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28 Nov

It’s All Science

Christine Carrillo by Christine Carrillo | Montessori Blog
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“What is a scientist?…We give the name scientist to a man who has felt experiment to be a means guiding him to search out the deep truth in life, to lift a veil from its fascinating secrets…” -Maria Montessori

He was crying pretty hard. No, he was weeping. His face of was red and his eyes were swollen. He was angry, confused and overwhelmed. Despite the successful orientation just a few days earlier, it has not been easy to say goodbye to mom and dad and make the journey down the hallway to our classroom. In addition to the difficult separation, there was a bit of a language barrier. He spoke another language at home and was not yet fluent in English. I helped him wipe his tears, and took him gently by the hand. I showed him the cylinder blocks. He was immediately interested, although still hesitant. Using a friendly smile and gestures, I invited him to sit beside me as I began to work with the material.

As soon as I began to remove the cylinders from the block, his eyes lit up. He locked his eyes on mine and reached for the next cylinder, clearly showing me that he wanted to go for it. After I finished my presentation, he went right for it, tears forgotten and enthusiasm in full swing. I watched him for a long while, mesmerized, as I often am, at the draw, pull, enticement and attraction, as well as the calming quality of these beautiful materials in my environment.

I observed him as he mulled over the holes, working with purpose until finding the right one in which to gently slide the cylinder. He tried one cylinder in several of the holes before finding just the right fit. I could practically see the gears turning in his mind. Through trial and error, observation, testing and testing again, he was able to return each cylinder to its correct space. He sighed with contentment as he finished, and then started the process all over again.

Montessori materials allow the child to teach himself. Through trial and error, these didactic materials give feedback, this case both visual (he can see that it doesn’t fit) and mechanical (some cylinders just do not fit in some holes), which allow the child to work independently. The child in the prepared environment tests his hypothesis (this one goes here) again and again. He records data in his mind as to which cylinder goes where. He tests and retests. The child finds contentment in his exploration. He feels a calm sense of accomplishment when finished. He desires to repeat the process again from the beginning.

Maria Montessori, herself a scientist and a physician, created her pedagogy through following the interests of children and did not name the approach after herself. We call it “The Montessori Method”, but she called it “The Scientific Method” or “The Child’s Method.” Our approach to education is the only pedagogy based in science, and based on one woman’s dedication of over 50 years of research and practice to create a developmentally based approach to education that follows the child’s natural growth process.

In our classrooms, children teach themselves concepts through trial and error, using didactic materials. These didactic materials provide a child with a sense of purpose and are repetitive and calming. Children are unhurried and can practice, err, correct themselves and explore deeper at their own pace.

When I look around my classroom, I see twenty-seven scientists. They are making mistakes, making observations, testing and retesting, repeating, recording data and engaging in that process over and over again. Once they are confident with one material, they are likely to desire to work with another. This sense of calm, self- assuredness builds wonderful members of our community who are, in turn, a gift to our society because calm, confident, self-assured children become calm, confident, self-assured adults. In the words of Dr. Montessori, “The child is the maker of man.”

As for the little boy who was tearful on his first day, he has happily been working his way through many of the materials on the shelves, with a special love for the sensorial. He does not cry in the morning. Though he continues to be the strong, silent type, this morning he raced across the room to me with a grin, grabbed my hand and led me to the beautiful pink tower he had built. The little girl working next to him shared in his joy and said, “YOU DID IT!” And my heart sang with joy for him and gratitude for this wonderful scientific approach to education that allows children to become the best versions of themselves.

Filed Under: Montessori Blog Tagged With: calm, children, classroom, didactic, materials, montessori, science, scientist, sense, work

01 Aug

If You Build it, They Will Come

Jennifer Rogers by Jennifer Rogers | Montessori Blog
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This summer we built a pond. Our sons were 16 and 12, and our daughter was 10. They grew up in Montessori classrooms that were beautiful, carefully prepared communities where they learned to concentrate, read, collaborate, and master difficult tasks. Their teachers instilled a deep reverence for the natural world. They are good readers, hard workers, respectful kids we have always enjoyed spending time with.

