which they live .” (Montessori, Education and Peace )

At approximately age eighteen, if the needs of each prior phase were met, we see young adults who are confident and ready to start making their unique contributions to adult society. This is when our children branch out into communities with more knowledge and experience, as young adults themselves. This is the time for deeper, more specialized study, for helping others with unique contributions, and for instigating change in their communities. This is when you see young adults forming their political views and starting their careers in the workplace. They often want to travel to other countries and explore the world with their own two feet. It is also a time of steadier physical growth and strength.

Educational Environment for the Fourth Plane of Development

Dr. Montessori pointed out that intense study in universities and/or real work experiences in the adult world give young people what they need at this stage of life, helping them to answer their question, “What will I do?”

The Purpose of Childhood Realized

Roughly around age 24, a child’s massive job of building his or her adult self is basically completed. Modern fMRIs confirm that the first three years of life have great importance with massive brain development, and around the ages of 6, 12, 18, and 24, spurts of rapid brain change occur. In one’s mid-twenties, the brain matures, and although it continues to make and prune neuronal connections throughout its lifetime, this activity consolidates around age 25, correlating with the idea that childhood ends and adulthood begins around that time.

A child’s successful development in each plane—or stage—of life depends on the attention given to the needs and characteristics of the previous one. There is no such thing as rushing through one stage to get to the next, or skipping steps. Certainly, we continue to work on developing characteristics throughout our lives; we never stop growing and improving our abilities.

By understanding and recognizing when nature has given us the sensitivities to acquire certain attributes, and designing learning environments that meet children’s developmental needs, we give children tremendous advantage. This is how Montessori capitalizes on human development. The discovery of the Four Planes of Development and how education can match them is certainly one of Dr. Montessori’s greatest gifts to parents, educators, and our children.

Our ultimate goal is to support children to develop themselves fully in all aspects, so they will be happy, successful, and contribute to society in meaningful ways!

“If man were to grow up fully and with a sound psyche, developing a strong character and a clear mind, he would be unable to tolerate the existence of diametrically opposed moral principles within himself or to advocate simultaneously two sorts of justice – one that fosters life and one that destroys it.” (Montessori, Education and Peace)

An Education that Matches Children’s Development

Tue, 04 Sep 2018 20:43:36 GMT

Montessori Uniquely Informs Educators

The Montessori approach of education is different from any other from the outset: Dr. Montessori recognized the importance of seeing each child’s life as the whole and continuum that it is; she then formed an educational model that matches children's development, aligned it with the particular needs and characteristics of each stage of growth, and provided the flexibility to meet individual needs along the way.

The school model we are used to seeing is a one-size-fits-all, linear model that increases in complexity and demands sequentially each year. Its design does not take into account children’s observable characteristics, developmental needs, or natural stages of growth. For example, think of a conventional preschool: The children are asked to sit in a circle, join a group activity, and move mostly as a unit through communal activities. And yet, young children are developing their individuality; they want fiercely to learn to do things for themselves (“Me! Mine!”), and need to do so, in order to gain basic life skills and the prerequisite abilities of organized thought and self-control for later learning. In conventional preschools, young children are also typically encouraged to spend some time in fantasy-based play. And yet, this is the stage in life when they need to gain an understanding of reality in order to succeed; they need real, visible, purposeful activities that they can engage in as individuals, to practice physical motions and fine tune their control, and to gain basic, unconscious knowledge of concepts such as weight, gravity, force, cause and effect, and so much else about the world around them, through their own hands-on explorations.

When children get to elementary school, conventional programs split them up to work as individuals on their own tasks, in direct or indirect competition with one another. Despite some group activities, elementary children are not meant to share their answers, help each other with their work, or converse amongst themselves during lessons. And yet, elementary-aged children want nothing more than to be with their friends, to understand the thoughts and minds of others, and to interact. (Remember how you always wanted to sit with your friends in elementary school?)

Between the ages of six and twelve, children also have a strong propensity and ability to imagine what they cannot see in front of them; their imaginations can aid them in learning about abstract concepts and realities, and they can draw out the meanings from fantastical stories such as myths, fables, and stories of good and evil.

Looking at such patterns in child development, Montessori and her colleagues designed environments to meet children’s needs by taking the characteristics of each stage that naturally facilitate learning into account.

A Continuum, and Each Characteristic has a Purpose

Montessori education begins with newborns—and the continuum which follows leads all the way to adulthood —meaning that Dr. Montessori saw this as the goal of childhood: to build a human being capable of participating in, and contributing to, society. With this long-view in mind, the Montessori approach gives the perspective and the reminders that something much more powerful and meaningful is going on than just the acquisition of information or skills; an entire person is forming, with all aspects of life intertwined and relatable.

This all started from actively observing children and finding recognizable behaviors that revealed how children learn best. When Dr. Montessori identified what characteristics she was seeing, she aimed to find what real purpose each might have to human development. Nothing in nature is random, and so—Dr. Montessori reasoned—the phenomena of child behaviors, consistent across cultures, and referring to certain stages of life, must have value. The educational environments she designed deliberately employ children’s most positive learning characteristics at each age. By designing the classroom environments and teaching methods in this way, Dr. Montessori freed children to reach their full potential at each stage of their development.

Recognizing Four Planes of Child Development

Dr. Montessori defined four distinct stages of characteristics and needs that children have from birth to twenty-four years, which appear consistent across cultures, countries, decades, socio-economic conditions, and races. These stages appear in plateaus of similar traits, with relatively briefer periods of rapid change in between, which occur around age six, age twelve, and age eighteen. These periods of rapid change are predictable, although, of course, they vary slightly within individuals. Between these points are years of stability by comparison, like plateaus, when children seem focused on developing certain aspects of themselves. Dr. Montessori called these plateau-like stages the Four Planes of Development .

Informed with this lens, Montessori educators can make decisions and create learning environments that really meet children’s characteristics and needs appropriately. For instance, knowing that children under age six are focused on developing as individuals and need reality to form themselves, Montessori environments encourage children to concentrate on individual tasks that have real purpose—such as preparing food to eat—where they can explore real procedures and develop gross and fine motor skills. Elementary-aged children can listen to stories about how scientists believe the universe formed and dive into research explorations with their friends, drawing charts to illustrate.

The Four Planes of Development give us a map to guide us as parents and educators, helping us to recognize what an individual may need and to respond to the characteristics we see. In the next article, we will look more closely at the characteristics and needs of each plane, ages birth to six, six to twelve, twelve to eighteen, and eighteen to twenty-four years of age.

Our Living Land Laboratory

Wed, 01 Aug 2018 21:42:53 GMT

If you happen to drive past the school this summer, I encourage you to take a peek at the amazing prairie and everything growing there. This is our “land laboratory” for our children to explore and research in September and throughout the year, building their scientific interests and connections with the natural world. Through the immediate examples in nature, our children notice the interrelatedness of everything and learn about the laws of nature that create balance and respond to imbalances.

Our prairie gives children the direct contact they need to develop a love for nature and to discover the amazing variety that the natural world presents to us. The Young Children’s Community and Primary children can observe, touch, smell, and collect specimens of all shapes and sizes to fulfill their incessant quests for knowledge. The Elementary-aged children—so full of questions and analytic ideas—can take samples, classify, and design experiments to share their results with others. Our Secondary Level students can take leadership roles by becoming stewards of this land, and go beyond our immediate resources to seek advice from experts and check the health of our prairie’s ecosystem with the larger one in our state and part of the world.

In these broad stages of investigation and care that corresponds with children’s developmental stages, the land laboratory we have on our property provides the stepping stones that ignite interest in earth’s ecosystems and real, original opportunities for children to follow their own ideas for their learning.

Dr. Montessori guided educators to provide stimulating environments where children can learn by following their urges to explore, ask questions, and investigate, and thereby give themselves a personalized and much fuller education than adults could give with the simple relaying of pre-determined information. Dr. Montessori wrote, “We do not want complacent pupils, but eager ones; we seek to sow life in the child rather than theories…The secret of good teaching is to regard the child’s intelligence as a fertile field in which seeds may be sown.”

Because children are constantly trying to adapt to their surroundings, it is imperative that we give them a sense for the whole of our surroundings, so that they may find their places in relation to not just their family, their school, or their town, but to the whole of this world that even our little patch of prairie is connected to and responds to. Our children do much of their work on the subconscious level, which makes direct contact with the natural world even more important, at each stage of their lives.

Our Forest Bluff directors and our on-site naturalist, Abbey White, look forward to greeting your children in September and supporting their scientific, artistic, historic, mathematical and linguistic investigations through our living land laboratory!

Lose Those “Summertime Blues!”

Wed, 18 Jul 2018 15:43:33 GMT

Summer is supposed to be fun—a relaxing time for families. But parents can also feel very stressed in the summertime. You can begin to feel like a prisoner of parenting, while children become harder and harder to please. Welcome to the summertime blues! There are two forces at work: Unrealistic expectations of ourselves and a tendency to do too much for our children.

Mothers and fathers often have the expectation of themselves that they “should” make their children happy. These days, happy isn’t even enough; we think we should make them ecstatic . The self-imposed pressure to make one’s children rejoice in every moment of every day of their magical summer—and the guilt of not meeting such unrealistic expectations—can be overwhelming at times!

And this leads to another problem: By trying to meet their every need and desire, we are stopping our children from being able to follow their natural urges to do things for themselves. Adults often think that being a “good parent” means doing more and more for children, and that that will make them happy. But when we “help” children this way, they just get more and more unhappy, frustrated, fussy, and demanding—have you noticed?

Conversely, to raise a family of balanced, happy, generous children who are ready to contribute and who feel truly connected to others, is another way. When we look at the principles of the Montessori approach, we see a simple structure that guides us to give our children what they really need, and because this is based in natural development, it frees them and us, from the pressures of our current parenting culture.

This overall structure has three steps: Preparing the home environment, modeling the behaviors you would like to see in your children, and allowing freedoms and choices while providing simple boundaries.

Prepare Your Home Environment

Put your energy into preparing your home environment so that your children can be more independent from adults. There are always little ways to do this, in little bits each day. This will look like a “Goldilocks” environment if you have several children, and as you make adjustments to match their ever-changing levels of independence.

When you travel, look for ways to prepare the environment of any restaurant, hotel room, or beach house, so your children can take care of their own needs more and depend less on you. Once you get the hang of thinking this way, you’ll be amazed at how your children’s behavior may improve! The opportunities to explore their abilities and build self-confidence and independence will feed their needs more than any lollipop bribe or screen time. Our children are driven to progress by a fierce natural force; it is our job to support that innate drive by physically setting things up for them to succeed in the environment.

Model The Behaviors You Would Like to See

Model the interactions of grace, courtesy, and composure you would like to see in your children. This is always easier said than done! But if you make it a priority and restructure your day knowing you are doing the best thing for your family, it will pay off in spades. Get up a few minutes earlier to have just five or ten minutes of meditation, prayer, reading—whatever helps you set yourself up to be your best—before you come out of your bedroom and enter family life. (If your children can come into your bedroom and you do not have any place where you can be alone, well…start with changing that, right away!) Engage your children in the prepared environment by showing them how to start using the items you have set out for them, and then move on to your own activities and let them be as independent as possible. For children who are accustomed to having one-on-one adult attention, you may need to wean them off this expectation by getting busy in your own activities and letting them explore their own abilities before you help. Try to show your children how to do things in ways that allow them to do the actions, rather than you. Dr. Montessori pointed out that the child’s expression is “Help me to help myself.”

Allow Freedoms with Clear, Simple Boundaries

Allowing children to make their own choices and providing them with clear boundaries are two ways in which parents can simplify home life and help children become more independent. (For a more in-depth discussion of this concept of freedoms and boundaries, see our post Freedom and Responsibility: How Choices and Limits Help Children Develop Character .)

Here are some examples when away from home:

In the car, children have the freedom to talk, read, ask questions, look out the window, etc. The boundaries might be: seats belts on and no screaming. Whatever boundaries are important to you must be consistent and enforced. For example, I once had to pull over and get out of the car and walk away when my children wouldn’t stop screaming in the back seat. When they stopped screaming I walked back over to the car, calmly got in, and drove them home. Stunned, they sniffled the whole way home and never did it again. They realized I was serious when I said, “I don’t drive when passengers scream.” (Thankfully, it was the middle of summer and the Forest Bluff School parking lot was empty that day while I waited it out.)

In a public place, we have the freedom to talk, play games that don’t loudly distract others (card games, memory games, I-spy games, etc.) and to eat or not eat the foods served. Boundaries might be: we stay seated while eating and speak politely.

Freedoms usually go without saying and do not need to be stated, but boundaries should be very clear ahead of time and very few. Pick over-arching boundaries that are easy to understand, apply to a lot of situations, and make sense to anyone. When children are old enough to understand what negative behaviors are, then any harmful behaviors fall under one category. And it’s just a broad rule to remember and refer to, such as “Be kind, and do your part to help the family.”

When children are five years old and younger, it can be helpful having a checklist of just a few family guidelines: clean up your dishes, straighten your own room, and help to make dinner twice a week, for example. But as children get older, one rule can suffice: “Take care of yourself and your own things, and be helpful when asked.” If your child’s messy room doesn’t cause problems for others, seriously think about whether that might be something you can let go of in order to prioritize other, more important things.

The essential thing is your tone of delivery. If you truly believe in what you are asking of your children, and you envision the outcome you believe in—independent, caring, cooperative people out in the world—then you can say things with love and support your children with grace and compassion. Any of the above can be made ineffective by a tone of resentment, sarcasm, or punishment. This is why modeling grace and courtesy is so important. You are the leader of your family, and your behavior and mood sets the tone. You are the living model for your children. So set yourself right first, and the rest will make sense. (See Lessons from Montessori: Preparing Ourselves with Grace .)

Practical Suggestions for Preparing the Environment

If you find yourself feeling very frazzled at this point in the summer, I recommend just going back to step one and spending your energies there. Step back and see what changes you can make to enable your children to take care of their own needs more independently. Here are more suggestions for preparing the environment at home or when traveling:

Bring a portable step stool everywhere you go. (The low ones from the hardware store that fold up are great!)

Bring a tiny potty everywhere you go if your child is too small to climb on a toilet without your portable stepstool.

Bring a child-sized cup and child-sized pitcher so your children can use these items in restaurants and vacation places. (Available online at com )

For a trip, let each walking child carry his or her own child-sized backpack of supplies and roll-away suitcase, and only bring the clothes that fit inside. (Plan to show your children how to wash their clothes partway into the trip—by hand/hang dry or in a machine—to make packing light/child-sized.)

If traveling, have 2 books, 2 small toys, or 2 games/card sets and drawing supplies for each child in his or her own backpack. Less is more! In my family, we used to save the undesirable toys and books we were given over the years and bring them out on the plane or in the car; these were called “travel toys” in our house. These were exciting, with all the bling, and we didn’t care if they got lost along the way. When we got home, they disappeared and re-emerged on the next trip.

Put needed items within reach so your children can take care of themselves as much as possible everywhere you go. In every kitchen, prepare a low shelf or cabinet with a set of bowl, plate, cup and utensils, a sponge or rag for wiping up, and a tiny hand brush and dustpan to clean up the floor after themselves. Far from being “chores,” these activities of independence and contributing to group life become enjoyable and give children a home-away-from-home familiarity. Doing this also releases you from the constant demand to attend to the children’s needs.

Help your children prepare a few healthy snacks in small containers or baggies on a low shelf in the refrigerator so that they can get something to eat when they are hungry, later on.

If possible, make a kitchen area for the children that is safe and low to the ground. If there is no child-sized furniture, you can to do this by placing outdoor cushions on the floor as seats and a large serving tray to be their table for eating (see photo).

By having a creative mindset when setting up the environment, you make tiny pockets, or moments, for yourself to read another few paragraphs in a book or relax. Just as important, you free your children to be more pleasant for other adults to be around. You ultimately prepare them to be less frustrated and more capable, cooperative, and participatory in group living.

Dr. Montessori said that when we give unnecessary help, we hinder our children’s development. She wrote, “…the first task of education is to furnish an environment which will permit and aid the child to develop the functions given him by nature. This is not a question of merely pleasing the child, but of cooperation with a command of nature. Observation of the child shows that normally he has the desire to act independently; he wants to carry things, to dress and undress alone, to feed himself…In giving…independence to the child, we free a worker who is impelled to act…” ( Education for a New World ).

Taking this in mind, prepare the environment a little bit every day, take care of yourself so you can be a living model, and watch your children blossom into the happy people you hope they’ll become.

Here Today, Gone Tomorrow: Must-see Wildlife in April and May

Sun, 15 Apr 2018 18:51:30 GMT

" There is no description, no image in any book, that is capable of replacing the sight of real trees, and all the life to be found around them, in a real forest. Something emanates from those trees which speaks to the soul, something no book, no museum is capable of giving. "—Dr. Maria Montessori

We may have made it to April, but it certainly has not yet looked or felt like spring in the Midwest. Frigid temperatures, gloomy skies, and occasional snow provide ample incentive to stay indoors with a warm cup of tea, silently begrudging the cumbersome winter coats taking up space in the closet. While I can think of nothing better than reading a good book indoors on days like these, the naturalist in me is immediately reminded of why April is one of the best months of the year for revitalizing our connection with nature.

Starting now and continuing into May, Lake County is host to two groups of unique, yet very temporary, wild visitors. The arrival of 1) spring ephemeral wildflowers and 2) migrating songbirds is truly a wonder to behold. Any day now, small wildflowers will begin carpeting the forest floor, and high above them, vibrantly-colored migrant birds, here from Mexico and South America, will dart amongst the tree branches as they continue on their journey north. All at once, an incredible diversity of wildlife and color springs into our neighborhood woodlands (pun intended!).

Much to my dismay, these wild visitors disappear almost as quickly as they arrive, within a few weeks. However, as with any nature activity, all you need is nice weather and the desire to go for a walk. So dust off those binoculars, grab your children, and head to the woods before the wildflowers and migrating birds are gone!

Whimsical Wildflowers

Walking into a forest, our natural inclination is to look eye level and above at the trees towering over us. However, in the same way that Maria Montessori championed the child’s development as a holistic endeavor (intellectually, emotionally, socially), we miss a large portion of the picture if we ignore the forest floor.

Amid the decaying leaf litter found there, highly specialized, fast-growing plants—collectively called spring ephemerals —make a grand entrance. In the brief window of time between the final snowmelt and before the trees produce a full canopy of leaves, ephemeral wildflowers take advantage of the sunlight hitting the forest floor. Seasoned opportunists, these wildflowers race to complete their entire life cycle before the tree leaves completely shade them out at the end of May.

Two of my favorite spring ephemerals are Bloodroot and Dutchman’s Breeches (pictured), both of which have unusual characteristics. Standing only 6 inches tall, these two plants bloom for a grand total of two weeks! If timed correctly in mid-to-late April, a walk through the forest will reward you and your children with a beautiful display of white flowers from these plants—a welcome contrast to the brown forest floor and a bold declaration of the start of spring.

Magical Migration

In a similarly rapid fashion, millions of birds travel north from Mexico and South America, through the United States, and on to Canada each year. For most areas of the United States, including Lake County, these migrants are only passing through for a few short weeks in April and May. Hundreds of neotropical songbirds, in particular, provide a magnificent display of reds, oranges, yellows, and blues. How many can you and your children spot?! The transcontinental voyages made by these birds each year are excellent examples of the interconnectedness of living organisms on Earth, a principal tenet of Montessori’s Cosmic Education. Sharing this knowledge and experience with your child would further reiterate the importance of a global perspective and encourage appreciation for a larger community of humans, plants, and animals.

Some of the birds you can expect to see on your outings are the Eastern Phoebe, White-crowned Sparrow, Cerulean Warbler, Scarlet Tanager (pictured), Indigo Bunting, Yellow-rumped Warbler, American Redstart, Magnolia Warbler, Baltimore Oriole, and Blackburnian Warbler (pictured), but this is certainly not an exhaustive list! Lucky for us, there are several natural areas in Lake County perfect for bird watching. I would recommend any of the Open Lands preserves, as well as Middlefork Savanna and Illinois Beach State Park to start, but don’t stop there! See where your exploration takes you...