Nonetheless, for several age-appropriate reasons, it has lately been hard to do things as a family, extraordinarily difficult to find tasks that would engage their minds and their bodies. Our boys are growing so fast now, they spend the bulk of many days eating and sleeping. At some point in most conversations about road trips, or bike rides, gardening, or trips to the parks and festivals that used to thrill them, one of the boys will usually ask, “do I have too?” So this summer, instead of a family vacation, we built a pond in our own backyard.

Like most amateur projects, building a pond was much harder than we expected, and took weeks longer than we predicted. It’s finished now, full of fish, tadpoles with little legs, and aquatic plants. It’s a simple design, like a Beatrix Potter illustration, except instead of a peaceful white kitten perched on the edge of the water, we have a rowdy black spaniel and a Labrador puppy. Our dogs enjoy the pond by barking at the fish, lapping the water, and occasionally falling in.

It was our oldest son’s idea to build a pond. When we moved into our home three years ago, he pointed at a recessed area of our tiny backyard and said, “that’s the perfect spot for a pond.” At the time, we thought his idea was ridiculous. We finally agreed to build a pond for reasons that only make sense if you surrender to the peculiar logic of teens. They said they had always wanted bullfrog tadpoles, and they had identified a spot for hammock-poles.

Pond-building procedures are, at the time and in retrospect, incredibly tedious. We checked all the pond-building books out from our public library, sketched plans and ideas, bought a third shovel and took turns digging until our arms, legs, lower backs, and feet ached. Spreading mulch is a dirty, miserable job in July. The low point was losing hold of the wheelbarrow in the front yard, watching a full load of mulch fall into the grass. The high point was watching our middle son set his rake aside and persuade his big brother to take phone-photos of him. He stood on a stone in the middle of the pond, striking the yoga balancing poses he first learned in his primary Montessori class. He was covered with pre-teen sweat and dirt. “We don’t want to forget this moment, mom.”

We made three trips to a local quarry. Altogether, we hauled more than 2000 pounds of rock home in our mini-van. On our third trip from the drive-on scale to the quarry office where we would pay pay for our rocks, I noticed the sign on the door, “No sandals or children in the quarry.”

“Oops,” I said. “At least we all have tennis shoes on.” My kids were covered in dust, still wearing work gloves. “Good thing I didn’t see that sign. I needed your help.” It was an honest mistake. I did not intentionally break the rules, but I do also know that three kids were engaged in work that was incredibly difficult because their labor was essential. They knew I could not haul that much rock without their help. Breaking the rule was worth it. Purposeful work is as motivating for teens as it is for three-year olds.

We toted the rocks into our backyard, one or two at a time, washed them with the garden hose, and began stacking, arranging, and re-arranging. My husband installed a filter, built a waterfall around the pump, and installed three small lights. Then we added goldfish and tadpoles. It was a fine, fine moment.

Several weeks later, grandma called. She was at a local garden shop, looking at fish. Could she buy one fish and put it in our pond, she wondered. She wanted permission, and she wanted to make sure her fish was different, so she could distinguish it from the others. “That way, I’ll have my own fish to look for when I come over.” Grandma’s fish is the only black and orange koi. When she comes, she knows who to look for.

Our oldest son says he’d like to build a small bridge next summer, a task he mastered in his elementary Montessori class years ago. Building a bridge would be an appropriate task for a young man just two years away from college. He is already the tallest member of the family, already venturing away from us in ways that are both wonderful and, for us, a little sad.

One Saturday evening during pond construction, my freshly-showered, exhausted husband said he had recently paused in the hallway, in front of the shelves that remain full of children’s story books. Our kids have outgrown bedtime stories, but we have not yet put the books in storage. “I read those books every night for years,” he said. “I feel like they are part of me.”

Our hope is that building a pond will be something like that, for our children, and for us. When they are grown, we hope we will stand beside our pond, step on the stones we hauled, walk across the bridge we have not yet built, and feel like the pond is a part of the life of our family, hard work, imperfect, alive, and growing.

Filed Under: Montessori Blog Tagged With: backyard, build, building, children, dirty, family, montessori, pond, work

16 May

Why Montessori?

Jennifer Rogers by Jennifer Rogers | Montessori Blog
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Preaching to the choir
A persuasive tone in speech and writing lends an urgent and important feeling to any topic. Then again, talking or writing persuasively about the benefits of a Montessori education before an audience of parents whose children are thriving in Montessori classrooms is a little silly. Parents who attend school meetings and read blog posts are among the best. They are typically people who are already thoughtfully engaged in education and parenting.

At every parent meeting, teachers look out into an audience of familiar faces. We notice that the same people also volunteer, ask honest questions in parent-teacher conferences, participate in fund-raisers, and arrive at school on time. We look for their faces in our audiences because the smiles are reassuring, and also because we know our words will make an immediate and lasting difference in the lives of their children. It’s a grand exchange, but asking “Why Montessori?” is a risk. Redundancy is boring, and smart people do not like to be bored.

My response to the “Why Montessori?” question is not detailed or exhaustive. It is a broad-strokes personal narrative, loaded with opinions formed in more than two decades of teaching. The arrangements of space, time, and people that I consider essential to an authentic Montessori education are not doctrinal. Others would answer the same question differently, but accurately.

I could easily add to the following list, but I could not take anything away.

Diversity
The youngest Montessori students gather information through observation and admiration of their older classmates. The oldest students are challenged and often transformed by urgent demands to help and guide their younger peers.

The failure of most public and private schools to incorporate diversity into the formation of classrooms and curriculums has been widely reported. It is an old and persistent problem. The segregation of ages and the standardization of curriculum is a lost opportunity. Standardization and segregation are huge limitations to academic achievement, and to the growth of human understanding.

There are children learning in Montessori classrooms from a kaleidoscopic array of ethnic, religious, and socio-economic backgrounds. They learn as much from each other as they do from formal lessons. Geographically isolated Montessori classrooms can be more homogenous than a school located in a diversely populated urban area, but every authentic Montessori school has a student population of mixed ages and abilities. Montessori students are not differentiated by age or intellect.

This diversity is, in my opinion, the single factor that has the most profound and lasting impact on the education of young children. Montessori students demonstrate how much we have to learn from each other as well as how much each of us has to offer our world.

Prepared Environment
Furniture in Montessori classrooms is the appropriate size for the children who will use it. This is also true of the tools, utensils, and materials they will hold in their hands. Pictures hang on the wall at the level of the students’ eyes. Every classroom is organized in such a way that the sequence of learning is materially present on the shelves and obvious to the children. The goals of independent decision-making and internal motivation are built into the carefully prepared environment.

Montessori classrooms are as different as the teachers who tend them, but they evince an attention to order and beauty rarely witnessed in education. Most are filled with light, plants, fresh flowers, and an ambiance of grace. Environments affect the quality of the experiences within them. The earliest memories of learning are, for Montessori students, forever associated with the warmth and peace of their first classrooms.

Purposeful Work
Maria Montessori was educated and trained as a physician. Throughout her long life, she remained fascinated with her observations of human health. The work she offered her students was always purposeful, and it always involved the coordinated work of mind and body. Montessori understood that a strong mind paired with strong hands led to optimum development of a child’s intelligence. This was true with her first students, and it remains true today.

© MariaMontessori.com

Students in Montessori classrooms have daily opportunities to select their work. Children may repeat the tasks they select as often as they desire, until the task is mastered. Work chosen independently and repeated without interruption often leads to deep concentration. Montessori’s ability to cultivate and protect the concentration of young children through their purposeful work remains one of her most significant contributions to the education of young people.

Skilled Leadership
A traditionally structured classroom usually includes a teacher-directed curriculum. Time and space are marked and organized by the strong, clear voice of a teacher who is trained in an age group or an academic discipline, mathematics, for example, or four-year-olds, or music.

Montessori classrooms are active, creative, and adaptive communities. The teacher’s voice is seldom heard, and she frequently sits beside a child as he or she learns. It might seem that the hierarchical structure of a traditional classroom would require stronger leadership and stricter discipline. Actually, a healthy Montessori community requires a much more intelligent and intuitive style of leadership.

Montessori teachers must be skilled in the practice of observation and comfortable with the independent, purposeful movement of young minds at work. Nationally and internationally accredited Montessori teacher training courses are intense and demanding. This is as it should be. Montessori teachers should be experts in the abstract principles and concrete materials that structure the life of a classroom.