Recommendations and Upcoming Events

ebird.org is a great resource for gathering information about which birds have been spotted in Lake County. Not only can you see posted observations by other birdwatchers to target your exploration of this area, but you can also create your own free account and keep track of the birds you and your children have seen. Scientists often use data from eBird to track long term trends in bird migrations. Data collected by the general public, also known as citizen science, is of great value to the field of ecology.

The climate in Lake County is very similar to that of Wisconsin, which is why I would recommend The Wildflowers of Wisconsin and the Great Lakes Region field guide for identifying plants in this area. The guide is small enough to carry with you on a walk, with useful information and helpful pictures.

Earth Day is right around the corner! Be sure to visit the Chicago Botanic Garden to celebrate! There will be lots of fun activities for kids and as an added bonus, McDonald Woods has a beautiful display of spring ephemeral plants.

Lake Forest Open Lands is also hosting a volunteer work day on Sunday, April 22 from 1-3 p.m. at Mellody Farm Nature Preserve for Earth Day. Participants can expect various hands-on restoration activities, such as pesky buckthorn removal, as well as nature hikes and a tree planting discussion.

Montrose Beach in Chicago is an international bird hotspot and one of the best places to go to see a diversity of birds throughout the year. Migrating birds tend to travel along Lake Michigan and the trees/shrubs right off the water provide them with insects, berries, and shelter!

If you are in the market for binoculars, there are several quality brands for any budget and for any experience level (including kids!). An important consideration is the magnification. For the recreational birder, I would recommend a magnification of 8x32. My personal binoculars are 8x32, and they are perfect for my birding passion!

Abbey White is a visiting naturalist at Forest Bluff School. With a master’s degree in Plant Biology and Conservation from Northwestern University, Abbey is providing our school community with information on starting gardens, fostering our prairie, and more about the natural world around us this spring.

A Montessori Approach to Helping Children who are Stealing or Lying

Wed, 21 Mar 2018 21:01:03 GMT

Stealing and Lying from a Montessori Perspective

Stealing and lying are two deviations from healthy behavior. They are perfectly normal things for children to do, especially as they explore the range of societal behaviors during their elementary years*; expect that all children will spend some time experimenting with each. When they are testing out what will happen, most find out and logically stop doing it. But when a child develops a pattern of stealing or lying, what then?

From a Montessori perspective, repeated stealing and lying are not “normal” behaviors for a child reaching their full potential of character. It’s like testing out something but getting stuck in the “repeat” mode and not being able to snap out of it. Everyone has a conscience, so if the conscience isn’t overriding the temporary benefits from the stealing ( Those cookies tasted great! ) or lying ( I got what I wanted again! ), then you need to step in to help.

Dr. Montessori suggested that when the environment supports children’s human tendencies such as those towards work, order, exploration, communication, and manipulation (i.e., touching and movement) and frees up their inner energy for their self-formation, they will “normalize” themselves over time. This means that they become increasingly calm, focused, productive, happy, compassionate, organized, and all other positive qualities. In essence, they will reach their full potential—as unique as each one is—which is their “normalized” self. We see this happen with the children in our Montessori classrooms with their age-appropriate activities in school, and at home with similar satisfying opportunities.

To create an environment that encourages this natural maturing process, we must offer useful activities that help children refocus on positive behaviors. Sometimes, we must remove distractions and temptations for a time. Socially, a child may be feeling uneasy or nervous and may get caught up in social drama, to then find themselves drawn to cause some trouble for others with stealing or lying. Whatever the reason a child chooses this anti-social behavior, they need assistance from the adults and other children to refocus their attention and energies on positive actions.

Practical Suggestions for Helping Children who are Stealing or Lying

If a child is stealing, tell them you need their help, and give them a positive role or job. Employ them in remedying the situation in a non-accusatory manner, perhaps by suggesting they organize the items in question. Point out to them afterwards how their actions helped the group/family or led to a chain of positive events.

If a child is lying, and you are sure, gently call them on it (“Actually, that isn’t true”) and immediately point to what they can do that’s positive (“Your brother had his trucks in this basket, and we need to get them back in there. Could you help me look for them? Let’s start in the kitchen…”). The proposed activity might be a project, a piece of work, or something that interests your child. If you’re not sure whether they are lying or not, no matter; if you sense that it’s a lie, say, “Hmm, it just feels unsettling to me,” and progress with a project, an interest, or some positive action that your child can partake in.

In both these examples, there is little point in punishing, humiliating, reprimanding, or arguing. By the time they’ve reached age five, children already know much of this material, and it becomes a game for them to master. If you are now seeing an emerging pattern of stealing or lying, you’re best off abandoning any initial urges to punish, threaten, or bribe. At this point, your child knows that they shouldn’t lie, they know it upsets you or others, and they are having a hard time not doing it anyway . Rubbing it in probably won’t lead to the solution.

In the above suggestions, we are going straight to the solution, with no dilly-dallying on the crime. In other words, you are showing the child the path to rebalancing themselves. When we are balanced and feel good, secure, and content, we tend not to steal, cheat, or lie. Human beings have inner urges to do the right things, to be their best selves, to be “pro-social.” Dr. Montessori’s approach employs these instincts and steers us to use this positive psychology in our teaching methods and in our parenting.

When your child has been busy doing more positive things—helping to organize the closet of items they had been stealing, making a doll to give the sister she stole from, helping you buy more cookies at the grocery store, or unpacking the groceries in the kitchen—you might later address the previous, undesirable behavior:

“Jack, you were really helpful just now. You know, earlier today when you ate the cookies, how were you feeling?”

“I don’t know.”

“I bet they tasted pretty good. You really love cookies.”

“Yeah.”

“It’s a problem when you eat them all, though, because they aren’t there for the rest of us. I was sad when I wanted one and found they were all gone.”

“I’m sorry.”

“OK. Apologizing is a helpful response. Thank you. I feel relieved. Let’s think of what you can do next time you really want cookies. Do you have any ideas?”

“Well, I knew if I asked you, you would say no.”

“You’re right, I probably would have. I know you would have felt disappointed. But then we could have talked about that and found a better way for you to get a cookie.”

As such a conversation progresses, you get down to making an agreement for next time, or sharing your feelings about stealing and lying, and along the way, you are having a heart-to-heart without blaming or shaming. You are helping your child—in an emotionally neutral tone—to face their behavior and make a decision to try to do something differently the next time. The goal is simply to open the dialogue, to get them thinking, to help them develop their own conscience, rather than to assert yourself as the “Ruler” who directs their behavior. Our job as parents is to support the development of our child’s own conscience, which is a gradual process.

As I was recently so painfully reminded by a psychologist, “Parents cannot follow their teenagers into every dark alley. The only one that goes in there with them is their conscience. You’d better get used to it.” (Ouch!) So, helping our children build a strong conscience is the goal. And to keep our focus there, we need to point to positive behaviors, not spiral downward into punishments, threats, warnings, and diatribes about how their behavior made us feel. This doesn’t mean we can’t be honest about feeling mad, sad, or disappointed—but our feelings cannot serve as a driving force to change children’s behaviors because when they reach adolescence, that dynamic of trying to control another’s behaviors turns to turbo mode. That is a game where every player is a loser, and the stakes are much higher!

The more your elementary-aged child tries to deny, point fingers, or insist, the stronger their fear and anxiety about right and wrong, and about your reaction. The only way through this forest and out the other side is to diffuse this intensity. As parents, we have got to be less emotional, less forceful, less righteous, less disapproving—a very hard feat for most of us. We feel so responsible for our children’s behaviors; we take it so personally! But when we can get ourselves out of their way, the more direct the child’s relationship to their conscience will be, and the swifter their recovery to normal, healthy behavior.

In The Absorbent Mind Dr. Montessori explained, “Neither severity nor kindness will solve the problem…If the child is placed on a path in which he can organize his conduct and construct his mental life, all will be well…These are not the problems of moral education but of character formation. Lack of character, or defects in character, disappear of themselves, without any need for preaching by grownups or for grown-up examples. One does not need to threaten or cajole, but only to 'normalize' the conditions under which the child lives.”

To "normalize" the environment means to put our attentions on supplying some interesting choices of activity which have real purpose and connection to the home, family, or natural surroundings.

Montessori wrote, “What advice can we give to mothers? Their children need to work at an interesting occupation; they should not be helped unnecessarily, nor interrupted, once they have begun to do something intelligent.” In this way, we include our children in the purposeful work of the home and family, and we support them to concentrate and engage in this work.

Ultimately, it is this balancing of the whole personality which Montessori felt was incredibly important and universal: “We find this phenomenon repeated…with children belonging to different social classes, races and civilizations. It is the most important single result of our whole work. The transition from one state to the other always follows a piece of work done by the hands with real things, work accompanied by mental concentration.”

Montessori emphasized, “The essential thing is for the task to arouse such an interest that it engages the child’s whole personality.” This point is critical: In order for an activity to really engage a child’s whole personality, it must meet the match of challenge for them. It cannot be too hard, but it must be challenging enough to demand the child’s attention. Most of the things you need to do around the house, on a child’s level of difficulty, are good choices for such activity.

Many psychologists recommend a non-emotional response that focuses on “How can we fix this now?” for lying and stealing. Most recommend helping your child to clean up the issue they created. The less pointing, shaming and blaming, the easier it goes. If your child refuses to join you in cleaning something up, returning it, or clearing up a breach of trust, model doing it yourself, and then try to involve your child in some balancing, engaging activity (which is also a great way to head things off at the pass) that absorbs them and gives them a constructive home life environment.

I love Dr. Montessori’s wisdom in pointing us towards meaningful activity as the answer. It resonates with the work of Csikzentmahalyi , who coined the term “flow” for that happiest, most satisfying state. Including your children in purposeful activities is a remedy for many situations, no matter their age—even with adolescents. When our sixteen-year-old gets ornery, wants to argue, or pushes the boundaries, my husband and I find that asking him to cut the tree lights off the outdoor tree, fix a cabinet, solve a problem for us, or make a meal always helps him return to his better self. It seems to bring a person of any age back into the fold, centers them to find their purpose and worth, and places them in society as a good citizen once more.

* Very young children under age five may not even know or understand what they are doing when we accuse them of "stealing" or “lying.” They just know they took something they wanted or tried to make something believable to others by saying it. With very young children, a simple response without too much talking is advised. Let them see you remedy the situation, and they will absorb the rights and wrongs of behavior by observing. The elementary years are really the time when morality becomes a conscious quest, and this is what this article is referring to. For a better understanding of moral development within a Montessori framework, see our blog post How our Children Develop Moral Values.

How Montessori Education Prepares Children for Life Beyond School

Sun, 04 Mar 2018 21:19:48 GMT

Parents often ask us, “What happens next? Where do our children go to high school, and what is that transition like? Which schools do they go to, and what kinds of careers do they choose? What are they like?” Parents want to know, in essence, “How is choosing Forest Bluff going to make a difference in my child’s life? And how can I know for sure?”

A few weeks ago we transformed the school building into a party venue for roughly 150 alumni and their parents who came back to visit, as we do every four or five years. Graduates who attended Forest Bluff in the ‘80s, ‘90s, and 2000s came back and joyfully reconnected. This event is always amazing for the Directors because we get to hear about what our alumni are doing in their careers and see how happy they are. On this particular occasion, we asked former students if they would mind taking a moment to talk to a videographer about any of their thoughts on Montessori education. Every single alumnus we asked responded enthusiastically; Montessori graduates seem to love telling people about their experiences, especially as they reach adulthood.

When our videographer—who knew nothing about Montessori—asked what we wanted him to ask the alumni, we said, “Just get them talking. Let them be themselves.” They had no trouble sharing! Over the Christmas vacation, I sifted through the footage and chose just a few minutes of clips to share with the audience at our evening presentation. These specific individuals went all the way through Forest Bluff, from 18 months old to age 14. They went to a variety of high schools: New Trier, Lake Forest Academy, Vernon Hills High School, and boarding schools. Some are working in their chosen careers, while others are in college, graduate school, and medical school.

When one graduate jokes that you learn all these traits in Montessori “from the Pink Tower,” I believe what he’s saying is that the Montessori materials and how they are presented and used have a central role in the approach. It is through the materials that your children learn how to transform their experience into knowledge. And this is what I think each of these graduates is getting at here. As I listened to these clips, I realized it is the process of turning experience into knowledge that Montessori children learn. They feel that they are teaching themselves, and they develop a confidence that they can teach themselves things. Montessori students understand that learning is not a passive experience. Rather, information is out in the world, in the materials on the shelves, in books; it is in your environment and you’ve got to find it, work with it, experience it, and then transform that experience into knowledge for yourself. This gives Montessori graduates a certain mindset for life.

I relate to the feeling some of you may have when you see graduates like this, and many of us think, “That’s amazing, but I just don’t think my child will be like that.” We worry that our own children are somehow the exceptions, that they could not possibly ever pull it all together. I think this fear must be inherent in parenting.

You may think these graduates had superior genes, or outside tutoring, or some other hidden advantage. But I was here, and I taught some of these very children, and I can tell you: One had a very difficult time learning sandpaper letters, another had trouble memorizing multiplication facts, another had a hard time with learning to read, and one wrote run-on sentences for weeks at a time. We had to work so hard together! But they don’t remember it that way. What they remember is that their struggles were a normal part of the learning process.

In our classrooms today, your children are going through struggles, too, just as these children did. We adults must keep this in the forefront of our minds: Struggling with things is a natural part of learning how to learn. We need to allow our children the space to work things through, to self-correct, and to work past their difficulties. When we can do this, our children will improve and do so with dignity intact. Your children will grow up to be successful, just like these graduates—I promise!

Dr. Montessori talked a lot about having faith in the child —and what she meant wasn’t so much a personal leap of faith in each individual, but that we can have faith in this process of learning that is happening inside every child. She recognized this phenomenon—this drive to succeed, to learn—and told us, in so many words, “It will go best if you can prepare the learning environment to meet the children’s developmental needs and then support this natural learning process unfolding before your eyes.”

In our recent Winter Coffee Discussion, I shared with parents the two things that make a big difference at home: Read to your children and surround them with quality literature, and involve them in the work that needs to be done around your house. This way, you show your children to be team players, to pitch in. This means carrying their own lunch basket in and out of the school building, helping to make meals, cleaning up when it’s needed, and so on. These are small ways you can foster your children’s growing independence and the mindset to embrace challenge. At these Coffee Discussions, our parents with teenagers who have graduated from Forest Bluff told their own stories. We discussed ways to address challenges at home and answered each other’s questions. I believe we all walked out into the cold weather feeling much encouraged in our parenting journeys!

Learning to Love Effort: How Montessori Fosters Perseverance

Thu, 18 Jan 2018 19:58:25 GMT

In the Montessori approach, “work” is not a dirty word; it’s a glorious word. For the child’s real “work” is to form their own, unique human being in the world, through everything that they do and everything that they engage in. Think of how you feel when you are fully immersed in something you love to do. It could be polishing your antique car, fly fishing, writing a poem, a speech, solving a math equation, or helping a client. If you have work that absorbs you in such moments, then you understand that inspiring work feels good to children, too. Of course, children do not think of their actions as work, but Montessori proposed that what children do should be respected as their work.

The infant’s task is to build a person, so she is fully engaged in kicking her legs and making sounds, delighting in it, concentrating on it, going on with it even when it takes effort. And here is a main reason that Montessori is so timely for today’s youth: when we have found some piece of work that engages us fully, effort is a friend that helps us persevere. With the Montessori approach, children develop an attitude that effort is a friendly, natural part of any learning process. This is because effort is built in to every activity they engage in at school that leads them into flow.

In a Primary Classroom , I watched a four-year-old boy wash a table with such gusto and flourish that he seemed completely unaware of the other children walking past him and talking. He did not seem to hear the bells a child was playing on the far side of the room, the water splashing in the sink as another child filled and refilled his bucket just five feet away, the classroom door opening, a child entering, the door closing again, or a girl tap-tap-tapping her feet while she was counting out loud at a table three feet to his left, adding four digits numbers with a bead frame. All this and more was swirling around him, and he was bent over his work, apron hanging down and wet with water, making big, round motions with his arm as he scrubbed the surface of the wooden table. His long curly bangs were swinging over his brow, the shoelaces of one shoe untied and lying on the floor while he rocked forward and up on the balls of his feet to reach the far side of the table, one hand flat on the table to support his weight.

The boy paused when he had made the soapsuds cover every part of the table surface. He stood upright, took a step back, brushed his dark curls from his face with a wet forearm holding the child-sized scrub brush, glanced up at the child sitting near him, and just as quickly bent over his floor mat to his right with all the table washing materials laid out on it: sponge, soap dish with soap bar in it, a wash-cloth for drying, a tiny bucket half filled with water. He rubbed the scrub brush on the soap bar, stopped and looked at the bristles, re-wetted them in the bucket, and rubbed them on the soap again (quite firmly). When he noticed suds building, he paused again, glanced at the underside of the brush, and went back at it with the table surface. He scrubbed and scrubbed, moving his circular motions around to cover the entire surface again. This repeated and went on for a good 15 minutes.

Beads of sweat formed on his forehead and his hair started to stick. He seemed unaware and unfazed, completely absorbed in his whole body movement. Then he put the brush on the floor mat, squatted down and took the sponge, and started wiping the table in smooth, long swipes from one side to the other, eventually removing most of the suds. He bent over and plunged the sponge into the water bucket, and at that moment another boy came over and said something to him. He smiled up at him, then looked back down and squeezed the sponge out with both hands, and the other boy walked away. He stood straight up, looked after the other boy for a moment, then watched the water dripping into the bucket from his sponge, long, slow drips. He looked pensive, watching…then squeezed the sponge out with more force, watched, then started wiping the table again.

He stopped after a while and sighed, stood up and noticed a girl walking by with a tray of flowers. He then dried his table with the dry wash cloth and quickly cleaned up the things on his mat, returning the water from the bucket into the child-level sink and taking the scrub brush over to the sink and rinsing it with a gushing stream of water (it dripped from his hand the whole way back to his mat but he did not notice this). He squatted down to his mat and put the sponge, dish with soap, and scrub brush back into the little bucket. He then paused and pulled them all out again.

Such episodes repeat throughout the day in a Montessori Primary classroom. This is a prime example of how a child organizes his thoughts and motions with a sequence of actions, integrating his will, decision-making, and body movements—both gross motor and the small motor of his fingers—and exercising care for materials and the environment. The child uses such exercises to satisfy his craving for purposeful work: not of the work of washing a table per se, but the deeper work of building all the cognitive and physical aspects of his personality. Dr. Montessori pointed out that young children need these organizing activities that have real purpose and connection to community life to build themselves through .

The effort and focus that rose out of this determined activity was his alone; a child can measure and respond to the level of effort he or she feels rising in them during the activity and adjust and work with that sensation of effort. It is completely unadulterated and not manipulated or created by an outside force, but comes from within that individual child. So, effort is a different experience than the one we deliver to children when we give them an assignment. Accomplishing specific tasks later when asked to is something our Montessori children can willingly do with confidence because of such numerous experiences they have had of flowing with effort by their own accord.

These simple practical life activities, such as washing, cleaning, and arranging, lay the foundation not only for effort but for the organizing of thoughts as a child experiences sequences of actions and their outcomes in all their stages and orders. Montessori uniquely employs such activities as the building blocks for thinking and doing. They deliberately and precisely set the stage for mathematics, language arts, and all the child’s intellectual and physical work to come. Simultaneously, our children’s healthy approach to effort translates into resilience and perseverance that will distinguish them in their later years.

A Montessori Guide to Technology and Teens

Tue, 05 Dec 2017 20:16:52 GMT

As our families leave the comfortable world of our Montessori grade schools behind and enter high schools, with new parenting challenges to face, we can look to the Montessori approach we have found so useful and apply it to this new landscape. Adolescence is a stage of life that necessitates new freedoms and adjusting boundaries, as our children begin to join the adult world with growing independence. Considering the basic tenets of the Montessori approach, this means we’ll provide support and some scaffolding, model for our adolescents, link them to the best of this adult world, and provide expanding freedoms with reasonable and supportive boundaries.