Silence
Visitors to Montessori classrooms first notice the beauty and order present throughout the environment. They also notice the quiet, especially if they are accustomed to teacher-directed systems of education. There are no bells prompting students to change activities or locations, no intercom, and no video or television instruction. Montessori teachers do gather the entire class for special events, singing, or shared story, but the voice of the teacher does not direct the movements of the children throughout the day.

In Montessori classrooms, there are occasions when the classroom is silent, when every child in the community is at work. More often, Montessori environments are characterized by the quiet hum of children at work, moving and talking together about subjects that demand their undivided, uninterrupted attention. In a contemporary culture heavily influenced by the interruptions of technology and the distractions of screens, this is a rare and precious gift.

Why Montessori?
If it were possible for a young child to answer “Why Montessori?” in a phrase or sentence that stretched beyond her limited frame of reference and her real gratitude for the fun she had a school that day, she would probably say, “I found myself!” Though their academic accomplishments are remarkable, the greatest achievements of Montessori students are far grander and more lasting.

Montessori students do have a confident, comfortable understanding of the academic concepts they will rely upon for the rest of their lives. They are academically strong not just for the short-term, but for a lifetime of learning. They also have a realistic understanding of their strengths, weaknesses, and talents. They can identify times and places when they should lead, as well as occasions when they should ask for help.

The experience of working in an intelligent community helps children understand both that there are some tasks we must do alone, and that we need each other to achieve our goals. Even our youngest students know how to reach inward and outward. The inner teacher of a healthy Montessori child is more reliable than any methodology or even the guidance of a talented teacher. Our students know how to work toward a goal, how to persevere when challenged, and how to connect in meaningful ways to the people in their home and school communities.

Why Montessori? Because a strong Montessori community is a group of people working together to help each person become the best version of him or herself. The gift of a Montessori classroom is that children begin their education with strong bodies and strong minds working alongside friends who know and love them almost as well as they know themselves.

Filed Under: Montessori Blog Tagged With: children, classrooms, community, diversity, environment, learning, montessori, students, teachers, work

14 Dec

A Quest for Reality

Paul Gutting by Paul Gutting | Montessori Blog
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“[It] may be said that in order to develop the imagination it is necessary for everyone first of all to put himself in contact with reality.” -Dr. Maria Montessori

When Dr. Montessori opened her first classroom in 1907 in the San Lorenzo tenement housing in Rome, she had two cabinets of materials for the children’s use. One was filled with the materials she had designed and made for the children based on her earlier work in hospitals, and the other was filled with toys that had been donated to her by her friends.

DSC_7932-mediumDr. Montessori found very quickly that the children in the classroom exclusively chose the materials over the toys. She was surprised, and went so far as to sit down with the children and show them how to use the toys. After sitting with the dolls and so on for a short time, the children returned to the materials and remained with them. This observation brought Montessori to the conclusion that the children preferred reality and real work to toys and fantasy. Her conclusion has since been supported both by Montessori’s own work and that of many educators the world over.

I have found myself wondering on occasion if such a scenario could still take place. Surely contemporary battery-powered toys with flashing lights and a different song for every button would attract attention away from our simple, orderly materials. But I have seen that it is not so.

A year or so ago, my school hosted a fundraising garage sale. We filled part of a classroom not being used for the summer with donations. We had all kinds of things – plastic play kitchen sets, a cat-shaped keyboard, toy cars, dolls, a bin of dress-up clothes, bikes, and the list goes on. The other half of the classroom still had Montessori materials neatly arranged on shelves.

I watched as a two-and-a-half year old girl walked into the room, looked at all the toys, even touching some of them, and went straight to the shelves of materials and took great delight in working with a cylinder block (one of the Montessori sensorial materials). She was not prompted in any way, nor did I put her in the room as a test or experiment. She was not a student at our school returning to the familiar joys of the classroom. She was a child entering into a room filled with choices and after seeing what was available, she chose what she wanted (or needed) most.

Often in Montessori, we speak of the materials calling out to the children, and we do our best to make sure that call is clear. That is why our classrooms tend to be simple and uncluttered, decorated to the point of orderly beauty, not to the point of distraction. The children want to engage in the classroom. They want the experience that the materials will give them because they will get more learning from that experience than from flashy toys or reasoned rhetoric from an adult.

I think this story supports several truths about children, but the thought I want to land on today is that children crave reality. They want to do real work with real things. Nearly every parent of a two or three-year-old child sympathizes with the image of sweeping the floor and having to drag the child along on the end of the broom. The children want to help, they want to understand their own power to do work, and they will be best satisfied in that quest when they have real things to do.

Filed Under: Montessori Blog Tagged With: classroom, materials, montessori, reality, toys, work

02 Oct

Nurture and Nature

Charlotte Kroger by Charlotte Kroger | Montessori Blog
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Outside my bedroom windows, along the back property line where my neighbor’s yard begins, I can see the four cherry laurel trees we planted a few years ago. Three of them are flourishing – getting tall and treelike – while the fourth is not doing so well. It is not as tall as the others and is skimpy in canopy. It’s not its fault. When we planted these trees we were not terribly discerning about the location. The gardener helping us said that the laurels should do well whether in sun or shade. So we planted them in an offset row across the back of our yard to serve as screening. We hadn’t taken into account the future growth of all the surrounding trees that now cast that part of the yard into deep shade, where the fourth laurel lives.

DSC_0896-medium The trees came with ‘instructions’ – hidden potential with everything needed to become cherry laurels we could one day count on to screen the back of our property. But the environment in which they grow varied enough that one of four has not lived up to its potential of tree shading.

Nurture and Nature

The environment is nurture; the child in his raw form is nature. There is little or perhaps anything we can do to alter the child’s nature but there is everything we can do to provide the appropriate nurture that nature needs to reach potential and beyond through the environment we provide.

Maria Montessori was very clear about the importance of the environment young children need during the years of their Absorbent Minds and Sensitive Periods. She presented a clear blueprint for the role of the Prepared Environment and the role of the adult in that environment. According to Standing (“Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work”):

“If there is one feature more than another which should characterize the prepared environment it is order.”

“It is hardly too much to say that on the way in which the directress (adult) preserves the order in the prepared environment – or not – will largely depend the success or failure of her class.”

“What Montessori has done is this: realizing the peculiarly absorbent nature of the child’s mind, she has prepared for him a special environment; and, then, placing the child within it, has given him freedom to live in it, absorbing what he finds there.”

“If the teacher (adult) and the children all migrated to another room – leaving the prepared environment – these new relationships would vanish, and with them the inter-related function of the absorbent mind in the prepared environment.” (the Guide/Adult – Children- Environment triangle)

“In this environment only those things are allowed to be present which will assist development. Out of it must be kept anything that would act as an obstacle – not least a too interfering adult. Even such things as are neutral or irrelevant should be rigorously excluded. The constructive psychic energy granted by nature to the child for building up his personality is limited; therefore we must do everything we can to see that it is not scattered in activities of the wrong kind.”

It is clear – we work with the child nature through the nurturing environment – tirelessly and consistently through its upkeep and preparation. This is our role of love, and the environment reflects this love in its readiness (preparedness) to support the child nature. It is through the environment that the adult has any influence on the developing child nature.

Standing further states
“Practical Rules for the Teacher (or adult) in Relation to the Environment”:

  1. Scrupulous care of the environment: keep it clean, tidy, spick and span.
  2. Paint again, sew again, when necessary: beautify the house.
  3. Teach the use of objects; and show the way to do the exercises of practical life (this must be done calmly and graciously and exactly, so that all the children will do the same).
  4. Put the child in touch with the environment (active) and when this is achieved she becomes passive.
  5. Observe the children continuously so that she may not fail to see who needs support.
  6. Hasten when called.
  7. Listen and respond to the child’s appeals.
  8. Respect and not interrupt the worker.
  9. Respect and never correct one who is making a mistake (“teach, teaching, not teach correcting”).
  10. Respect one who is resting and watching the others work without disturbing him or obliging him to work . . .
  11. But she must be tireless in offering subjects again to those who have already refused them; and in teaching those who have not yet learnt, and still make mistakes.
  12. By her care and intent silence she must animate the environment: also by her gentle speech and presence – as one who loves.
  13. She must make her presence felt by those who are seeking; and hide from those who have already found.
  14. She becomes invisible to those who – having finished their work carried out by their own effort – are offering up their work as a spiritual thing.