Let’s apply this approach to a well-known struggle most of us share when our daughters and sons enter high school: what to do about technology use. I hear too many parents lament that their 14- to 17-year-olds seem “addicted” to technology, huddled over their iPhones and laptops for hours at a time, irritable, stressed, and often distracted. A push-and-pull drama unfolds, where parents and teens struggle to figure out what limits and “rights” are reasonable, on both sides. Here we’ll suggest things that can help you get off to a better start with teens and technology.

The "Take Off": Developmental Considerations

Until they graduate from Forest Bluff School, our students really do not need to use computers or smartphones. In fact, there are many reasons we recommend holding off on technology exposure for children, which we will explore in a future blog. Our Forest Bluff students learn to touch type and use the computers in our Secondary Level like any other piece of classroom material, with support and supervision. Then, as our children head off into high school, a laptop computer and in some cases, a smartphone, may become necessary.

Because technology is very much a part of our adult world, and developmentally, adolescents can think more abstractly, high school is a logical time for our children to begin using it beyond learning to touch-type a paper or planning a Secondary Level trip. Now it can be a tool for communicating, collecting information, and creating. After having the first stage of adolescence (middle school) under their belts, when learning to read social cues and expressions more accurately is key, high school students are more ready to find the power of the written word when there are no physical expressions to inform them. They are developmentally ready for the abstract world of technology and the gifts it offers to adult--and evolving adult--minds.

A word of caution, however: adolescence is also a time of increased distractibility, when the brain is undergoing big changes that make it more open and vulnerable to addictive behaviors (see Brainstorm , 2015). The tendency to overuse technology must be taken into account and should be a topic of conversation with your children before problems arise. The desire to connect with friends and be part of a group drives teens towards their iPhones and computers. This makes it an important time to help them stay aware of what else is going on around them and involve them in family and community life.

At home, we encourage parents to emphasize intellectual life, spending time outdoors, being physically active, reading, conversing, and contributing with chores and collaboration as a family. As an example, my own 13-year-old daughter and 15-year-old son have dinner with my husband and me every night, with each member cooking a weekly meal from scratch. We all pitch in on the clean up. Even though it can be a challenge with homework, sports, and busy schedules, we continue to come back to these basics of family life and are always grateful to find how this feels. Especially now in these teen years, we work hard to prioritize these habits of how we spend our time. It really pays off.

Adolescents will naturally want to stretch away from their families but still need the home base; they need to feel that they are necessary to their first core group. As technology competes for their attention, ask your adolescent to participate in more adult-like roles within the family, like driving, doing an errand, planning the logistics of a trip, caring for an elder or younger person, and sharing more of the load that the adults are carrying. This fundamental connection with the family unit and sense of responsibility is so important to emotional, social and physical health. There is good evidence that developing life skills and connecting with family and community in the teen years aids confidence and supports academic success. Whenever I have asked veteran moms for advice on raising teens, the first thing they invariably say is, “keep them close,” and I believe this is what they mean.

Introducing Technology: Preparing the Environment, Modeling, and Setting Supportive Limits

Prepare the Environment

When you give a laptop computer or other electronic tool to your adolescent, fix it the way you would like it to be used: block inappropriate sites, remove features you do not think your child should use, and put parental controls in place that allow you to adjust the hours and amount of time the computer will function. Some families choose to turn off their internet at a certain time each evening or plug all their devices into chargers in a central, confined location, so that nighttime is guaranteed to be tech-free. The purpose of preparing the tech environment is to remove the need to be controlling and micro-managing. Set things up from the get-go to be used how and when you think is best. Then there’s no negotiating or issues. The parameters do the work.

Next, present any device as a useful tool and talk about your values when you gift one--this is your moment! Ben Moudry, a Montessori child who became a Montessori teacher of adolescents and head of a Montessori school, observes that the students who were given technology when they were younger often see it as a toy for games and entertainment, rather than a tool. “They constantly goof around on the computer, so it’s become a habit that’s hard to break,” he says. But if their introduction to technology was as a tool to use for learning, Ben sees that they have a different attitude, one that helps them make better use of it in school. Because so many computer “learning programs” are like games, they can also create this association of entertainment. When we talk about using the computer as a tool, we’re referring to writing papers, searching for and reading research, building graphs, designing programs and the like.

Realize that no smartphone or computer is a “right.” It is a luxury, and if you, the parent, are giving one to your child, it is reasonable to explain that it’s your money and your decision. A device comes with your conditions and can be taken away. It also should be given with instructions on how to use it properly and what your clear expectations are. It is useful to decide together what the guidelines ought to be and make an agreement, as an offshoot of your conversation about what temptations may come up. If you think your child may be fuzzy about the guidelines agreed on, type them up to refer to. Look at this as a contract. This may sound unnecessary, but I cannot tell you how many parents wish they had started out this way, as they end up there after much frustration and disappointment. Start out more clearly, and you won’t regret it.

Talk with your child openly about why adolescence is a time of greater distractibility in life, that you know other teens who have struggled to “unplug” from their devices, or that you yourself have challenges with doing so. Ask, “What guidelines do you propose that you think can help you avoid these things for yourself?” (If your child is not mature enough to engage in this discussion and follow through by typing up a short list of good guidelines, that’s a definite sign that they are too young to handle freedom with technology.) You may want to shorten, simplify, or adjust the list. Make it simple and help your child set himself/herself up for success.

Model Screen-Free Time and Appropriate Use of Technology

Share your values by living them in front of your children and talking about what’s most important to you. Mealtimes, bedtimes, in the car or on walks, are moments for connecting, telling stories, asking questions, sharing your thoughts and listening to your children’s. Turn off your devices and put them away when together, be demonstrative about your priority; adolescence is a crucial time to be emotionally and cognitively “present” for your children.

As adults, we can now set limits on our own technology use: We can set our own phones up so that we cannot text or use the screen while driving cars and our computers so that they do not alert us when new emails arrive while we’re working. What has been a free-for-all can now become a more controlled experience for us.

As adults, we can make these choices to restrict ourselves--and do so--because we desire work spaces and times without constant interruptions. But children are not coming at this from the same perspective, with the many years of self-control and choices that we have under our belt as adults. When a parent gives a child or adolescent a device and simultaneously tells them that they need to control their use of it by their sheer willpower, we are asking something most of them are going to struggle with--a lot. Their constant failure with this can be disappointing not only to you, but also to them. With the news on how technology is specifically designed to capture our attention and make us use it more and more, it is incredibly unfair to give it to young adults and expect them to control their use with adult-like strength. Much better to begin with boundaries that will help our adolescents to expect that this scaffolding is useful and necessary, even for adults.

Also model your manners with your smartphone or computer. Put it down, turn it off, and interact with people when appropriate: when in a restaurant together, at check-out counters, at social functions, or when having a conversation with someone. Model alert and aware behavior when walking through a city, crossing a street, or getting in or out of a train, bus, taxi-cab or Uber ride. Adolescents may not be watching us with the same absorbent minds as young children or the analytical minds of elementary aged children, but they are looking to us as immediate examples of adult behavior as they are becoming adults themselves. Our young adults need to see us make clear decisions about technology.

Set Supportive Limits

Handing tech devices over to children without limits built in may seem harmless when you see other parents doing it. But as we see mounting evidence from families we know, and substantial research pointing to the issues arising from doing this, parents are backtracking to set limits. So, supply some clear boundaries, such as which rooms in your home devices can or cannot be used in. For example, it is advised to keep electronics out of the bedrooms for a lifetime habit of protecting that space for sleeping and relaxing. It is also widely advised to prohibit bringing them to meals, so that everyone engages with each other, and not their devices. These two are common ones. Beyond that, some families have other specific boundaries. In our own house, for instance, we keep the laptops in the kitchen, library, and office--study areas that are in the lower level of the house. We don’t bring any devices or laptops upstairs, which is where our bedrooms are. My husband and I follow the same guidelines as our children.

For a child in middle school (ages 12-14) we recommend keeping computers positioned where you can see the screen. I know many families who did this and were glad that they were able to establish good habits, especially with emailing, texting, and Face Time. Nowadays, we can check a computer’s history through the parental controls feature (in settings) and see what the user was doing, but many parents may still want to be around with younger teens. This also sets the tone that a computer is not a privacy right; it is an interactive and social device that’s open to audiences. Realizing that their computer activity is seen by others, whether from the exterior or interior, is an important message.

Keep Your Goals in Mind

If your aim is to support your adolescents to develop their abilities of concentration and self-reliance, then align your decisions with this outcome. Support developing concentration by maintaining that computers are tools for writing papers, building graphs, and doing other thoughtful work.

And encourage self-reliance by making computer and smartphone use realistic. For instance, one guide for the timing of getting an iPhone is when a high school student can handle the financial responsibility; one of my older sisters told her children that they could have iPhones when they could purchase them and pay for the call plans on their own. With money from their first jobs, her teenagers did this in high school, and they took very good care of those devices! The girls received their bills each month, and my sister and her husband taught them how to pay them with their own wages. This was an empowering experience that helped these adolescents learn more about how adults function. They understood the responsibility of the freedom. Rather than feeling they were being punished by not being gifted the devices, these daughters saw their parents’ actions as a way of helping them enter the adult world with realistic expectations and awareness of their own abilities.

Maintaining Focus for Learning

When our children become young adults, they begin a process of using the tools we use in everyday life; along with this introduction must come the ways we keep ourselves focused. Dr. Angeline Lillard has been a professor of psychology at the University of Virginia for over 20 years, and when she saw that her students could not seem to control their laptop or smartphone internet use in the classroom, she banned them during lectures. The research coming out at the time was showing that we do not retain information as well when we type it as when we handwrite it (Mueller & Oppenheimer, 2014). Therefore, Dr. Lillard did not believe that the students needed their laptops to take notes during her lectures (with some exceptions, of course). There is also strong evidence that being distracted--as we are when messages come in on our devices--doesn’t just interfere with learning new information, it can actually block it.

Prohibiting smartphone and laptop use in the classroom was novel for the early 2000s, but as Dr. Lillard’s teaching assistants sat in the back row and excused offending students from class, she noticed the quality of student work and participation increase convincingly. More research in recent years supports this observation (see the articles listed below, which cite many studies). The students enjoyed Dr. Lillard’s class more and actually thanked her for setting these guidelines to keep them on track. Today, many of Dr. Lillard’s colleagues at UVA also require that students not bring laptops or smartphones to lectures and class discussions.

It’s just a matter of time before all educators find that any classroom designed for group discussion and learning in lecture format is no place for smartphones, laptops, or any other kind of screen that distracts the participants from what they are there to do: learn from a teacher and each other. Teachers who are using technology interactively in their classrooms may have another perspective, but as long as a classroom teacher cannot see what is on their student’s screens, the temptation to shop for new shoes, Snapchat a friend, or check Instagram while they look like they are “taking notes,” is too strong for many. Such activity detracts from their own learning, and because it influences participation, it also affects the learning of their classmates as well as the entire class atmosphere.

We know that what makes Montessori classrooms so impactful is the emphasis on developing the ability to concentrate. All learning is based on this premise: that one who can focus can think. This is why protecting learning spaces for focused concentration and thinking must be the aim of educators, as well as parents at home.

Conclusion

As a stream of research in recent years links anxiety, depression, and a compromised ability to focus to unrestricted technology use (see Irresistible , 2017), parents must take precautions before handing devices over to their children. Pause to think of Montessori’s explanation of the characteristics and needs of each stage of childhood. Adolescence looks like the most logical time to introduce technology as a tool for adult life, despite the fact that increased distractibility is a characteristic of this stage of brain development. Before you begin down the technology path, prepare your home environment in some important ways so that your child is supported and set up well. Model with your own technology use, and demonstrate how you actively curb your use where necessary. Provide freedoms thoughtfully, and set limits with care. Remember that freedoms can and must be given in steps, so that children have the chance to respond with increasing responsibility. And finally, give your adolescent scaffolding for practicing the best habits. Technology is no different from any other new landscape when you look at it this way. The basic principles of the Montessori approach have much to offer us in these new adventures!

References and Resources

Articles

Carr, N. (2017, October 6). How smartphones hijack our minds . The Wall Street Journal.

Mueller and Oppenheimer. (2014). The pen is mightier than the keyboard: Advantages of longhand over laptop note taking . Pyschological Science, 25, 1159-68.

Loh, K.K., & Kanai, R. (2016). How has the internet reshaped human cognition? The Neuroscientist, 22(5), 5-6-520.

Books

Brainstorm: The Power and Purpose of the Teenage Brain , by Daniel Siegel, MD

I rresistible: The Rise of Addictive Technology and the Business of Keeping Us Hooked , by Adam Alter

Reclaiming Conversation: The Power of Talk in a Digital Age , by Sherry Turkle, PhD

The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Brains , by Nicholas Carr

Videos

What is "Brain Hacking"? Tech Insiders on Why You Should Care . Anderson Cooper/CBS News, 60 Minutes, April 9, 2017.

Freedom and Responsibility: How Choices and Limits Help Children Develop Character

Wed, 01 Nov 2017 22:44:48 GMT

Some of the most misunderstood concepts in the Montessori approach are “freedom and responsibility” and the “development of the will.”

A delicate balance of freedom and responsibility leads to the development of the will. The three interact in an ascending spiral that gives children gradual, increasing success to make decisions and direct their own lives. This is the ultimate goal of an education for life, making these some of the very most important aspects of a young child’s life, at school and at home. In order to understand this process of developing the will, think of freedom as being choices, and responsibility as being limits. This way, freedom and responsibility are results--rather than starting points--in a child’s development. Choices and limits lead a child to freedom and responsibility.

Why Develop the Will?

At first, our youngest children are ruled by their impulses. They may kick, pinch, or grab, from impulses which they haven’t learned to control yet. By giving choices, we help a child develop his own will so that he can choose, think independently, and become truly free. The control then comes from inside the child, not from the outside; this is how a child is empowered by his developing will. Gradually, through repeated experiences of making choices with limits, young children become more settled, less impulsive, more self-disciplined, ready to join others, comfortable, and truly free.

Having experiences helps a child make new decisions. For instance, if a child is offered a choice between a banana and an apple but has never tasted an apple, he might choose one or the other impulsively, not sure which he wants. Knowledge comes through experience, so once he has tasted an apple and decides he does not like it, he can make a more informed choice the next time. His will comes into play when the options are posed to him another day: “I know I really like bananas better than apples because I have tasted both,” and, “I am going to choose the banana now.”

This new knowledge enables a child to make the choice. Making choices inspires his interest in what is happening. Repeating this cycle (choice-knowledge-interest-next choice…) enables a child to develop his will, strengthening his ability to make his own decisions and forming his character. “The will” is the ability to pause and choose, based on thought. When the will is more developed, it means a child has this strength to pause and decide, taking the choices and limits of his environment into account.

Why Give Choice?

To lead to this success, we need an environment where young children can make choices and be active. An adult can help a young child channel his energy into positive actions by offering choices of activities that he can become deeply engaged in.

At home, we want to give our young children two options whenever possible. (Two choices provide a needed limit.) The choice between two things allows our children to practice-- again and again--will over impulse. Because children under age three are deeply in the process of developing their wills, their behavior can be “difficult” if we do not recognize that this is what is happening. We can also frustrate the process by giving too many choices or letting a child have anything and everything. Naptimes, bedtimes, meals, clothes, toys--these all can be permissively confusing if there is no structure or limits. On the flip side, we can frustrate the child’s process by never offering clear choices between two available options. The two available options give our one- and two-year-olds opportunities to do just what they need to do: develop their wills through simple choices, again and again.

Please note, we are not talking about the first year of life, because when children are about 15 to 18 months old is when giving them choices between two things becomes so important; this is when the development of the will is a focus in their development. This focus can inspire behavior that has earned the unfortunate expression “the terrible twos.” When we realize that two-year-olds’ frustrated behavior comes from an overpowering desire to make one’s own choices and the craving for limits in these choices, we can act to satisfy their needs and reduce the frustration.

Give your young child two options whenever it is reasonable: two food items, two books for bedtime--just a few times a day--and see what difference you notice. Giving a choice every time something is about to happen can be way too often and make a child anxious or controlling, so just look for the reasonable times for a little person to have a choice. The more they can climb into the car seat on their own, carry their own bag, pour their own water, wipe up their own spill, choose between two foods, the better. But there is no reason to purchase two pairs of shoes or two coats just so a child can choose between them! There are natural limits in life, where there is often just one option, and there are plenty of times where there are many choices, which is when we want to present just two of them to our children.

Examples of choices:

Would you like an apple or a banana?

Are you going to put on the blue socks or the red socks?

Do you want to sit by me or next to Grandpa?

Do you want to walk to the car or be carried?

Only give choices that are reasonable and which you are content with. If you cannot carry your child, that isn’t an option to propose; so instead, you can ask, “Would you like to walk holding my hand or shall I hold your hand?” (Amazingly, even this can sometimes satisfy a young child’s need to be respected enough to exercise choice in the matter.)

In a gradual progression by age six, you might offer three reasonable choices and sometimes, a child may propose another agreeable option that shows they are becoming more responsibly independent. Some children need more limits (fewer choices), and some are fine with more choices (increased freedom). These are not value judgments, because giving a child what he or she needs is the best way to reach the final goal of being able to make good choices of their own. Observe your own children to decide whether they are handling more choices smoothly. Sticking to two choices is always a good strategy if you are unsure.

Why Give Limits?

A real environment is set up with limits built into it. The consequences are natural ones. They are real. Glass breaks when thrown on the floor, and we sweep it up and put it in the trash or recycling bin. Water spills when a cup is tipped, and we mop it up. The broom, bin, and mop are part of the environment so that everything is ready for the child to participate in all stages of a realistic process. Every society has guidelines to help us exist in harmony, and our little children learn these guidelines by being invited to interact with a real environment that has limits built into it. Limits provide security and orientation.

We can also add guidelines that point our children to limits that help them. We might stitch a circle of thread onto a placemat to show where the plate can be placed, and a smaller one for the cup and an outline of a spoon for the placement of the utensil. We might use a sweeping guide (a semi-circle made of wood) so that young children can sweep a pile of dust to one decided spot in the room.

There are also logistical limits: Perhaps a child chooses an egg for lunch, but when the egg is ready to eat, she decides she wants a slice of turkey instead. We provide the reasonable limit, “We have an egg now. Tomorrow you can choose the turkey. Mmm, this egg looks very good. It is still warm.” If she decides she doesn’t want it now, that is her choice; we will not force it. But we are not going to give in and change the food. That would be taking away the limit that helps her to make her choice tomorrow and to realize the power of her own decision-making.

I think this could be why children who are given whatever they want get very anxious, because they actually feel powerless, not powerful. Nothing makes sense, because having adults give them whatever they want shows them no boundaries to live in, no security, no walls. The child who realizes, through experiences, that the next day she can make a choice again and can choose the turkey slice, (or the egg!) feels in control in a very real way. Now, if there are no more turkey slices because Dad ate them since yesterday…well, that adds another layer of reality; now we plan to go later to the grocery store and replenish our supply. The only choice is what is available, as disappointing as that may be at times.

What is Responsibility?

Think of responsibility as being the result of exercising choices within limits. Responsibility does not come first, as in, “Behave responsibly and then I will see that you are responsible.” Children cannot know how to be responsible until they have developed the ability to respond by their own decisions. In other words, response-able : able to respond because they are able to choose their own actions and then execute them.

The limits in an environment give children the boundaries that they can practice responding to. Through their continued experiences of making choices within limits, children become increasingly response-able. As they respond to the limits in the environment and make choices with these limits in mind, we call their behavior “responsible.”

What is Freedom?

Dr. Montessori referred often to the importance of giving children freedoms. Many people misunderstand these statements by thinking that she meant we need to “let children go.” But Dr. Montessori was very clear that we mustn’t allow children to do anything they wish, practicing their impulsivity. Doing so would not lead children to develop inner freedom, which is based on one’s own decision-making ability and self-control. Montessori referred to giving children freedom with choices and movement as their minds directed them, but this is not a free-for-all kind of freedom. In fact, she pointed out that, at first, children are reacting to their whims and are not truly free, but rather prisoners of impulses.

The term freedom in a Montessori context really refers to inner freedom, which is the result--not the starting point--of the process of developing a will. Yes, a child needs freedom to move and freedom to make decisions, but these are very specific freedoms that we can think of as choices . And unless there are limits in these choices, and some purposeful activity that moves the body and mind (such as sweeping up a spill or pouring water to drink into a cup), there can be no process through which to reach true inner freedom.

Inner freedom is the ultimate goal in this process. We all crave inner freedom, to think our own thoughts, make our own decisions, and follow our willpower to construct our lives. But it is only the limits of the world that make this possible. We cannot have anything we dream up, and these boundaries of reality give us security, a sense of place and purpose. Freedom is not license; it is not impulsive behavior. Freedom is having developed the self-control to make a choice and the willpower to decide and restrain oneself from one option in order to have another. This puts us in a relationship with our surroundings. We are in harmony with our surroundings when our actions have a connection to the next moment and to other people, objects, and conditions. Our children will find this wonderful harmony.

An Education for Life

If you have older children, you can rely on the limits of reality when giving reasonable choices. Natural, built-in consequences often provide limits in the real world. Parents can cause more harm than good when we interfere too much with what is possible, carving out more choices to try to placate our children. We can also divert our children away from natural consequences by thinking we need to invent limits. A typical example might be when a teenager decides not to do her schoolwork, and her parents create a consequence such as, “You cannot have ice cream tonight until you’ve done your schoolwork.” That may work only until the teenager doesn’t care about ice cream, which is when the limit looks pretty silly and not realistic. And the savvy teenager can figure out that she can still get the ice cream, just later after everyone else has gone to sleep! Now the parent has a new problem: behavior to further correct with another invented consequence, and the cycle continues. And the thing is, that made-up consequence was not even necessary in this case because there was already a real consequence: If a teenager doesn’t do her schoolwork, she probably won’t learn the material, which will reflect in her grades or some other measurement of her performance or ability to proceed. It is up to the teenager to experience whether the grades are important. This is where we have to resist the urge to make our child’s problem our problem. This is very hard to do, but if we raise our children to have a real relationship with the natural limits of life from the beginning--with glass that breaks and mealtimes that end, for example--then she is more likely to think that her grades are her problem and not yours. She is more likely to respond to how her actions and the limits of life intersect. It’s a mindset for life.

Stating your own limit as a parent, such as, “I take kids who do their week’s schoolwork to the water park,” or, “I drive kids to soccer who have tried to do well in school,” can help you frame your role in supporting responsible behavior, but the real consequence is a limit of life. We do best when we (within reason) do not get between the real limits of life and our children.

Taking a Montessori approach at home with choices and limits helps your parent-child relationship from the very early years into adulthood. Because very young children need to develop their willpower and ability to make decisions when they are in the sensitive period to do so, we want to be especially aware to give them simple choices in their early years. Being consistent for our children is not always easy, but thank goodness we have time to keep practicing and working on it over the years! Developing willpower is a gradual process, and its peak focus time is between ages one and three. It pays off when your little ones feel more satisfied with their decision-making needs being met, and ultimately, it helps them prepare for the greater world and their actions in it. When we give choices and limits, the result is freedom and responsibility.

Maria Montessori Speaks to Parents: A New Book Illuminates How to Simplify our Parenting Roles

Wed, 27 Sep 2017 15:32:17 GMT

A new book, Montessori Speaks to Parents by Maria Montessori, was just released this summer, thanks to Carolina Montessori, who is in charge of her great-grandmother’s archives at the Association Montessori Internationale headquarters in Amsterdam. Carolina tackles the more than 56,000 pages of Montessori’s writings, and with her cousin, Alexander Mario Henny, publishes new writings under the Montessori-Pierson Publishing Company . This newest book is a selection of brief articles that Montessori wrote for parents. The foreword is by Paula Polk Lillard, and the photographs are from Forest Bluff School, selected by Lynn Lillard Jessen .

Keep It Simple

The concise language and clear messages in this little book make it a treasure for parents. In it, Montessori explains that children’s needs are really quite simple. This means that our role as parents--if we stay focused on the most important aspect of our task--is quite simple. This news is a great relief; our challenge is in changing our mindset to fulfill our simple role!

Montessori points out that children learn through movement . Therefore, instead of insisting that children stand still or, conversely, giving them nothing to do but run around aimlessly, we must observe their interests in actions that they fix their attention on, such as fitting a cork in and out of a bottle, a key in and out of a lock, pulling their shoes on and off, or sweeping an area with a little broom. By watching to see what entices them and when they become attentive to something, we can take that as our guide and allow children to work through some actions uninterrupted and unhindered. Montessori explains that we can easily help children to learn by aiding this natural desire for movement: “Our idea is simply to provide [a child] with interesting objects which will nourish and exercise his mind. We have no need to force him to learn, to make him work, he does that of his own accord because it is his nature to grow in mind as well as body” (p. 39).

She points out that young children are interested in things that help them to learn about the world, and that if we are sensitive to this, we can have confidence in our children’s choices: “The child’s interest is caught by the objects and activity most suited to his development, and the wise mother will see that her child is kept continually occupied with his own little interests” (p. 37). This is so valuable because this is the way that our children form their intellects: “Children...develop their intelligence through activity” (p. 35). As parents, we can spot when an activity is beneficial because our children will do it again and again, as if trying to perfect their abilities to improve: “…most often a child persists until he himself does it right. This is perseverance which is so important a part of personality” (p. 41).

Choosing the daily activities of life as learning opportunities makes a perfect match for young children’s needs and interests; these are the actions we must perform as adults on a daily basis. Rather than rushing through the motions of dressing, eating, and cleaning so that we can get the children out to some event, organized activity, or location, we can slow down and focus on what is right in front of us. The children love to learn to do things for themselves because these actions help them in so many aspects of their development simultaneously: “This is both education and movement, because there is a refinement of musculature coordination when the work is carefully done, and education through movement, because these activities involve judgment and will, self-discipline, and an appreciation of orderliness” (p. 31).

Look Closely

Montessori encourages parents to look closely: “Watch him, forget that he is tediously picking up and dropping his rattle--that is your point of view--see him watching his own little fingers, see how he is interested in them. He is developing his muscles. If you watch him closely, you may see perhaps the little fingers open one by one instead of all together…gradually, he is becoming master of his own fingers” (p. 12)

We must restrain ourselves at times and allow the children to be free to move with purpose and interact with their environments, only interfering when there is an issue of safety or disrespect. Through their purposeful activity, our young children develop intellect, will, and internal discipline. This happens even when our children seem to be “playing”: “The greater part of what you call ‘play’ is really work. Grown-ups think of play as a purposeless occupation that keeps children happy and out of mischief, but actually when children are left to play by themselves, very little of their activity is purposeless” (p.17).

Over and over, Montessori implores us to let the children be – to allow them to do these motions on their own, not to interfere and not to comment or narrate for them. She points out that having too many toys and “a nanny” to watch over their every movement are impediments to our children’s development: “It is tremendously important that we should understand the spontaneous way in which the child develops himself” (p. 12). Of course, our children need to be kept safe and attended to. But ask childcare helpers to stand back or invite your young children to join with daily tasks. Our helpers need to know that we do not want them to interfere or thwart our children’s attempts to do things for themselves--from dressing, eating, washing, and all other daily tasks around the home. Instead, we want them to slowly show our children how to do things for themselves and show them how to help us with daily tasks.

Not To Always Have His Own Way!

Montessori cautions, “Do not think for a moment that I maintain that a child should always have his own way. That is not what I mean when I say it is wrong to thwart children. But there are two ways of trying to teach obedience. In the misguided old way children are simply told to do this and that, and that is all there is to it; they are punished if they are disobedient. Then there is the other way on which my entire system is founded. Ask from your child only what he can give you; that is, ask for obedience in such a way that your child will be glad to give it, and he will learn the habit of obedience easily because he has learnt it naturally” (p. 29-30).

What Montessori means here is to align your goals with those of your child, who is driven by an inner urge to move, to perfect his movements, and to interact with the environment around him. Children are driven to line up objects, to stack them on each other to build a tower, to arrange things, to scrub and wipe things, to open and close, to put things in and out of other objects. In all these motions, your young children are discovering the world around them, perfecting their own abilities to affect the environment, and developing their intelligence. They are exploring and forming their knowledge of gravity, physics, size, shape, texture, and so on. And during these interactions with the real world, there is no teacher, yet your children are learning!

The Child’s Important Task

Ultimately, we must understand that adults act to change the environment and to use as little effort as necessary. We have created vacuum cleaners and other machines to help us to be more efficient and effective. (I put computers and smart phones in this category.) But the child is at work to build himself as a human being, and he needs to function at his fullest capacity to delve into the details of tasks and to exercise his maximum effort. He tries to work all the time by being active. Our job as adults is to allow him to do this imperative work. The outcome will be the some of the characteristics we’d like to see all children develop: persistence, resilience, problem solving abilities, collaboration, motor control, self-discipline and restraint, creativity and imagination.

So, instead of thwarting your children’s desires to be active by trying to force them to be still or implanting a diversion that is not in sync with their developmental needs (such as a screen or machine), invite them to purposeful activity and step aside when they fix their attention on something that feeds this inner drive. Attention leads to concentration, and ultimately to the development of character. Ironically, the end result is a happy little person who is ready and willing to sit patiently because their need to move with purpose has been satisfied.

Lessons from Montessori: Preparing Ourselves with Grace

Sat, 02 Sep 2017 15:45:05 GMT

Montessori Training and the Mindset it Cultivates

Parenting with grace can be a challenge at times. We explore how parents can apply lessons from Montessori teacher training to child rearing at home.

“The first step…is to prepare [yourself]” – Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind

In 1913, Dr. Montessori gave a series of lectures to train teachers in her first formal training course in Rome. Ninety men and women came from around the world to enroll in this year-long course. Imagine what they must have sacrificed, traveling so far in those days on rough seas, in carriages or early vehicles over uneven roads, leaving their families and careers to come hear what this woman had to say! It was just this kind of willingness and openness that Dr. Montessori declared was necessary in those who wish to work with children. If we are going to truly embrace the idea that our role as adults is to serve children’s natural drive to form themselves, we must be humble, astute, and courteous. We must be ready to learn from observing the children, how to best help each one in their quests.

This is why the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) training courses are so long (three summers long or a calendar school year of nine months) and involve rigorous work and examinations for teachers-to-be. To become a fully-trained Montessori teacher, one is not just acquiring the mechanics of the method: the lessons, materials’ uses, and philosophy. To adopt a new way of thinking--which this approach requires--means that a personal transformation takes place. A person must depart from the traditional, limited beliefs of what children are like and what to do with them. There is an openness, a willingness, and a courage that those first trainees had and that we need to exercise.

It takes time, experiences and practice to change one’s approach and beliefs. A new Montessori teacher watches the children, determines from her training what to show them next, and adjusts based on what she sees in the students’ behaviors. For instance, I remember as a Primary teacher inviting a three-year-old to bring three sandpaper letters , one at a time, to a table to work on them with me. He brought the first, looking around the room as he walked, distracted and excitable, dropped it on the table, and rushed back for the next one. I finished up what I was doing with a different child and turned to smile at him as he approached with the next letter clutched in his hands, again looking around and this time talking to another child as he passed. “Peter,” I stopped him by holding my hands out to gently accept the sandpaper letter /j/, “let’s see how softly we can place the /j/ on the table.” I withdrew my hands as I saw he seized the opportunity to show me himself. “Lovely,” I whispered, “I wonder about the /m/.” And he rushed back to look through the box for that letter. He was still excited, still distracted, but gradually, as I drew his attention towards his movements and the letters, he started to settle into himself and focus.

Our lesson with the three letters that day was more about the movements, even as we practiced the sounds together. I introduced one new letter--instead of the three new ones I had planned to--because I saw that Peter wasn’t ready that day to absorb the new information. In fact, he forgot one of the letters from the previous day several times, so that review became a big part of our lesson, too. Another day, when he settled into work more quickly, we would have time to make strides with more letters. This is how we adjust to meet each child where he or she is at every moment, and we watch the responses we get as we try different things. We actually cover more ground, and do so with deeper and more thorough learning, than if we wed ourselves to an arbitrary timetable for a curriculum.

Parenting with Grace: What We Can Learn from Montessori

This same sensitivity and flexibility can help us as parents. Recently, we had a Coffee Discussion for the Forest Bluff mothers who have three or more children under the age of seven. After sharing some stories, frustrations, worries, and laughter, three “veteran” Forest Bluff mothers responded with their insights from their own experiences of raising several children close in age. Now that their children are in their teens and twenties, these mothers could look back, recall the struggles, and share what had helped them most. One of the biggest take-aways was to pick and choose one’s priorities and let go of some goals that might not be as important in the grand scheme of things. We also heard the call to be graceful; all three mothers said in so many words: It just won’t be perfect, but it will all turn out all right. Accept this and act with grace as best you can .

How can we be graceful when children are screaming, chaos reigns around you in the kitchen, and your own nerves are shot?

Like a teacher in her classroom, we must begin with ourselves. Quite literally, take a step back and observe the children for a moment. Then be the leader. Calmly and confidently step in to guide the children, one at a time, towards something positive. Be as gentle or as firm as each child needs you to be. Every one of them is different, and they are different on each day. But in any moment, when a child is acting chaotically, s/he either needs to be removed from too much stimulus or given the opportunity to be actively involved in her/his own project. It could be as simple as being invited to wipe the tabletop, prepare simple food, or move furniture or belongings from one part of the room to another.

If a child shows s/he is exhausted or overstimulated, it helps to lift them up caringly and hold them while you help the others get started on what they can be doing, then put them in another room or area to quietly look at a book or play alone for a little bit. Setting boundaries and consistently upholding them gives children the structure that they will set for themselves more often as they mature. I know children as young as four who will sometimes announce, “I need some time alone now,” and walk out of the room to care for themselves!

As adults, we need to fill our own spiritual wells weekly with some activity or practice that rejuvenates us. This differs for everybody, but we all need it. We also can do this throughout the day. As a Montessori teacher, I prepared the classroom in the morning and then stood quietly, waiting for the first children to arrive. Sometimes I listened to the classical music quietly playing in the corner. I looked out the large windows at the trees and sky and took deeps breaths to relax so that I could be fully present for each child. I got myself ready, like putting on my own oxygen mask before helping others.

When teaching, I was always so busy I couldn’t believe how fast the day was moving. But as we set up our lunches and sat down at the tables to eat, I used this as another opportunity for calming. I encouraged the children to slow down and move carefully, perhaps played some quiet classical music again, and modeled for the children my own slow motions and calm attitude. I smiled and whispered in response when the children spoke to me, and they quieted down in turn. After lunch in the Elementary rooms is a reading period, when the teacher and all the children read their chosen books quietly for pleasure. At every level, there are these checkpoints throughout the day, and honestly, with the hustle-bustle of working with 20 to 25 children all day long, I do not know how I could have stayed with them all day without these moments of re-centering. I believe the children benefit from taking moments to re-center as well.

In our homes, when we are with our young children all day long, it is imperative to weave in such moments. Checking our phones constantly (I’m guilty, too), answering calls and emails (I’m guilty, too), and racing off to an errand or to stuff more into the day (I’m guilty, too) are big obstacles to creating a home life that fosters creative, reflective thought and inner-stillness: qualities that prepare our children for optimal learning. Our children are much more vulnerable to the distractions and overstimulation of our modern lifestyles than we are. So, preparing ourselves to be sensitive to their needs and observant of their behaviors is more important than ever. Just as the Montessori Directress prepares herself to be the kind of adult who can support and foster the children’s healthiest growth, we as parents need to take the time to prepare. And give yourself time for change to happen; just as it takes the teacher in training months of learning to change herself, this is an ongoing process and a continuing journey in parenting, too. Prepare yourself with grace!

The Montessori Approach to Literacy: Part III

Tue, 08 Aug 2017 16:00:40 GMT

Suggestions for How Parents Can Support Literacy Development in the Home

This month's post is the final installment in a three-part series on the Montessori Approach to Literacy.

Speak to Your Children Early & Often

Infants need to hear us speak, slowly and clearly, making eye contact. You’ll see the urgent ways they respond when their bodies, hands, eyes and mouths are all moving and quivering with effort as they prepare to make sounds that imitate yours. Give this process the time and value it deserves. What a complete miracle it is that we are born wired for communication and human connection!

Opportunities for interaction happen when we are changing a diaper, breastfeeding, or feeding an infant with a bottle. It is so important that we not talk on the phone or text during these times, but give our children our attention and be present with them. Feeding is communication for an infant; it is a whole body experience involving the psyche, personality, and emotional relationship with food, as well as communication with their first human being. Do your best to be emotionally present for these times of interaction and attend to your own adult needs at other times (which you must do, too!). A tangent here: Although compartmentalizing our time is a constant challenge in our modern lives, the consensus is that compartmentalizing and avoiding multi-tasking is the antidote to distractibility and stress. Doing this from your early years with your infants will set you up for your parenting life--it’s a marathon, not a sprint, so take good care of yourself!

oung children need to converse with us. Model for your children by saying the real names of things and taking an interest in the world around you. Go with what is right there in front of you--our immediate world first, because it is from this base that the child will build her knowledge and understanding of the rest of the world. Taking the time to make eye contact and articulate as you are speaking with your children demonstrates to them that human relationships are your priority. So much speech development is taking place every single day when your children are young.

Foster a family culture of sitting down to eat and converse together at meals. Studies overwhelmingly show the benefits of this habit. This is where our children pick up on your family’s values, manners, mindset, approach and attitude toward life. In addition, children gain strength from their family connections. This is where you get to check in with each other emotionally and learn about what your children are thinking about.

Seek Professional Support When Necessary

It is also important to remove obstacles when they are spotted. Ask your pediatrician to check your infant’s ears for hearing and their tongues for speaking, for both are critical to the process of forming speech and comprehending others. Because language development is so sensitive, do not hesitate to get professional help if it is needed. It is not a big deal to get help from a speech therapist for a few months if your child needs the extra guide. Most children don’t need outside help, but if you have one that does, my advice is to move forward with early intervention because the younger a child is, the shorter and more effective the therapy will be.

Read to Your Children Every Day

Children of all ages need to see us reading for pleasure and hear us reading out loud to them. Because they are naturally hardwired for language, so much of “teaching” children to read, think, and communicate comes quite unconsciously and naturally by listening to us read. Interestingly, studies show that there is a difference between listening to a recorded voice, even if the child can see the face on a screen; being with a real reader and interacting with that person is far superior to just listening to a voice. So, while audio books are nice on a long drive or to entertain a sick child, they are not an equal replacement for read-aloud time. Sit down together to read to your children regularly or whenever you can. Allow your children to hear you articulate words while they follow along with your thoughts and absorb sentence structure, vocabulary, and ideas from listening to you read. This is also where deeper conversations and more intimate subjects often come up in conversation. If you read from the classics with older children, choose books you love. When hunting for books, look at the illustrations, culture, sounds of the language, structures in the sentences, and the vocabulary.

Nurturing a love for reading and writing sometimes takes until the teen years to accomplish, so do not be discouraged if you have a child who would rather dribble a ball, play with dolls, or dig in the mud. The stories and words we share with our children fuel the dialogues they create and revisit in their quiet minds while they are off playing alone or with others. Surround your children with books, paper, and pencils and “ooh and ahh” over their little written stories, drawings, and other gifts of language. This evolution of one’s language is a natural process – and a magical one to be enjoyed.

Some Reading Recommendations:

The Read Aloud Handbook by Jim Trelease

Forest Bluff School Book List

The Montessori Approach to Writing and Reading: Part II

Mon, 19 Jun 2017 21:09:10 GMT

Montessori made a surprising observation that young children can actually construct words with the tools they have been given – communicating their thoughts by using letter symbols – well before they can decode the thoughts of others, or “read.” This makes sense, when you think of how much easier it is to locate and recognize letter symbols representing an idea in your own head, rather than starting out completely cold, trying to figure out what another person is thinking as well as what the letter symbols are.

By using the symbols the children have learned to associate with matching phonetic sounds (the moveable alphabet letters), children can “make” words by arranging them together. When a child has the idea of rug in her head, she can find the first sound symbol, /r/, in the moveable alphabet box, then /u/, and then, by sounding out the word, she looks for the letter symbol /g/. She can lay these letters out and though she may not be able to actually “read” this word, she can know that she just formed the word rug . A teacher or friend may come by and read it, and the child delights in the seeming magic of written communication. The excitement of writing is born, and she wants to make more and more words with the moveable alphabet. Eventually, she begins to read what she made and may even find that her letters are in the wrong places. She may have made urg, for instance, and can correct this, analyzing and thinking through the order of the sounds as she does so. This is a deeper level of study that the moveable alphabet encourages.