Ours is one of service to the child nature through loving care of the environment in which he spends his day of development, day after day, be it in the home or in the school. This is the love we show the child – the respect and honor we afford the developing, creative nature and raw potential of the child. It is our partnership with him in this creative endeavor.

Filed Under: Montessori Blog Tagged With: child, environment, montessori, nature, nurture, potential, prepared, respect, work

05 Jun

Impermanence

Charlotte Kroger by Charlotte Kroger | Montessori Blog
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The Guide walks about the room, slowly and with calm focus so that she will not distract or disturb the children in their work. She repeats this routine a few times a day, deliberately choosing a different route each time, in order to make herself available to the child that might need some scaffolding in reaching the next level in an activity or to inform herself of the work being done. The Guide is careful to observe indirectly so that no one feels monitored or intruded upon – she has developed a deep respect for the child’s concentration and work. She also recognizes that the children themselves take cues from her on how they show respect for the concentrated work of others, or not. She makes mental notes of the children’s needs for fresh lessons with points of interest, of readiness for the next step in a work or a new work.

DSC_8790-largeOccasionally, she finds a child using a material in a manner not reflecting the aim of the lesson presented on that material and she makes note to herself to continue observing this child and his work from a distance. She means to ascertain if it is exploration that will benefit him in reaching the essence of the material, or if the child stands in need of a new, clarifying lesson with the material or perhaps even disruption of the present work and a return of the material to the shelf.

When she observes misuse of the material that calls for gentle but firm intervention, a calling to the child to engage with the material in a safe, respectful and knowledgeable manner, she does not hesitate to intervene in these instances. Her long years of experience in guiding a Children’s House have strengthened both her instincts for appropriate action and her instinct to wait and observe a bit longer. She recalls the early years when this instinct and skill that must accompany it was not so keenly developed and she was sometimes confused on which, if any, action to take. Luckily, she recalled from her readings in Montessori books that encourage a ‘wait and see’ approach. She recognizes that the adult is often the biggest obstacle to a child’s ability to concentrate.

Rounding the corner near the easel activity, she takes note of Sandra, a capable, intelligent and happy five and a half year old girl who has been in this community for two years. She is a soft- spoken, introverted girl who began her Montessori experience in another Montessori Children’s House in another city. She had been cautious about connecting with her new peers and the Guide remembers helping her cultivate an interest in developing friendships through engineering group work that engaged her with others. The girl now stands in quiet confidence and utter focus as she creates her painting. The Guide settles herself in her chair and references her daily lesson plans for a brief moment.

Rising from her chair, the Guide again glances at Sandra and her easel work and observes the beginning of a vivid, colorful scene that the girl is developing – unaware of the Guide’s interest. That the girl loves horses has always been a part of Sandra’s persona in the community. She enjoys reading about horses, talking with friends about horses and her interest often spills over into long, involved and colorful stories about this love affair, at first in Moveable Alphabet work and now in spontaneous cursive writing with pencil and paper. Emerging on the easel paper is the barest hint of a picture evolving of a horse in a meadow bursting with vivid flowers. The Guide stands very still, entranced as she always is when observing this intimate view of the child’s interior thoughts and imaginings. She is always in awe of a child’s ability to use the simple paints and brushes of the easel activity to create truly beautiful pictures that she understands are actually private diaries of the child’s thoughts.

She recalls the prospective parent observer who questioned the parent liaison of the school, after observing in this community, “Why didn’t the Guide comment on the painting the child was doing at the easel? She just looked and kept on walking. And why is none of the children’s art work posted about in the room?” She makes a mental note to include this question in a possible topic for a parent gathering on “Children and Their Creative Urges.”