All of this “writing” can happen without the tremendous effort or difficulty of controlling the fingers and hands in forming the letters themselves. The difficulty has been isolated so that the child can concentrate on one aspect of making words at a time!

In her first school, Montessori said, “If visitors asked the children [age four], ‘Who taught you to write?’, they often answered with astonishment, ‘Taught me to write? No one has taught me!’” Not only was it incredible that the children had learned to write, but they had done so without the sensation of effort or of being taught. At first, Dr. Montessori and her colleagues wondered if it was this particular group of children, but as the experience was repeated over and over with other groups, it became clear that all children are endowed with this capacity to “absorb” and produce written expression.

Physical Preparation for Writing

Because she had observed how other organisms in nature indirectly prepare themselves to develop new abilities, Dr. Montessori realized that this phenomenon was a natural one. She saw animals and organisms in nature “…gaining facility in movements … carried out almost automatically through repeated exercises even apart from the work for which they were directly intended. In this way one could set himself to a task and be already capable of carrying it out without ever having directly put his hand to it…I thought that one might be prepared to write in this way…I marveled at the simplicity…” ( The Discovery of the Child , 194-195).

Writing has different components and can be broken down into different skills to work on indirectly, and then we bring the movements together as a final step. By tracing the shapes of the letters, children could make them without having to master the minute mechanics of controlling the instruments for writing.

But even before that, the muscular mechanism for controlling the pencil is developed simultaneously through many important Montessori materials . The sandpaper touch boards and the baric tablets teach the children to use a lightness of touch with their fingertips and tune in to the sensations there. By tracing the geometric shapes, children loosen their wrists and learn to flexibly move them, as we need to do when writing. The many tiny knobs on the puzzle maps and the solid cylinders exercise the pincer grip of the pointing finger, thumb and middle finger, the ones we use for holding a pencil. Tracing the botany cabinet leaf shapes with the thin orange stick combines the movements of the wrist with the pincer grip and also an added challenge of keeping contact between the stick’s tip and the curving edges of the leaf shapes, so that hand control and eye-hand control are exercised. Making metal insets with colored pencils help the children to guide the pencil in controlled formations with some guiding support from the insets themselves. In this way, the numerous steps of handwriting are broken down to isolate the difficulties and offer the child practice in each area. Finally, the child can put all of these together, and with their experience of making letter shapes through the sandpaper letters and making large letters on the chalkboard, they begin to try to form letters on paper with a pencil.

For some children, this entire process will be smooth, but for those who run into personal challenges, you can imagine how incredibly helpful these aids and this method is to them. All the children benefit in coming to handwriting in a very natural and enjoyable way. Meanwhile, they have also learned the names of geometric shapes, botanical leaf shapes, countries of the world, the differences in cylinder dimensions and much other information that is interesting to them. They have been encouraged to move their bodies, think with their minds, and engage with others and their surroundings.

Preparation for Reading

As all this is going on, young children are also seeing their older classmates read all around them, and they are looking at words and hearing people read them out loud from books and other written materials. The teacher begins to write them little “messages” in slow, careful cursive letters on tiny strips of paper which the children can decode with help and begin to place around the classroom: rug , map , cup , sink , and so on.

The children also practice decoding phonetically spelled words on language cards; there are numerous sets available in the room, and they progress by difficulty. In the Phonetic Object Game, the teacher writes words on strips of paper for the children to match to objects of the same name. This is all happening in conjunction with further practice with the moveable alphabet and writing.

When the teacher sees signs that an individual child is ready for the next level of difficulty, she introduces the idea of phonograms as “two, three or four letters which stand together to make a new sound,” such as /th/ or /sh/. This is an exciting discovery, which opens up many more possibilities in decoding words and making words with the moveable alphabet. There are many phonograms to learn through the Phonogram Object Boxes, Phonograms Booklets, and Phonogram Cards. Children learn to recognize these phonograms all around them, even in the daily reading of what the teacher has written on the board, such as, “Today is Monday, March 7, 2017. Did you hear the birds singing this morning? There was a Robin in my yard!” The children delight in finding the phonograms in the message on the board each day.

Simultaneously, the teacher introduces the final category of our words, referred to commonly as sight words . These are words such as where , there , though , is and was , which simply need to be learned and memorized because they cannot be sounded out or recognized with knowledge of phonograms. Montessori called these “puzzle words” because they are so “puzzling.”

So, in these three distinct categories--words we can sound out phonetically, phonograms within words, and puzzle words--our children build their knowledge for reading. Most children can figure their way through texts around age six but continue to develop fluidity and expertise all the way through their elementary years. Reading is a terrifically challenging achievement, not to be underestimated. We adults can easily forget how hard it can be to learn to read and, consequently, become impatient for this skill to develop. But almost all children, no matter what school system they are in, will be reading by fifth grade, and no one will be there to judge when or how quickly a person learned to read as a child!

That being said, because the Montessori materials and method give our children so many supports and isolate the difficulties along the way, Montessori teachers have a special advantage in spotting learning challenges and seeing where and how a child may benefit from expert assistance in acquiring this skill which can give our children so much joy and intellectual stimulation in their early formative years. Spotting an area of difficulty in the early years means that supplemental aids can alleviate and shorten the help needed for a child to fully thrive in their language and literacy development.

A word of caution, however: It is important to balance recognizing where something is difficult for our children with the importance that they develop strong confidence in their abilities to overcome and correct their own challenges in their lives. As these are formative years, we want to foster personal growth and attitudes of self-sufficiency and not worrying about how one is performing in relation to others. My advice is to take a laid back attitude about your child’s reading progress unless a trained Montessori teacher suggests some specific ways you can help your child or recommends having a language specialist evaluate the way your child is processing language. Most of the time, repeated experiences, exposure, and interest are all that is needed to awaken the natural ability to read. Sharing our love and enthusiasm for reading is the very best thing you can do!

Our children absorb language just by being around it, a process we can respect, have faith in, provide aids to, and actively encourage. Learning to read and write demands effort from our children, but this healthy relationship with effort and the complete satisfaction our children experience in its wake is the stuff that life is made of. These become the most meaningful and transformative experiences of our lives.

The Montessori Approach to Reading and Writing

Wed, 24 May 2017 18:44:58 GMT

Few moments are as exciting as hearing your child utter her first word or hearing your son sound out a street sign from the back of your car. What a thrill it is to welcome our children into the magical world of spoken and written words!

Language is crucial to understanding the world and even one’s own thoughts. It’s such an intimate part of us that we describe the world we see with words in our heads, and we “see” the world we describe. We use language as our spoken and written means of communicating our feelings and thoughts and we use it to understand those of others. It is how we think, speak, read, and write.

It is truly remarkable how rapidly and well young children acquire language. When a child is born, he has none, and by age three he speaks in full sentences and understands us when we speak to him. Dr. Montessori recognized that young children are endowed by nature with unique, powerful abilities that enable this process:

“To develop a language from nothing needs a different type of mentality. [W]e acquire knowledge by using our minds; but the child absorbs knowledge directly into his psychic life. Simply by continuing to live, the child learns his native tongue.... We, by contrast, are recipients. Impressions pour into us and we store them in our minds; but we ourselves remain apart from them… Instead, the child undergoes a transformation. Impressions do not merely enter his mind; they form it. They incarnate themselves into him. The child creates his own ‘mental muscles,’ using for this what he finds in the world about him. We have named this kind of mentality, the Absorbent Mind.” ( The Absorbent Mind , p. 35-36)

Examining Sounds as Indirect Preparation for Reading and Writing

Dr. Montessori pointed out that, “It is important to remember that the child’s actions are not due to random choice, but directed by his inner needs for development.” (Paula Polk Lillard, Montessori A Modern Approach , p. 35). Thus, when our infants are touching everything with their hands and exploring with their mouths, this has a direct purpose in preparing themselves for communicating with us, which means eventually, speaking and writing.

“Montessori concluded…that the tongue, which man uses for speaking, and the hands, which he employs for work, are more intimately connected with his intelligence than any other parts of the body. She referred to them as the ‘instruments’ of man’s intelligence.” (Lillard, Modern Approach, p. 34) It’s incredibly important it is that we consider this! We parents and educators want to be certain that infants’ tongues and hands are free, so that they can use these vital tools. Pacifiers get in the way of mouth formation and the encouragement to practice shapes and efforts which are precursors for speaking, so we want to avoid putting them in our infants’ mouths after those first weeks when they may be useful to soothe a newborn.

During the sensitive period for acquiring language, which begins in the womb and lasts through age five, “[The child] must have objects to explore in order to develop his neurological structures for perceiving and thinking just as he must be exposed to the world of human sound in order to develop his neurological structures of his language…It is of the utmost importance that the adult be guided by tolerance and wisdom when placing any necessary limits on the child’s need to touch and taste during this period.” (Lillard, A Modern Approach , p. 35)

So, it is important that the infant be free to make sounds and explore in order to discover that relationship between making sounds and hearing them come out of his mouth. He also will respond to others who communicate with him by looking into his eyes, speaking to him, and listening to him. This is the “dance of communication” that is so pleasurable for both adults and infants and causes us to bond emotionally.

Infants respond very strongly to the invitation to communicate with us and so must be hard-wired to focus on human voices and speaking. Dr. Montessori described it this way:

“[How is it that] amongst the thousands of sounds and noises that surround him, [the child] hears, and reproduces, only those of the human voice?…It must be that the sounds of human speech make on him a deeper impression than any other sounds. These sounds must…cause such an intensity of emotion – so deep an enthusiasm as to set in motion invisible fibers of his body, fibers that start vibrating in the effort to reproduce these sounds.” ( The Absorbent Mind , p.34)

Helping Children Explore Spoken Sounds in Preparation for Reading and Writing

Montessori’s concept and practice of indirect preparation is unique and highly effective. Alexander Phillips – the Principal at Suder Public Montessori School in Chicago – recently told me, “Here’s what I love about Montessori education: Regular educational systems take a child right up to a certain point in teaching something new and then – 60 or 70% of the time – leave the last leap in understanding up to the child. The fact is, some children will make that leap but some children just never will, and they are left behind to suffer and underperform. But Montessori takes every child – concretely – all the way to their own ‘aha’ moment, every time.”

This happens is in large part because Montessori teachers are trained to use indirect preparation and have the materials and means to do so. The Sound Game, for example, prepares the young child to hear the sounds of our language, which they will then learn in isolation in the Sandpaper Letters. Through their practice with the sandpaper Touch Boards, the Baric Tablets and other physical materials, children prepare their hands to touch lightly, and to make smooth, exact and continuous movements, preparing them for physically tracing the Sandpaper Letters. Then, the sounds and the shapes of the letters are integrated when the teacher presents the Sandpaper Letters to the child, and he is able to make the sound, trace the letter shape, see the letter and hear his own voice all simultaneously. So, it isn’t just the Sandpaper Letters that help the child learn their letter shapes with the phonetic sounds, it is all the indirect preparation and the integration of the senses in motion that make this possible for the child.

Even the Practical Life Exercises such as washing a table and pouring water give a young child practice and preparation for sitting with concentration, controlling her movements with her mind and her muscles and for looking for logic in sequences. Numerous exercises in the Young Children’s Community and the Primary classrooms prepare the child to concentrate on one thing at a time, to focus her energies and movements, and to engage in communicating with the teacher. Everything the child experiences, in a way, indirectly or directly leads up to this experience with the Sandpaper Letters.

Montessori Approach to Reading and Writing: The Sound Game

A very important part of the preparing our children for speaking, reading and writing comes through the Sound Game. The teacher prepares a tiny basket with four or five miniatures of realistic objects inside. There may be a tiny tree, a china cup, a broom, and a porcelain rabbit, each only a half an inch long or smaller. The teacher holds one object out to the child and says what it is several times, very slowly and clearly, letting the child hold and examine the object and say the word as they choose: “We call this a tree…tree…tree…tree.” Then, the teacher will emphasize the first sound, “Tree begins with the sound…t, t, t, tree…t-tree.” The child may imitate, and then they move on to another object in the basket. They repeat this and talk about the objects as long as the child is interested. They are typically intensely interested in this practicing. They love to watch the teacher’s lips as she says the sounds, imitate her, and delight in someday identifying a sound before the teacher points it out. They may discuss the same objects for about a week, and then the teacher replaces the objects with new ones that have other sounds.

When a child gets very good at noticing the first sound of a word and can articulate those sounds well, the teacher may begin to point out the sound that words end in: “This is a potato. Potato ends in the sound, o. Potato. Potato. O.” She may draw out the sound to be identified to help the child to hear it. Eventually, they will search for middle sounds, such as the sound “oo” in “shoe.” There are many steps to the Sound Game and it can be played all throughout the sensitive period for language development, increasing the challenges for the ear in hearing as well as the mouth in speaking. The objects themselves are delightful for the children to look at and to hold, and they give visual clues to help them. The result of playing the Sound Game often and for a year or more is not only a heightened awareness of sounds and an ability to produce them clearly but also an increased interest in the individual sounds in our language and an enthusiasm for them.

Along with the analysis of the sounds within words, children are hearing how we put words together to make phrases. Montessori pointed out that in the first years of life, “The child has not only absorbed words and meanings; he has actually absorbed sentences and their constructions.” When we say, “The tumbler is on the table,” the child does not say, “On tumbler is the table the.”

Building Happiness: To Be [Happy] or Not to Be…That is the Question

Fri, 28 Apr 2017 21:29:08 GMT

I’ll admit it: when a parent announces, “I just want my child to be happy ,” I cringe inside. Of course, I know what they are saying—that they really want to help their child develop the strengths that will lead to a happy life. Isn’t building happiness a noble pursuit? Happy people are thriving, successful, joyful people who help others and improve the world. There’s nothing wrong with wanting happiness…as long as we keep in mind that we do not hand happiness to our children as a gift. Instead, it is a quality that every human being must learn to cultivate inside him or herself.

Parenting, if it can be compared to driving a car, is an “off-road” experience. You get in a Jeep and try your best to traverse bumps the size of boulders, huge pot holes, splash through mud, fuss with the windshield wipers, and occasionally have smooth sailing through gorgeous fields of flowers.

The more we focus on the road itself, the less effective we are, because we cannot change the state of the road or even which one we’re on. Instead, we must put our energy into preparing the Jeep and readjusting in little pull overs along the way. We can change the suspension, swap the tires, or add break fluid.

We can also adjust our attitude; with an activity like riding over rough bumps in a Jeep, the more you tighten up, the less comfortable you are, yet if you get too loose you can really get hurt. There’s a balance to find of relaxing and going with the motion while flexing your muscles enough to keep upright and safe.

Everyone Drives Themselves

In this metaphor, every child is driving his or her own Jeep, too. We parents cannot get in there and do the driving for them. But children have advantages over us—they are more open, not burdened by adult worries and attitudes, and they have terrific stamina. They are on a fresh start. Happiness is learning, mid-bump, how to use the gears, adjust the suspension, handle the popped tires and the smashes to the frame. Thank goodness for our children’s resilience, their closeness to joy, and their courage, so that they can learn as they go along, and keep on going!

Dr. Montessori advised us to focus on preparing the environment, modeling for and linking children to the experiences in it, and providing freedoms for them with boundaries. These external guides from us become internal as each child becomes their own adult. They come to create their own environments, they choose their mentors and connect, and they give themselves freedoms and boundaries. This ultimate independence from us offers them, and us, great happiness. To support our children to eventually become their own adults, we must see them as capable. In Montessori’s words, we must “…find ourselves confronted by a being no longer to be thought of as helpless, like a receptive void waiting to be filled with our wisdom, but one whose dignity increases in the measure to which we see him [as being] the builder of [his] own mind…” ( The Absorbent Mind , p. 20)

So, the next time your child expresses that she or he is having a hard day, give them a hug and a smile of assurance. They are on the road to building happiness. It is not a smooth road. Tell them, “You’re doing an amazing job. I’m so proud of how you handle so many things, and of how brave you are. And…there are some gorgeous fields of flowers just up ahead.”

The Birds, Bees, and Beyond: Talking to Children About Sex

Thu, 16 Mar 2017 19:03:40 GMT

Talking to Children About Sex: What to do about The Talk?

When I was in fourth grade, I asked my mother—just as she was biting into a Sunday night hamburger, as I remember—“Mom, what’s a ‘rubber?’” After a brief choke, she asked me why I asked. “Well, in this book a friend lent me at school, they keep talking about rolling on them. But…is it something you eat?” And thus began my mother’s version of “sex ed.”

I still cringe when I think about the embarrassing experiences in biology class when we covered that chapter in the textbook, the graphic movies we had to watch, and the discussions about what our feelings over the whole thing might be, which we thought were “creepy.” That science teacher with the big mustache will be forever etched in my mind.

What could be more personal than talking about sex? Every parent has a different approach to the topic, based on his or her own experiences, feelings, beliefs, and goals. And every single child is coming from a different place, with a unique personality, different questions, and varying readiness for the answers. Even more so than one’s development of a mathematical mind, language expression, or budding ability to recognize musical notes, talking about sex is not a one-size-fits-all topic.

Although Maria Montessori did not directly address talking to children about sex, it’s safe to say she would advise keeping with her approach on everything: meet each child where he or she is, respond with profound respect, include the spiritual aspects of life, and help children make sense of the biology and the appropriate social manners.

Many children, including adolescents, indicate that they are very uncomfortable having this topic discussed as a school subject. We believe the privacy of their own homes and the security of their families is the proper setting for a topic so deeply personal and important.

According to clinical psychologist Sharon Maxwell , it’s important that parents address these messages on some level. This could be through comments we make, conversations, and modeling. We also need to give our children information about their bodies and relationships with others.

About Those Birds and Bees…

Rather than talking to children about sex in one big talk, it’s more realistic—and wiser—to tackle this in numerous, small conversations over the years, asking questions and trying to determine how much your child wants to know before launching in. (Your child may simply want to know what a “rubber” is, for instance, and be totally unprepared and disinterested in hearing about everything involved in its use and misuse!) On another day, a child may be asking for just one other bit of information.

Only you can determine what, when, and how much your child is asking for. As you form your own attitude and approach, get input from resources. I discovered Sharon Maxwell’s excellent book, The Talk; What Your Kids Need to Hear From You About Sex , after hearing her keynote address earlier this month at the Wisconsin Montessori Association Conference. Seek out information from lectures by psychologists, your pediatrician, and friends and family members with children of their own. Follow your intuition and consider your child’s developmental stage as a guide for your conversations. Young children who ask about where babies come from, for instance, may literally just want to know about where they come from and not about graphic descriptions of sexual intimacy. A beautiful book that may meet this need is A Child is Born , by Lennart Nilsson.

When children approach puberty, getting a book that they can look at in private and ask questions about can be very helpful. Many families like the books by the American Girl Doll company, called, The Care and Keeping of You . For children ages twelve and older, The What’s Happening to My Body? Book for Boys (another is For Girls), by Lynda Madaras, goes into further details and addresses issues that our children may face in their high school years, as well.

With any book on this topic, choose carefully. Knowing that your child may pour over every detail, read the book you’ve chosen thoroughly before handing it over; some have a religious bent you may or may not agree with, for instance, while others cover way more information than you may feel is necessary, or not enough. Again, this is a personal topic, so choose what fits for you and your child.

…And What’s Beyond?

There’s another, deeper level to this topic that has to do with feelings, values, beliefs, emotions, desires, shame, ethical behavior, resisting temptation, and all the complexities that sexual relations will bring up as our children enter adulthood. To address the biological functions without the emotional component when talking to children about sex is leaving out the most important part and can lead to a fascination with physical sensations without the maturity to consider the emotional implications of sharing them.

Sexual relations compose our most intimate ways of connecting, and therefore the topic deserves compassionate, attentive, careful communication that is tailored to a child’s needs at that specific time in his or her development. I appreciate Sharon Maxwell’s guidance and attitude on talking with children about sex; she even advises that because sex is about respect, personal boundaries, and trust, be sure to tell your child that there are times and places where discussing sex is not appropriate and may make others feel uncomfortable because it crosses their own personal boundaries. Our children need to know that this is a topic we must be ethical and polite with.

Our children look to us for clues, so being relaxed, confident, and a little lighthearted can help you go beyond the birds and the bees and into sharing your thoughts about what it means to be human. Aim for the positive, rather than a list of warnings, don’ts, and threats. There are ways to cover all those unwanted results of getting in over one’s head without shame and remorse where it may get misconstrued. Think of this as an ongoing education you share with your children, not just one or a few big speeches. Touch on what makes this part of life unique and meaningful, and the rest will follow, one bit at a time.

Your Attention, Please: Bring Home Lessons in Concentration from Montessori Classrooms

Thu, 02 Mar 2017 19:23:22 GMT

Your Attention, Please!

Do you have more trouble concentrating after dealing with emails, texts, to-do lists, and other necessities that fragment your day? I certainly do. We are not alone, as any bestseller bookstand or news headline will tell you. Information is coming in faster than ever and with more urgency. Some days, we can feel as if we’re caught in reaction-mode, catching balls that are flying at us from all directions. Breathe? Hahaha!

So what about the children living in our midst? We know that they get uninterrupted time in their Montessori classrooms, where they can concentrate in peace. But what happens before we drop them off in the mornings and after we pick them up in the afternoons? Do they watch us trying to function in a frenzy–irritated, distracted, and sometimes exhausted manner?

Concentration is Key Inside and Out of Montessori Classrooms

The ability to concentrate is the foundation for learning and for success in life. We see it in the recent research and anecdotally, in the quality of people’s work, relationships, and wellbeing. Educators and psychologists are pointing out the realization that we must support children to learn how to focus. (Google Daniel Goleman’s article, “ Want Kids to Succeed? Teach Them Focus .”)

I am so grateful that Maria Montessori designed her approach to actively cultivate this skill as a base for our children. We do not need to change our Montessori classrooms to incorporate this new eureka. We already have all the training, tips, and techniques for helping our students develop their wells of concentration every day in our school. It is in the way the teacher moves slowly and gracefully and makes eye contact directly with each child while speaking. It is in the three-hour, uninterrupted work cycle that is a daily practice every morning. It is in the simple, clear, beautiful classrooms with wooden floors and matching furniture and large, floor-to-ceiling windows. It is in the beautifully handcrafted wooden learning materials.

Everywhere you look, there is simplicity, calm activity and pleasant opportunities for focused attention.

Instead of teaching the children by lecturing to them, our Montessori teachers actively “link” the children to our learning environments and encourage them into that deep state of flow. They use interest, choice, peer learning, and hands-on opportunities to facilitate our children’s enjoyment of getting deeply involved in working.

As parents, what can we do to model a life well-lived outside of that special school setting of Montessori classrooms? Here are some tips that we can incorporate for a Montessori approach with our families:

Compartmentalize Your Time
Compartmentalize your time so you can attend to the task at hand: In the morning, have a goal of focusing on the basics and stick with those. We have to dress, get a nutritious breakfast, and do some tasks before walking out the door. If starting your work day involves checking emails or another distraction from what is right in front of you, try to hold off until the children are in school. Demonstrate for them that the priorities are breakfast, dressing, and working together. Show that priorities–by definition–demand our full attention.
Turn Off the Distractors
Before you pick your children up, put your Iphone into airplane mode and pay attention to what you are doing and whom you are with. Children need to interact with you, whether conversing or just sitting together quietly. Demonstrate that your relationships matter most.
Prepare Your Spaces
Think of your home as a sanctuary from the hectic world, and make it so. Work on it as a prepared environment for yourself and your family: reduce clutter, put meaningful objects in it, and create spaces for reflection, reading and creativity. I know this is very challenging when we have several children in the house, especially when they are young ones. But your continued efforts to make your home a refuge by making conscientious choices and guarding it from unwanted messages will pay off. It is a constant work in progress.
Set the Routine
Design the day to involve downtime. When your children are napping or playing quietly, use that time to rest, read, or do something likewise. Protect that downtime fervently! This is when imagination, creative thoughts, problem solving, reflection, integration of freshly learned information, and innovation takes root. It is true for adults as well as children; our “attention muscles” atrophy if we do not dedicate time each day to working them. We need to read a book, for example, without constantly checking our iPhones or jumping up for interruptions. In a hectic world, we can actually get so fragmented that our own minds start to interrupt themselves mid-thought. So, as our children need the time to develop their own abilities, we need to set aside times to retrain ourselves each day, too.
Your Own Oxygen Mask First
Your actions, habits, and moods unconsciously affect your children. This is why it is not selfish to care for yourself first! Take a date night, schedule a massage, a yoga class, meditation, a walk, a run, time to write in a journal, to draw, to dance, or whatever fills you up with new life. If you want to raise happy children, be a happy person; they will follow your example. Our children can only learn what it takes to be happy if they see adults consistently (and sincerely) demonstrating it.

Supporting Our Children’s Great Task

Montessori reminded us that we are in charge of the environments and routines. We have this responsibility to create and maintain them thoughtfully, and we are the role models for our children. So, with this in mind, I am going to turn off my iPhone, shut down my computer, and sit down on the couch on front of my two teenagers to read The Marshmallow Test; Why Self-Control is the Engine of Success , in hopes of refreshing my own ability to concentrate. Dr. Montessori told us in The Absorbent Mind , “The first essential for the child’s development is concentration. It lays the whole basis for his character and social behavior. He must find out how to concentrate, and for this he needs things to concentrate upon. This shows the importance of his surroundings, for no one acting on the outside can cause him to concentrate. Only he can organize his psychic life. None of us can do it for him. Indeed, it is just here that the importance of our schools really lies. They are places in which the child can find the kind of work that permits him to do this.”

I am grateful for the peacefulness of our Montessori classrooms. Let’s also live lives that support our children’s important task to develop their ability to concentrate, from which their successes and happiness will flourish.

Timeouts & Tantrums; Are We There Yet?

Tue, 14 Feb 2017 19:37:00 GMT

Dealing with Timeouts and Tantrums

Who Are These People?

Your child is sobbing and screaming in a puddle once again… Boy, do I know how maddening that feels as a parent! It brings to mind a comment I once heard by a stand-up comic, that working with little children is like being with “brain-damaged people.” What is wrong with these people? They are unreasonable, irresponsible, illogical, highly emotive, and self-centered. Let’s get a timeout!

Maria Montessori’s perspective is our rescue when it comes to this problem, because she reminds us that children are different from us in numerous ways, and not only must we respect this, we must understand and take their developmental needs into consideration.

The child’s purpose is to build a human being. They are in the process of developing – not fully formed as we are. If we can really wrap our minds around this point, it can guide us in our approach. Ultimately, our children will not only be relieved by having their needs addressed and their development supported, but we will enjoy our time with them much more.

The Discipline Dilemma

When it comes to “discipline issues,” it is much harder to be a parent than it is to be a Montessori teacher: The classroom environment is designed specifically to meet the needs of the children who enter it; our homes are designed for many other purposes and for more people with differing developmental needs. When children misbehave, the teacher does not take it personally, she can see the behavior objectively and in context, and she is there with a “present” mindset; parents have a ringing phone to answer, a dog vomiting on the floor, dishes piled in the sink, a wallet to locate, and children of different ages to herd into a car with the clock ticking in her head. Oh--and she takes things personally.

Then, along comes the pediatrician’s advice to put a misbehaving child into a timeout – one minute in a chair facing the wall for each year of the child’s life – or some other punitive quick-fix. The problem is, even if these reactions work in the short term, they are often causing more problems in the long run. And much of the time – just ask around – they do not solve the problem at all.

A Different Perspective: Our Montessori Framework

Montessori does not give us direct instructions on discipline issues, for two reasons. First, there’s the famous, “it depends…” (on the child’s personality, development, history, the events leading up to the moment,) and second, parents must turn to their inner guide when it comes to finding the best answer, (following advice only if it fits your situation). Montessori was a proponent of inner freedom and individual choice, and this extends to how we should respond in certain situations. However, Montessori does give us all that we need to find the answers:

A fundamental realization that the human being forms himself, and that he goes through developmental stages. When the developmental needs are met, the child succeeds in forming himself.
Our adult role is to create an environment that meets the child’s needs. We must continually adjust the environment as the child’s needs change. We can do this by understanding – basically – what those needs are, and altering our homes and routines to meet those needs as best we can. (Alert – not always possible! Cut yourself some slack and do the best you can).
The respect that human beings all need a balance of freedoms. By “balance,” I mean that freedom must come with boundaries. Both the freedoms and the boundaries are decided by, and enforced by, the adult.

So, first we begin with these concepts. Set up the situation – let’s say it’s getting breakfast and preparing for school in the mornings – with these three things in mind. For example, set up your kitchen so that your children can get what they need for breakfast and clean it up fairly independently. Show the children how to do things for themselves as much as possible, then step away to take care for your own needs so that the children can have space to try things out. The routine should be consistent enough that your children know what to expect. Provide some freedoms within boundaries – such as a choice of two things they could make for breakfast. Setting the stage for success in this way helps your children to manage themselves to the best of their ability.

Then Comes the Blow Up

Even when you have followed this example, however, we all know that children have their challenging moments. When your child gets upset, first take a long, deep breath and stand still for a moment. Much of the time, stress expressed in a tantrum has to do with a build up of emotional frustration, and adding your own to the situation just makes it worse. Be the leader – see that she is suffering and stay calmly objective as best you can. Children often just need a little compassion. It’s amazing how effective a spontaneous hug, a sympathetic sound, or some silent assistance, can save the day. Your attitude of acceptance – self- acceptance first and foremost – is the best way to put things back on track. This does not involve a lot of talking, reasoning, or questioning. Just give the hug, make the sound, or lend the helping hand. This is probably what you would want someone to do for you when you’re at your wit’s end, so try to model that example.

There are times, to be fair, when the “tantrum” involves unacceptable behavior, such as hitting a sibling, breaking something in two, screeching at the top of one’s lungs in a restaurant or throwing oneself on the floor of the supermarket. In such cases, a hug may not make much difference. This is when a swift removal with a sympathetic sound is effective. The time for young children to experience that the adults are in charge is while they are still small enough to lift and carry. By taking action, you are supporting your child with a loving boundary. When your child finds your boundaries consistently, he or she will gratefully stop searching for them. In normal circumstances, children who throw tantrums regularly are typically just trying to find boundaries. Once they find where they are, they move on to other interests.

The best remedy is avoiding situations where you just know a tantrum is likely: when a child is overtired, over-stimulated, underfed, dehydrated, overly stressed, given too many freedoms without boundaries, or given too little opportunity to do purposeful things. When my children were little, I found that things went most smoothly when I kept in the forefront of my mind, the fact that my children are forming themselves and have an inner drive to do so all the time. This meant that when we walked into a supermarket, my goal was to employ them in as many actions and decisions as reasonably possible. I asked my four year old to go find two zucchinis and my one year old to carry the bag of carrots, for example, keeping them busy and thanking them profusely for every helpful action.

As you reflect on the times leading up to a tantrum, think whether the above supports were in place and adjust for next time if not. Sometimes we can make an adjustment in the moment. Perhaps you realize that your child is tired or that the task is too frustrating. Or maybe you are micromanaging your child, undermining his small decisions, attempts and judgment of his own work. (We tend to do this when we are tired!)

The "Three D's" that Make Timeouts Tempting

When a behavior is one of the Three D’s: Destructive, Dangerous or Disrespectful, you do need to respond swiftly and without hesitation. This is about protecting your child, others, or objects in our environment. Realize that it’s your job as the adult here to step in immediately and do the protecting. It isn’t good for a young person to build habits of destructive, dangerous or disrespectful behavior. We want positive, productive actions to override. In order to act with compassion, you can even say out loud, in a pleasant voice, “Ah, I can see this isn’t a good time for this…It’s OK – we can head home.” Then don’t negotiate, re-explain, or get agitated. Just pick your child up and walk out, and know you are doing the right thing. You are doing your job as a parent. Feel good about it. Don’t beat yourself up with unnecessary doubts and dialogue. It’s fine. All children do this. We make misjudgments about how our children are feeling or how they are going to behave, all the time. It’s normal. We can’t always know how they are going to feel, and neither can they. Be accepting. Relax. Enjoy some nice music on the drive home and look forward to your bath or whatever you plan to do when you’ve gotten your little one into bed. If he screams the whole way home, you be the rock of compassionate calm.

Apart or Together

n a classroom, we Montessori teachers bring a misbehaving child near us to sit for a short time, where he can watch the interesting things we are doing with other children and observe all the wonderful opportunities in the room for activity. Typically, after just a few moments of sitting next to his teacher, a child will want to get busy again. Instead of a timeout, it’s like a reset, close to the presence of a caring, firm, busy adult. I say “busy,” because the point is not to allow a misbehaving child to monopolize your attention by misbehaving.

You can be calm and cheerful and sit where your child can be near, but not interfere with what you are doing. This way, you provide the support he may need to get back on track. Because children prefer to be active, they often respond well to being allowed to get involved again in some purposeful activity.

In the classroom or at home, a child may actually choose to be alone to calm himself down. The behavior may be the result of not feeling well, being overly tired, or agitated. He may opt to go to his room and be alone for a while, sit in a quiet corner with a book or lie down in another room at home. This is a healthy sign that your child is soothing himself and learning coping techniques. When a child removes him or herself, it is a welcome and healthy sign of growing self-awareness and self-control.

In the worst situations, is it OK to put a child in her room or tell her she must leave a common area where she is causing disruption? In my mind, yes. I cannot imagine how any society survives if we do not have this last resort to go to when absolutely necessary. Dr. Montessori believed, “A child’s liberty must have as its limit the interests of the group to which he belongs.” In other words, to be in the desired company of others, we must all develop the self-control to be courteous and move about with respect for other people’s physical and psychological space. You give your child what he needs when you provide the limits of society with love and compassion. If you do not provide these limits now, the world will provide the limit later without love and compassion! As one person wisely once told me, “You can parent your children when they are young, or you can attempt to do it when they’re in their twenties; it is a lot harder to do it when they are in their twenties! And amazingly, you do have to parent them eventually. May as well get it over with when they’re young!”

I am now the parent of adolescents, and I still work with this framework of looking for how to encourage my children to contribute with purposeful actions, offering freedoms and providing supportive boundaries. I try to create a home environment and routine that best meets their developmental needs and respect that our children are the ones forming themselves, not my husband and I.

Dr. Montessori made some great discoveries by watching children very carefully and seeing what they were actually trying to attain in their behaviors. Montessori saw that the child’s quest is to develop self-discipline. She said: “The discipline we are looking for is active. We do not believe that one is disciplined only when he is artificially made…silent… and… mute. We claim that an individual is disciplined when he is the master of himself and when he can, as a consequence, control himself when he must follow a rule of life.”

This is the ultimate goal – that our children make choices that bring them closer to community, not farther away from it. What disturbs us about timeouts and tantrums is that they perpetuate isolation from the group. With strong compassion, supportive boundaries, and sensitivity to our children’s developmental needs of the hour, parents can help children to find their best selves so that they can join in and contribute to society with joy.

For more ideas on childrearing, one of our favorite parenting resources is Love and Logic , by Jim Fay

Winter Weather Fun

Tue, 31 Jan 2017 22:11:20 GMT

Winter Weather Fun: Braving the Outdoors

We all know it’s important for our children to get outside and play. But what about when the weather is…well, uncomfortable ?

This is when having good equipment, and knowing how to use it, is paramount. Every year, I spend that first icy blast of winter shuffling between buildings, chiding myself, “There’s no such thing as too cold, just bad clothing choices.” After a few weeks, I finally get into the habit of layering and sealing myself off from the cold, and I marvel at the change in my comfort and approach to winter weather.

In Contact with Nature

Starting from the time they are very young, we can make it possible for our children to enjoy all kinds of winter weather fun. By preparing them with the right equipment and modeling the outdoors spirit, we give them many gifts: Wisdom in how to care for themselves, respect for the elements, healthier more active lifestyles, and the peace and renewal that comes from being in nature. We must actually experience being outside to gain the benefits; Montessori wrote, “There is no description, no image in any book that is capable of replacing the sight of real trees, and all the life to be found around them, in a real forest. Something emanates from those trees which speaks to the soul, something no book, no museum is capable of giving. The woods reveal that it is not only the trees that exist, but a whole, inter-related collection of lives…[that] no one can bring into the school…How often is the soul of man – especially that of the child – deprived because one does not put him in contact with nature.”

Bundle Up

When my son and daughter were little, they went outside after school almost every day in the winter, even when the temperature was in the teens and the wind was blowing. They wore heavy wool socks, polyester-fabric long underwear top and bottom, snow pants and parkas, wool sweaters, wool hats, thick mittens that came high on their forearms with straps that sealed them securely over the coat-sleeves, face masks, neck warmers, and ski goggles! They looked like astronauts, but they were happy as clams out there. Not a single inch of their skin was exposed to the cold, and because they were moving their bodies, they were warm enough to enjoy some fresh air and all that nature gives us in winter.

Our daughter, now an adolescent, traveled this month on a school trip with her Forest Bluff Secondary Level classmates to Ely, Minnesota – where temperatures typically hover around zero degrees – to cook, sleep and work outdoors for ten days. The group spent weeks preparing, learning about how to help one another and themselves stay comfortable and safe in such temperatures. The students served the Wintergreen Dogsledding Outfit by clearing sledding trails of brush and tree branches, using sleds and work dogs. This school trip is incredibly challenging but deeply rewarding; I consistently hear that almost all our Forest Bluff School graduates refer to their experiences on their Secondary Level Winter Trip in high school or college entrance essays. Our adolescents build great strength, fortitude and reserves for teamwork in the extreme outdoor setting.

Prepare and Enjoy

At other times of the year, we and our children face very windy days, rain, and other varieties of uncomfortable weather. We can still find ways to get out into it and enjoy what the outdoors offers. Whether or not our children mind being wet, hot or cold in order to be outside, we still need to teach them to prepare and wear the best equipment to keep themselves safe. Quality fabrics and equipment may be costly, especially since our children change sizes every year, but if you get just one of each item and the children really use them, these purchases may reap great rewards for your children in their full development. You might share your used items with extended family members or other Forest Bluff families when your children outgrow them. We have a culture in our school community of loving the outdoors, and we want to encourage it for our growing children.

At Forest Bluff School, our students go outside in the fresh air several times a week. For instance, 6-to-12 year olds have a work choice of forming groups of four and playing outside during the day, as long as they have the proper equipment for the conditions and have been working responsibly in the classroom. They also go out as a class with their teacher to play games, learn sports or to learn a skill, such as how to build a real snow shelter. Spending time outside, in every kind of weather, is an important part of the children's school experience and forms some of their fondness memories of Forest Bluff School.

Montessori told us, “Set the children free, let them have fair play, let them run out when it is raining, take off their shoes when they find pools of water, and when the grass in the meadows is damp with dew let them run about with bare feet…; let them rest quietly when the tree invites them to sleep in its shade; let them shout and laugh when the sun wakes them up in the morning, as it wakes up every other living creature which divides its day between waking and sleeping.”

Seize This Day!

Winter Activity Ideas:

Walk in on e of our L ake Forest Open Lands Preserves all around Lake Forest (dogs are welcome in many areas and some trails are prepared for cross country skiers)
Go to a Lake County Forest Preserve and look for animal tracks, water that has iced over, berries or leaves still stuck on branches or birds.
Rent cross country skis at the Heller Nature Center in Highland Park
Go skating at Artesian Park in Lake Bluff or West Park in Lake Forest
Go for a winter picnic in the woods – bring thermoses of warm foods to be eaten right out of the containers. If a utensil is required, make sure you will be able to handle them without removing your gloves or mittens.
Have an outdoor fire to roast marshmallows or just to enjoy the warmth. There is something magical about fire, especially when you are outside under a nighttime sky of stars.
Skate on pa tches of ice near your home. (Our children discovered a flooded area in the woods behind our house years ago and still amuse themselves by skating on it. It’s only about 6 inches deep, so they can do this activity independently and safely).
I know some families who have flooded their yard to create a “rink.” Ask for some advice on this, as I have never done it.
If we’re lucky enough to have snow, build a snow fort, snowman, tunnels… There’s so much to do with snow!
Go birding or on a nature walk with a theme, led by Lake Forest Open Lands or the Botanic Garden
Go for a walk in our many preserves and look for signs of winter – berries on branches, birds, owls, identify trees, animal tracks in the snow. Many of our nature preserves have classes to teach young people about these and other wonders of nature in the winter. Lake Forest Open Lands, the Lockhardt Center (also called Mellody Farm) on the corner of Waukegan and Deerpath roads has maps and pamphlets that may give you and your children ideas for your own nature walks.

Places to get gear:

Gearheads
REI
LLBean online catalog for kids
Land’s End online catalog for kids
Lake Forest Bootery for winter boots and rain boots

Interesting Tidbit:

Paul Schurke, who founded the Wintergreen Lodge, where our Secondary Level students work on their Winter Trip, has been to the North and South poles with sled dogs and is an expert in winter outdoor expeditions. He’s been written about in National Geographic Traveler Magazine, the Smithsonian, and Outside Magazine among many others, and has been featured on Good Morning America and the Discovery channel as well as other programs. He loves having our Forest Bluff students help Wintergreen by clearing their trails every other January!

How Our Children Develop Moral Values

Wed, 28 Dec 2016 13:38:35 GMT

I have been asked, how do we help our children develop moral values in a Montessori setting?

I will start with an anecdote: Last week, I got goose bumps and my eyes welled up with tears as I witnessed the entire student body at Forest Bluff enter the school hallway, arrange themselves in complete silence to sit facing the front, and join their voices to sing traditional Christmas carols. Our Jewish, Muslim, Hindu, atheist, and Christian children enjoy sharing the pleasure of this school tradition, respecting one another’s religions and seeing what they all have in common when seeking peace through communication and mutual respect.

The most astonishing part of this annual school tradition is the self-control that each child demonstrates by choice, from the smallest 18 month old to the tallest 14 year old. What I realized this year is that these children— all of these Montessori children—truly know what it means to be individuals forming a community. They understand that it takes the participation of each and every one of them to create the total silence and to sing in unison, then to rise carefully and return to their classrooms. It gives one great hope for the future and shows that we are helping these children are develop moral values to work with others.

Children Need to Develop Moral Values

Maria Montessori was no stranger to violence and persecution; she lived through both World Wars, saw Mussolini, Stalin and Hitler come to power, and witnessed terrible acts of genocide. She was exiled from her own country, and her schools were shut down because they promoted freedom of thought. Montessori did act, however: she designed an educational approach that she called an “education for peace,” designed in every aspect to help children learn to empathize, work with each other, and build their own morals from within.

She saw that our children do not learn morals from being lectured to, subjected to rewards and punishments, or told to compete against their fellows. She pointed out, “We take for granted that children can be enlightened by the word and that, if they so desire, can live our advice. Instead, my method of education approaches this differently…. They are beings having within them forces which must develop of themselves, over which I have no power, and whose development I can only assist.” She believed that we must work with what she identified as an inner sensitivity that young children have to what feels good or what feels bad. It is the development of this “gut feeling” that makes a child pursue one action over another and to restrain him or herself from doing an undesirable action and that we must nurture. This natural inner urge will help our children develop moral values.

Montessori’s Unique Approach to Helping Children Develop Moral Values

You may have heard us explain that Montessori is most effective because it matches the educational approach with each stage of children’s development. Children develop through distinct, recognizable stages, or “planes of development,” no matter where they are born, how intelligent they are, or what their experiences are. When we can deliver information in ways that appeal to the characteristics of the stage or plane a child is in, we can make a real impact.

Between ages zero to six, young children absorb information about the world through their senses. This is also how very young children develop moral values; they will pick up what they see modeled and from the environment they are exposed to. At school, we help young children develop moral values through Grace and Courtesy lessons, the ultimate one being the “silence game.” The feeling of good and bad, right and wrong, is swelling inside them but has not been given a name, is not understood with the intellect or reason; it is innate, absorbed without judgment. As parents, this is the time to save your words and moral lessons and demonstrate with your own actions and expose them to the best. This is the best way to help young children develop moral values—they will internalize what they witness. This then becomes their “gut feeling.”

Between ages six and twelve, children go through a long trial-and-error stage, where they test the morals they have been forming in themselves during their early years. Elementary children collect information through experimenting, developing their ability to verbally reason through right and wrong, and making choices. They seem to need to make a lot of mistakes! They will steal, lie, cheat, be mean to friends, use swear words, say inappropriate or offensive things—sometimes even the sweetest of children do these things. It can be awful for us parents to watch this experimenting.

However, the consequences for their undesirable actions are built in, because, in a Montessori classroom, misbehaving children experience their classmates’ negative reactions, feel shame and embarrassment and an unpleasant “gut feeling.” These inner feelings guide them to change their behavior. By design, the children need partners to do certain work and community exercises, so they have to figure out how to work with one other. The environment is one of community, so everyone figures out how to work out their issues and synergize. Through this very natural approach Montessori elementary children develop moral values.

Because six to twelve year olds are more nimble than adults are, children can change rapidly at these ages: a child tries something different and gets good feedback and good feelings only moments of behaving negatively. Again the next day, he may find himself—or herself—doing something mean or disreputable, like stealing rubber bands, breaking paper clips, starting a rumor about a friend and snickering, and those unpleasant feelings swell inside, providing nature’s guide.

Of course, a teacher may interfere as needed, perhaps by moving a disruptive child so that others can continue in their work or taking away a child’s freedoms for a short period of time, but truly, the “punishment” is the natural consequence from the community and that inner feeling that guides. Some children need to experiment more than others, but observing the behavior and popularity of others, feeling the desire to belong, to feel closeness with others, does much of the correcting.

As parents and teachers, we can work with the Elementary children’s new ability to reason and imagine how others may feel or what the outcome of different behaviors might be. These children love to talk about moral issues and explore them through fantastical worlds and historical stories, fables and myths. Reading classic literature and having discussions about what the children notice in the characters is one way we can nurture their moral development in this stage. Reading about and exploring desirable and undesirable behaviors, as in Tom Sawyer, Anne of Green Gables, Black Beauty, or Harriet the Spy , provides wonderful opportunities to talk about what you and your children notice. But even if they are very quiet about their thoughts, you are providing your Elementary children with great material to ponder by reading these classics with them.

By ages 12 to 14, the experimenting phase ends and a sensitive individual who needs to be in a small, trusted, close community emerges. Our Secondary Level students develop moral values as they work together, almost like their own tribe, to serve others outside our community. They travel into the wilderness with only one another to depend on, survive the elements, build structures for other communities, and leave a lasting mark when they leave. They experience, again and again, the results of their positive work, and they develop a pride and confidence in one another and themselves. They graduate from Forest Bluff School at age 14 with a wealth of knowledge about themselves and about getting along with a variety of other people. Even though we are a small school, our students are very different from one another in numerous ways and because Montessori celebrates individuality in all subjects, the children realize how different they each are and what it entails to create a healthy community.

With adolescents, we again return to modeling adult behavior—talk less, act more—as we did with the youngest children. Now our children will see past the surface as they are learning about all the gray areas in life. They will see our adult flaws as well as our strengths. Adolescents are in the stage of developing the ability to see the world more clearly and understand its increasing complexity. This is when discussing politics and moral dilemmas helps adolescents voice their own opinions and find their own voices as they enter the adult world. They will change their minds many times and must not be forced, ridiculed, or shamed, but be permitted to try out their verbal rhetoric and investigate the wide range of ideas human history presents to us.

Supporting Children as They Develop Moral Values at Home

In all of their developmental stages, we cannot force our children to develop moral values by using a stagnant model of rewards and punishments. Montessori cautioned us to have no illusions of power over another human being. She pointed out that nature provides a force we can work with: humans have within them an inner force for good, a desire to be with others and feel good. Thus, our goal as adults must be to nurture and foster this tendency towards goodness and this inner guide. We can:

expose our very young children to desirable environments
model our morals in their presence
share our stories and talk about our beliefs and experiences as our children age
explore the intellectual ideas of humanity with our adolescents
and allow natural consequences to cultivate an inner guide

“Have faith in the Child,” Montessori told us. It takes many years to develop morality, and we have to support our children with a kind of faith. When we doubt, we need only think of those children in our school’s hallway under the cathedral-like ceiling, showing their desire to create something great. They can do it.

Public Montessori Schools: Planting the Seeds

Tue, 15 Nov 2016 14:01:58 GMT

In October, Paula Lillard, Lynn Jessen and I visited two large public Montessori schools in Cincinnati, Ohio. These schools, Clark Montessori High School, with 717 students, and Gamble Montessori High School, with 500 students, have many things in common: their students chose Montessori over traditional public school; many are children who have been in one of the five public Montessori schools in Cincinnati, but for some, like the three students who gave us our tour of Gamble, this is their first experience with Montessori education. Both schools train all of their teachers in a Montessori program designed specifically for seventh through twelve grades. Clark and Gamble have specific, Montessori-inspired guidelines for students and teachers to follow. Both schools have multi-aged classrooms, combine subjects, provide long blocks of time for each class, encourage student-led projects, involve outdoor work in the form of service trips that include living and camping in natural settings, and promote deliberate interactions with society.

Seeing these public Montessori schools was deeply moving. This is a definite, deliberate movement to inspire change in the world.

Dr. Maria Montessori’s vision for peace through education was palpable in both Clark and Gamble. The way students moved through the halls and interacted with each other and their teachers showed that they were engaged in learning and felt respected and safe. One administrator we spoke to explained, “Our focus at Gamble is on building a community where everyone looks out for one another. Wherever we can give students choice, we do. We’re out here making mistakes and learning, right alongside the children.” The faculty and administration's care for their students and their inspiring stories won our admiration and encourages us that Montessori education, through public Montessori schools, is indeed planting seeds of peace for the future.

Finding the Soil

I couldn’t help but think that this movement started, to a great degree, from Paula Lillard’s early efforts as a young mother living in Cincinnati. “In the 1960’s,” Paula Lillard says, “there really wasn’t any Montessori in Cincinnati that we knew of. There were awful riots happening in Avondale—a neighborhood I drove through on a weekly basis before and then after the riots—and the devastation was horrible. This was the decade when the Kennedys and Martin Luther King Jr. were shot. My friends and I were concerned about the violence. At the same time, the first Montessori pre-school classroom started at Cincinnati Country Day School, and we noticed the positive experiences our own children were having in there. We wanted to make Montessori education available to families in underprivileged communities.”

Towards this effort, Paula and some of her friends founded the Cincinnati Montessori Society, with the goal of getting classrooms started in the inner city. They wrote up proposals, found sites, and when public money became available, they were poised to act. They succeeded in getting Head Start preschools in the area to be Montessori-based. Knowing that trained teachers would be needed, they convinced Xavier University to start a graduate-level Montessori training course, which is still going strong today. The public Montessori schools spread with the help of persistent advocacy from the children’s parents and their community leaders. To read some of the inner-city parents’ comments on this movement, see pages 146 to 149 in Paula’s book, Montessori: A Modern Approach . They may bring tears to your eyes.

The spread of Montessori in Cincinnati has been a great success story; according to Clark’s Principal, Dean Blase, there are a total of 5,000 children currently in the Cincinnati public Montessori schools. This means that through a combination of the private and public schools, roughly one in seven children are now receiving Montessori education in the city of Cincinnati.

Trees Make Forests

In 1982, Paula Polk Lillard, Lynn Lillard Jessen, and Jane Linari founded Forest Bluff School as an experiment and as a model for what could be accomplished if Montessori’s principles were closely followed. To this day, our school aims to be a starting point and an example of how a school can run smoothly and meet the children’s needs with a Montessori approach. Two heads of Montessori schools in the Chicago area started as teachers at Forest Bluff: Jennifer Hanna, who founded Chicago Montessori School, and Patty Eggerding, at West Suburban Montessori School. Beth Clayton, who taught our Secondary Level for six years, also went on to found and become Head of Journey Montessori School in New Mexico, where she now lives with her family. We hope more of our teachers will become leaders in other communities after their time with us. We also hope that those Forest Bluff parents who have had to relocate to different parts of the country will continue to advocate for Montessori education and perhaps start Montessori schools like Forest Bluff in their new communities.

What ensures success? In Grit: The Power of Passion and Perseverance , researcher Angela Duckworth tells us that successful pioneers need to have both a deep interest for their own needs and a compelling desire to help others. Parents who want access to quality Montessori schools for their own children and grandchildren and who want to see that it is available to children from all backgrounds, must exercise a strong conviction and a dogged determination to start new schools and a willingness to help those that exist to be even better. Our parents are well versed in Montessori after attending Forest Bluff for several years and have much to offer other parent communities. Our teaching directors also receive a great deal of information on how a school can run smoothly, because they are included in decisions in the running of the school and get experience from the inside. For all of our Montessori schools to succeed, educators and parents must remember to carry with them an attitude of always learning more and of continually observing children’s natural behaviors.

While driving our rental car down the highway on this recent trip to Cincinnati, Paula Lillard told Lynn and me, “What I think was so unique about Maria Montessori is that when you don’t lose sight of that child , don’t put your ego in there, you will be able to see the real needs of the children and how to meet them. What was so different about Montessori was that she practiced true humility and had an ability to really see children as they are, to keep them in the forefront of her mind, always .”

Let us humbly keep planting these seeds, everywhere we can!

For information about public Montessori schools in the Chicago area, see the links below:

Clissold Elementary School
Drummond Montessori School
Oscar Mayer Magnet School

For information about Montessori at the high school level, see the links below:

Beacon Academy
Clark Montessori High School
Gamble Montessori High School

Developing Inner Order: How We Can Help our Children

Wed, 26 Oct 2016 16:41:13 GMT

Orienting to Inner Order

Imagine you are told you are on a bus heading to a camp. You're told you'll be there for a few weeks, that there will be activities every day, and that you'll be staying 24/7. Here are some of the things you would want to know right away: Where are we? How long will we be here? Why are we here? What will we be doing? You'd want to know the layout of the grounds: Where will I sleep? Where will we eat? Where is the bathroom? And when do we get to use it? The information you’d be seeking would have to do with orienting yourself and creating inner order. The unpredictability would consume you–if you were taken to interesting lectures, you'd be thinking of these more pressing questions the whole time. You wouldn't be able to focus or learn or grow until you satisfied your need for this more pressing information.

This is a bit of what life is like every day for babies and young children. Dr. Maria Montessori recognized young children’s quests for inner order: they seek it, they crave it, and they try to create it. You may notice they want to do things at the same time every day, that they want you to read the same book aloud, they line up the boots in the hallway and they move objects of the same kind into one place. Why?

Montessori proposed that because the young child is building his own mind, he needs external order. He needs to build a mind that is oriented to his environment, can organize incoming information, can make sense of information, and can create its own inner order. Montessori observed that this need is so strong that children get upset when order is absent, in ways that we sometimes fail to recognize.

Routine, inner order, orientating ourselves in time and in space, predictability–these all have to do with the mind's ability to measure. Every person, Montessori explained, has a mathematical mind in this sense. We are attracted to measuring, and we do it automatically; we predict outcomes and we seek out information that helps us to determine where we are, what's going to happen next, and where objects are to be found. Young children have the important task of orienting themselves and forming their minds, every day.

Developing Inner Order through the Organization of Spaces

Some of the first measuring a baby does in recognizing objects, patterns, and sequences in his physical space. A baby or young child must be able to move around in a room so that he can learn about distance, the amount of effort required to reach an area, the relationships between objects, and between objects and himself. He learns to associate certain areas with certain activities. He needs us to provide consistency so that he can recognize his surroundings, take mental measurements, form connections, and give his attention to processes. So, how can we help?

First, think through the locations where certain activities occur: Is there a certain chair you sit in to nurse your baby? Is there a certain place the baby lies down to sleep? Does your young child take a bath in the same tub every night?

The child who has consistency begins to recognize basic patterns and can associate certain activities with certain spaces. The predictability soothes him and satisfies his quest for inner order, and thus he begins to form some understanding of his little universe. Then, his mind is free to begin tackling other ideas. The baby who is getting this kind of support tends to be bright-eyed, outward-looking, calm, attentive, and ready to learn new things.

Developing Inner Order through the Organization of Objects

What about the objects or toys in a child's environment? We can help her satisfy her need for order by first limiting the number of toys that are out at any given time. Put some toys away in the closet and rotate them every few weeks. By reducing the number of things or books out on the shelves, we give the child the chance to really look for detail–to examine each toy and explore all it has to offer. With too many things out, young children tend to flit from one thing to another, rush through playing with each one and be overwhelmed when it comes to returning them to their places. Having too many objects available is too much for a young child to organize.

We know it's important to support young children in developing their concentration. When we notice a child is not focusing, the tendency is to think that she's bored and needs more choices, but be aware that the opposite is more likely true. When there are only a few choices available, a young child can focus on them, then return objects to their places after she has played with them. For instance, set out only three or four books instead of an entire shelf, place a set of six language cards out instead of a whole box.

We can also organize them by category, then arrange sets of pictures and rotate them instead of having them all out at once. Gradually, children become intellectually ready to add more categories and embrace the challenge of re-arranging the sets. This may happen over several years. If we begin giving a 15-month old very small card sets (of three or four cards in a set), we may have several complex sets out by the time they are five years old.

If objects are kept on a low shelf, a one-year-old will begin to find her things there and even put them back. She may delight in moving the objects around, from a top shelf to a lower shelf and back again. By age two, the child who has had order in her environment will begin to replace an object to the very spot it came from. There is a gradual understanding of, and seeking of, inner order.

Our role in this evolution is to maintain the order in levels until the child takes over each level for herself. Ask that all the adults in a home contribute to this by replacing things on the shelves where they belong. The child may leave a toy out on the floor, but when she finds it back in it's place many, many times and perhaps for months, she eventually begins to put it there herself. Continue to do this, to provide order for the child's mind to grasp and to embrace. This is the foundation of a child's thinking mind.

Developing Inner Order through Sequences

Young children begin to recognize simple sequences within our practical life activities. But this can't happen if the adults do something differently each time, or we keep changing the activity. The young child who wants to bake bread every single day the same way, with the same five ingredients week after week, does so because she is studying the sequence and the very idea of sequence. We do not quiz her or expect her to do the activity without us, but we repeat it, again and again, and we invite her to do what she can. The young child has to experience the sequences; she can’t just watch. Her hands and body must move through sequences in order to fully process them.

A simple sequence within the evening routine might be: Your daughter washes her hands, eats dinner, has her bath, gets into bed, and thinks, "Daddy sits on this side of me, reads me this book, then we say the same prayer, he says goodnight at the door and then leaves the room.” A very young child craves a sequence because it gives her bearings.

As a side-note, if your three-year-old is demanding that you do things the same way every time and throwing a tantrum when you don’t, this may have more to do with the development of her will, because she is trying to see if she can control other people. Being respectful of a child’s need for inner order does not mean allowing children to run the show, but rather, taking into account what they are working on.

Developing Inner Order through Routine

If we don't maintain family routines, our children may constantly wonder, “Where am I in this world of flurrying activity? Mom is on the phone, it’s a different meal, Dad is here one evening, not the next, then we go to the grocery store, but I don't recognize this aisle, where are we driving…?” There is a multitude of unknowns for our babies and children every single day regardless of how much we try to keep things consistent. That's a given, so imagine if we don't try to keep anything consistent at all.

Think of the unsettling novelty in my example of being taken to a camp, realizing that the answers to your inevitable questions would serve to orient you. You’d know what questions to ask because as an adult, you understand order and you know what information will help you to orient. Consider that children, who are going through so many things for the first time, are still creating their inner order, so they don’t even know what questions to ask yet. They often reveal their discomfort by crying or acting "difficult."

Some children may show us they are craving routine and order when they begin having trouble concentrating in their classrooms, creating order in their own work, or following logical sequences in school. If a child’s afterschool routine is erratic, she may spend the whole morning in her classroom wondering what is going to happen afterwards. If different people pick her up each day, she may spend time wondering, “Who is going to pick me up today?” Telling her beforehand can distract her as much as the wondering, so the best remedy is to try your best to keep things consistent. That way, the announcements that someone different will pick her up will be minimal.

It also doesn’t do much good to tell a very young child when to expect something to happen because they have not yet developed an orderly sense of time. A child under age five does not know whether to expect something in an hour, in ten minutes, or in a month. By announcing upcoming events, adults may infuse young children with anxiety. It’s like saying, "Look out! Something’s coming up!” when they really need to concentrate on the present moment, instead.

I used to teach a three-year-old who would start telling me in October, "We're going to Denver tomorrow, we're going to Denver tomorrow!" He would say that almost daily until February. It was such a relief when the annual family gathering passed, because he finally started working in class. He just couldn’t settle down and concentrate until the anticipated event occurred. It’s true that every child is different–some are more sensitive to this than others–but it doesn't have to do with how smart they are, it’s just characteristic of their developmental stage. It is best to wait until very close to an event to begin talking about it.

Young children who live with consistent routines are typically better at handling occasional changes, like the spontaneous trip or event. This works if we prioritize the routine . Because of disruptions such as illnesses or doctor appointments, it is not always easy to give our families a steady routine. Therefore, if your relatives accuse you of being too consistent, you're probably serving your youngest children’s needs very well!

As your children approach age seven, they will change dramatically. Elementary-aged children have developed their inner order and they’re ready to move on. They are not easily thrown off by changes in routine. In fact, they need to get out in the afternoons, go to a weekly tennis lesson with other children, to be around different adults, and have unstructured play time with others. They will be prepared for this stage after receiving the support they needed under age six: steadiness, simplicity, time in nature, your calm companionship or that of another adult, and practical life activities of the home such as cooking, baking, cleaning, gardening or sweeping.

Adults naturally have very different needs than those of very young children. We mustn’t feel guilty making time for ourselves when we can. Just keep in mind that an adult's need for changes in scenery and routine doesn't mesh with a young child's need for routine, so don’t try to combine your activities.

I remember a funny conversation with a fellow Montessori trainee who told a story of watching a frustrated two-year-old throwing a tantrum at a Starbuck’s while his mother tried to appease him and visit with her friends. We could relate to that mother’s craving for adult companionship, but as my friend lamented “Paula, there is nothing productive for a two-year-old to do in a Starbucks!”

While I laughed at her exclamation, I thought of how important it is for us to arrange our time so that we are not disappointing our littlest children and ourselves. Make time to meet your own needs as an adult as regularly as you can.

Montessori shows us that infants and young children need to be actively involved–more than anything–in the routines of the home. Making it a personal goal to reconnect with all those household routines that we call practical life activities can ground you and simultaneously help your young children develop their inner order.

Conclusion: Stick to the Spirit of Supporting Your Children’s Need for Order

Please don’t succumb to the myth of perfection. Will you be able to bathe your child in the same bathtub every evening? Occasionally you won’t. Will the toys always be placed back on the shelf in the same order? You’d make yourself and everyone else in the home nervous wrecks if you insisted on it. Our homes will not be like Montessori classrooms, nor should they be. They are homes.

But understanding that our young children have this basic need for inner order will help us to support their development. We must do the best we can, and keep the spirit of love, compassion and acceptance alive, which is so much more important than following any specific suggestions. So, try to do some of what I suggest above and then soften your expectations just a little. We do best by not getting too uptight and severe in our expectations of ourselves or of others.

When our little children have their need for order attended to, they are much more at ease and able to adjust to the unexpected and spontaneous things that arise in life. Every child goes through a period of time when he or she is most sensitive to order, but you will notice that this passes over time. The respectful thing we can do is to acknowledge that our infants and young children have this need and support it when we can by setting up routines, sequences, and physical order whenever or wherever we can, then let our children interact freely with the environments we have prepared for them.

Helpful Resources:

The Organized Mind: Thinking Straight in the Age of Information Overload, by Daniel J Levitin ( http://www.penguinrandomhouse.com/books/313653/the-organized-mind-by-daniel-j-levitin/9780147516312/ )
The Absorbent Mind, by Maria Montessori (http://www.montessori-namta.org/Books-by-Montessori/The-Absorbent-Mind)
Montessori Services Catalog ( http://www.montessoriservices.com/ )

Learning Emotional Balance Through Montessori

Fri, 30 Sep 2016 16:56:14 GMT

Learning Emotional Balance Through Montessori: How We Steel Our Children Against the “Superkid” Perils

When I read the New York Times Article in July, 2015 by Frank Bruni, “ Today’s Exhausted Superkids ,” and “ The Silicon Valley Suicides: Why Are So Many Kids Killing Themselves in Palo Alto? ” by Hanna Rosin in The Atlantic in December, 2015, I was deeply saddened that more parents don’t know about the benefits of taking a Montessori approach to learning emotional balance at school and at home.

You may have read these or other articles about teens struggling to balance themselves when pushed to excel. Too many have tried to escape what feels like suffocating pressure from their parents and high-achieving communities with drugs and even suicide. Although the issues in each case are complicated, such articles remind us to keep what is most important in the forefront of our minds as parents. At Forest Bluff School, we continually find wise guidance in the Montessori approach to learning emotional balance, which emphasizes healthy self-governance in action as well as thought .

What I see in the described stories are problems that stem from adults—perhaps unconsciously—trying to run young people’s lives for them. In contrast, our students at Forest Bluff learn from an early age that they are in charge of themselves. While making numerous choices throughout the day and deciding what work they are going to do next, our children learn to take their feelings and energy level into account. For instance, when a student has been working hard on editing his research paper for an hour with his teacher and practicing presenting it for another hour with classmates, he will usually choose to spend some time drawing the cover while in easy conversation with a friend or by himself in a reflective manner near a window. Because the teacher does not interfere with such decisions, healthy personal habits develop.

I see this kind of ebb and flow of effortful versus restful activity all day long in our Montessori classrooms, where children are learning emotional balance by choosing what they are going to work on, when, and where. Adults rarely have to intervene to inspire a child to challenge himself, or, conversely, to encourage him to take a break because he has passed the point of being productive; children follow their intuition to balance themselves in this Montessori environment. This gives them practice for life, and sets them up to recognize that when the pressure mounts, they can respond by doing something to get back into balance. They also realize that pressure comes from within, as it should. This is their internal conversation. You are more likely to hear a Montessori child say, “I am going to finish my snake report today,” than, “My teacher says I have to…” or “My parents say I have to….”

Learning Emotional Balance at Home

The most important thing we can do as parents is to mirror this healthy approach to self-governance at home: encourage your children to make their own choices, hold them accountable when those choices lead to consequences, and model making healthy choices. When you work hard but then get to bed early; are physically active during the day; take some down time to read and reflect; and eat healthy, well-proportioned meals, you demonstrate some necessities for leading a productive and fulfilling life.

Learning emotional balance, working hard, and doing their best is something that children and adults want to do. Dr. Montessori saw this as a natural inner drive which we must nurture. External pressures, which can be destructive, are actually unnecessary.

So, each time you take a moment to have a cup of tea, sit down with a book, or retreat for a brief nap, realize that you are showing your children some healthy ways you balance your life so that you can give back to the world in a meaningful way. And when you see your Forest Bluff children do the same, rejoice that they are learning emotional balance and getting good practice for their futures. The life skill of balancing oneself is priceless.

Boundaries and Freedom: Creating Space for Children

Fri, 16 Sep 2016 22:28:00 GMT

Creating Space for Children

No matter the ages of our children, we ultimately cannot control what they do. This is one of the biggest challenges for all parents. We care about our children—their behavior, their appearance, their successes and shortcomings. We want them to be happy and to thrive, to live lives of service to the world, and to be good people. The misconception that we can control these outcomes enters our psyche the moment our children are born, and it must be one of the hardest realities to accept along our bumpy parenting journeys. The Montessori approach reminds us that, rather than trying to control children, we must put our energies into creating space for children: preparing the environment, modeling behavior within it, providing uninterrupted time, and giving our children freedom to make choices. When we do this, we develop healthier relationships with our children and we set the stage for them to have healthier relationships with others. Ironically, this is also the best way to ensure that they succeed and live happy, productive lives.

By 'creating space for children' I don't just mean a physical space, but a temporal space as well. This space must have clear physical boundaries, such as the walls of a bedroom or the fence in the yard, and also temporal space, with a beginning time and ending time. Within these boundaries, a child must be free to act—this is crucial for his development. Montessori said, “It is not enough to give the best living conditions, freedom must also be given, so that human beings placed in the most favorable conditions of existence should be left free to develop themselves.” (Rome 1913 Lectures)

Ways of Creating Space for Children

So, let’s look at an example of creating space for children with boundaries and allowing freedom for choices within it. If we are talking about very young children, one of the important spaces in the day is the nap time, or what I prefer to call “quiet time.” Some children are not regular nappers. No matter what you do as a parent, certain children will not lie down during the day and fall asleep! I had a child like this, and I can relate to the exasperation, as I tried every suggestion and experiment. I could not control whether or not our son fell asleep. But with a background in Montessori philosophy, I did realize that I could try creating a space in which my child could choose to sleep. I put him in his room at the same time every afternoon for quiet time, read him a story and lay on his bed with him, creating a restful scene, and then left him in there until an hour later.

That hour became a precious time for me as a mother to be alone and rest, read a book, or write in my journal. It was restorative time. Often, I would hear our son cheerily talking to himself in there, playing or looking at books. Sometimes he actually did fall asleep. But even though he often didn’t, we all emerged after the hour feeling somewhat rested. This routine of having a quiet time became the norm in our family. Even now, our family tends to follow this daily pattern of reading or doing something quiet in the early afternoons.

This idea of creating space for children and allowing freedom within it can be transferred to situations with older children, as well. For instance, you can designate a certain time in the evening for your adolescent to do his homework. You may not be able to control how your child does his homework or even whether he does, but you can create the space and call it study time. Study time might be from 7:30 to 9:00 every weeknight, in your kitchen or home library, and your child can choose to do homework, read a book, or write something. (Be specific that this time is not for email, texting, talking on the phone, watching a movie, or playing video games). This works best if you as a parent also sit down with a book or some work and model that, even as adults, we study or have a reflection time in the evenings. It can help to designate a physical space for your child within the home to do this. It becomes easier to set boundaries within a designated space.

With both of these examples, you focus on creating space for children—the clocked time, the location, and the conditions, but your child is then free to make certain choices within it. Your young child may not choose to sleep, your adolescent may not choose to actually do his homework, but you provide a consistent opportunity.

It is important to resist commenting or getting involved. Don’t try to control. Every child needs to build himself as a decision-making, autonomous person. A "self" must be established before cooperating and collaborating with others. If you can be respectful of your children’s choices within the boundaries you provide, they will learn to self-correct and succeed by their own efforts. The conditions of life itself and the natural consequences of the environment give your children all the information they require to adjust their behavior.

The next step is to model with your own behavior. If you rustle around the house cleaning dishes, doing laundry, and talking on the phone during quiet time your child may feel he is trapped in his room because he can hear you out there, doing something he thinks he’d like to be doing, too! The space you created might not do its job in this case. Likewise, if you watch a sitcom or rustle around the house preparing for the next day during study time, your adolescent might not make good use of the space you created for him. Instead, do your own quiet activity during your child’s quiet time, or do some of your own reading or reflective work during study time. Modeling behavior that mirrors the best choices for your children is an important ingredient in creating an effective space.

We have a tendency to want to control our children’s outcomes because we care so much about them. But the amazing thing is that when we focus our energies on creating space for children, and allowing our children to make their choices and build themselves through their own efforts, and by modeling for them, our children become invested in their own successes. Montessori saw that this is, truly, the most helpful approach. Look for times and places in the routines of your family’s day where your children may need you to create the space for them to succeed. It is the most effective way to support them, and you will all be happy to leave the controlling behind.

Self-Directed Playtime is not Wasted Time

Mon, 22 Aug 2016 21:46:40 GMT

Something Out of Nothing: Why Self-Directed Playtime is not Wasted Time!

How do you get your children away from digital screens? The direct answer is to take the devices away, shut them off, limit their availability, or quite simply, do not have them for your children at all, which is the easiest thing to do. But once you have peeled them from a screen, the question becomes, what to do when your children are “bored?” Ah, there is so much to do when there is “nothing” to do! Your heart should sing when your children come to you and complain that they are bored, because by not giving them a solution for their feeling of restlessness, you allow them to practice the ever-important life skill of creating something out of nothing through self-directed playtime.

With my childhood friend in town this past week, I was reminded of how we spent our unstructured summer days between ages six and twelve. We made forts in trees with blankets, scraps of wood, and nails we found in the shed. We pretended to be Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn, running away on a ship (the hammock) and landing on an island (after a huge storm!) where we would sneak into a house (my parents’), steal food, squirrel it away in an abandoned barn, where we would live, hunt, and fish in the pond with string and sticks. This was all done barefoot (which was painful) and with mosquitoes.

We were lucky—we had ponies to play with, a barn, fields, woods, and even a pool, a hammock, and a trampoline. But the most important ingredient to our successful self-directed playtime was my mother, who left us alone to explore, experiment, and create. For hours, even days, her only concern was whether we showed up at the dinner table and came in by bedtime. My mother, Paula Polk Lillard, was off writing books about Montessori, and she had no time to meddle in our business. Yet, perhaps she left us alone because I was the youngest of five much older children, and my mother had perspective and wisdom. She really didn’t worry about whether we would fall out of trees, hit our heads on the metal frame of the trampoline, get stepped on by ponies in our bare feet, get burrs in our hair, millions of mosquito bites or poison ivy, all of which happened. She let us learn about these things. My mother knew the value of free time and self-directed playtime for children to discover life skills, create original ideas, and build independence.

I am not proposing a completely nonchalant parenting approach, mind you. I am sure my mother had some idea of where we were or what we were doing. She was probably watching from a window where she sat at her typewriter. She certainly had us come get her when we wanted to swim in the pool or go galloping around on the barebacked ponies. But my mother did not hover—she was always busy doing her own thing in the background. When I asked her the other day whether she thinks we could have gotten seriously hurt, she said, “Maybe we were just lucky, but I figured there were two of you, and if an accident happened, one of you would come and get me. Besides, you were not reckless children—you were busy playing.”

We had an amazing, enchanted childhood, which my friend and I talk about every time we get together. We laugh at the absurd adventures and marvel at the wonders of growing up outside: swimming in the pool at night before bed after a long hot day, the smell of the grass we crawled around on, the snails we collected in the pond, the lightening bugs we caught in jars, the cool mud squeezing between our toes in the woods on hot days… The smells, the sounds, and the sights of summer in Illinois are etched in us.

None of that would have been possible through a screen. And besides having a wonderful time, what did we learn through our self-directed playtime? We fought and resolved our differences, we cried and apologized, we fell and learned how to keep from falling, we hit our fingers with hammers and learned how not to, and we built reserves of patience and tolerance for mild discomforts. We built perseverance in our hours-long attempts to trick the Shetland ponies into being caught. We concocted elaborate plots for our little model horses, which would take entire weekends to execute, breaking only for meals. We wouldn’t have developed these parts of ourselves—certainly not as thoroughly—if an adult had been telling us about life’s experiences, or we were watching others on screens. We had to make the mistakes ourselves, and we had to be bored enough to create the next adventure in the blessed hours of our summers.

Children develop more problem-solving skills, resilience, courage, and creative thinking skills when adults allow them free time for self-directed playtime. Specifically, in a study published in 2014 in Frontiers in Psychology, “Less Structured Time in Children’s Daily Lives Predicts Self-Directed Executive Functioning,” Baker et al. find that, “The more time children spent in less-structured activities, the better their self-directed executive functioning. The opposite was true of structured activities, which predicted poorer self-directed executive functioning. These relationships were robust…and specific....” Conclusively, because executive functioning (planning and executing one’s own ideas) is a strong indicator of success later in life, parents ought to be aware of the tight correlation between self-directed playtime and this important life skill.

Children whose parents schedule many activities for them and tend to tell their children what to do are less creative and productive than those who have fewer planned activities and more free time for self-directed playtime. With this in mind, let your children find ways to make something out of nothing. You have to let your children make a bit of a mess sometimes, but within reasonable limits, I encourage you to let them be. You do not need trampolines and ponies—very few of us have access to large plots of nature and such props in our suburban culture. But because children are imaginative, they can create entire worlds of play around any house or alleyway. All they need is your permission.

The Keys to Successful Self-Directed Playtime

If needed, provide a few from the following list of suggested ingredients to encourage self-directed playtime:

Blankets and pillows children can drag to different parts of the house
Art supplies, especially paint
Lots of paper, string, and tape
Used cardboard boxes of all sizes
Scraps of wood, plywood, and boards
A simple toolbox, with hammer, large nails, and wire
A hammock or swing
Fabric or old clothes for costumes
Wigs and hats
A simple sewing kit
A sprinkler and hose
Plastic chairs
Healthy snacks and water available in the kitchen
The final ingredient is TIME…children can enjoy self-directed playtime for hours and hours once they get into it, as long as interruptions are few

Basic agreements between you and your children might be:

No screaming (because that means it’s an emergency!)
Clean up afterwards and put everything back (before your friend goes home or before sitting down to the next meal).
If the adults call for you, you have to come right away.
We will interrupt each other as infrequently as possible.

Playing is not a waste of time, but a childhood could be “wasted” without it!

Some reading recommendations:

Children at Play: An American History by Howard Chudacoff
The Last Child in the Woods: Saving our Children from Nature-Deficit Disorder by Richard Louv
The chapter “Give Them Unstructured Time” in How to Raise an Adult; Break Free of the Overprinting Trap and Prepare Your Kid for Success by Julie Lythcott-Haims

forest-bluff-school

How to Live in an Uncertain World: Optimism Through Montessori

The Emotional Climate of Our Homes

The Arc of History

What You Can Do

Final Thoughts

Montessori and Accountability: Developing a Moral Compass

Why Holding Children Accountable Matters

Values and Character

Internal Regulation

Healthy Relationships

How the Montessori Classroom Supports Accountability

A Social Community

Freedom Within Limits

Trusting the Child's Inner Guide

Practical Advice for Parents

Set Clear Expectations and Rules

Engage in Reflection and Problem-Solving

Maintain Connection and Support

Balance Accountability with Praise and Positive Reinforcement

Model Accountability Yourself

Final Thoughts

References & Resources

Grammar the Montessori Way

The Argument for Grammar

The Montessori Way

Grammar for Young Children (3-6)

Parts of Speech

Reading Analysis

Grammar for the Elementary Student (6-12)

Parts of Speech

Reading Analysis

Final Thoughts

How Montessori Prepared Me to Thrive as a Future Professional in the Age of AI

A Montessori Masterpiece: The Multi-Age Classroom

Planes of Development

Birth to Six Years (The First Plane of Development)

Six to Twelve Years (The Second Plane of Development)

Twelve to Eighteen Years (The Third Plane of Development)

Classrooms and Environments for the Different Planes

Home or a “Nido” (0–1.5 years old)

The Young Children’s Community (1.5–3 year olds)

The Primary Classroom (3–6 year olds)

Lower and Upper Elementary (6–9 and 9–12 year olds)

Secondary Level (12–15 year olds)

The Benefits of a Multi-Age Classroom

A Natural Community of Peers

Mentors

True Leadership

Flexibility in Progress

A Balance of Familiar…

…and New

Final Thoughts

References

Birthday Party Mania: It's My Party and...Someone is Definitely Crying

0-4 Years ﻿

5-8 Years

9-11 Years

12-14 Years

Final Thoughts

Cursive Handwriting: The Gift of Taking “The Long Way”

Montessori Theory on Cursive Versus Print

Easier to Learn Letters

Easier to Master the Formation of Letters

Spaces Between Words Leads to Greater Comprehension

Continuous, Natural Movement

Montessori Theory on Handwriting Versus Technology

What the Research Shows: Handwriting Versus Computers

Better Recall of Words and Letters for Emerging Readers

Retention of Information and Greater Conceptual Knowledge

Broader Brain Activation, Leading to Deeper Processing

Final Thoughts

References ﻿

How Can I Help?: Creating a Routine with Chores

Children as Contributors

Finding a Chore System

Getting Started

Laundry, Food Preparation, and Dishes

How We've Been Doing

Final Thoughts

0-4 Years

References

Our Goals for Education

Final Thoughts

The First Plane of Development: 0-6 Years

Will They Understand the Internet?

The Truest Form of Love & Compassion