Sandra continues to paint her picture, and the Guide moves on to give a lesson to a three year old on stitchery with yarn on burlap. The child she has invited to this lesson is a new boy to the community. He is quite rambunctious but a very likable fellow as all children are to the enlightened Guide. She is very fond of him already, which is the ground to her work with any child, appreciating his enthusiastic nature and quick ability for developing friendships with the other children. He is interested in many things and this is reflected in his ripping through the lessons he has had at a fast pace – nothing seems to hold his attention for any length of time that will allow him to sink into a focus and love of the material that might result in concentration.

She has chosen this particular lesson because she has seen it, time and again, call to the furtive, busy mind of very active children – calling them to a slow and steady rhythmic activity, resulting in a concentration probably no one has expected for the child’s abilities. But she knows that for every child there is something in the environment that will ground him and hold his attention so that his energies are channeled into a calming and centering focus – and she knows it is always the resulting concentration that is transformative. She fervently hopes this is the one to grab Jack’s attention and interest. Very often it is sewing activity that serves this purpose, especially for boys – perhaps because it is not part of their usual repertoire of activities, she muses.

DSC_2093-mediumTogether, she and Jack walk to the shelf and she introduces him to the burlap sewing activity. She fetches the basket that holds the blue embroidery needle in its container – its large eye will accept the thickness of the yarn they will use – and a small pair of scissors in a cloth pocket. She shows him the supply of prepared burlap rectangles nearby and invites him to choose one (there are 3 rectangles, each bound in a different color tape and having 5 tracks of pulled threads for guiding the child’s sewing). Jack selects a red bound rectangle and places it in the basket. Next, he is invited to select a tiny ball of yarn from the nearby container. There are several choices of colors and he selects red again – a clear indication to her of his energy and enthusiasm. She has discovered that the more choices the child is given – even in selecting the color of tape and yarn – the greater is his investment and interest in the work at hand. He places the yarn on the basket. She shows him how to hold the basket firmly with his fingers opened fully under its base and the thumbs of both hands tightly wrapped around the rim of the basket to steady it. She reminds him to look at his destination, his table, as he carries the basket and walks there. She takes her seat on her guide’s stool, next to the boy at his selected table.

Jack sits in his chair, his bottom against the back of the chair, feet flat on the floor and hands in his lap – he reflects the care she has taken in preparing him for receiving new lessons with attention. She calmly repositions the basket to the top of the table and begins removing the items, one at a time, naming them. “Burlap, needle in container, scissors in pouch, yarn ball,” she says as she places them in a row across the table, near the basket but leaving a space for his work at the bottom section of the table.

Next, she takes a moment to briefly survey the room and ascertains that the children are engaged in absorbing work and that the assistant is aware that she will be engaged in a lesson. The assistant acknowledges her gaze with a smile and continues the work she is doing with a child and his sandpaper letters. The Guide notices that Sandra is still involved in her painting.

Picking up the burlap rectangle, the Guide lays it flat on the table in front of Jack. She runs her finger along the 5 tracks that he will fill with yarn. Next, she opens the container for the needle, removes the needle and places it on the table next to the burlap rectangle. She carefully replaces the cap on the needle container and puts the container back into the basket. She then releases the scissors carefully from the cloth pouch, lays them on the table next to the needle and returns the pouch to the basket. She fetches the ball of yarn and holds it in her non-writing hand, searching for the lead end with her free hand. Finding it, she slowly unravels the yarn, letting the ball gently turn within the cup of her fingers and thumb as she measures a length from one end of the front of the table to the other end. Resting the length of yarn on the table, she fetches the scissors, placing her fingers within the appropriate apertures, and snips the yarn at the ball end. All of these movements are done with careful and slow intention that will allow Jack to make mental pictures of the process for his own use.

Now that the yarn is prepared, the Guide takes a moment to create an intimacy with Jack by looking at him with a brief smile and eye contact – calling him to remain engaged and with her in the activity. She knows that he will cherish this time that she will give to him alone and she counts on this to create a zone in which they will share in this gift to him.

Turning back to the work at hand, the Guide picks up the end of the yarn with her writing hand. Then she picks up the large eye needle and deftly, with calm attention, inserts the yarn through the eye. When a bit protrudes to the other side, she pulls the yarn gently through so that about two thirds of it remains unthreaded. She will not show Jack how to knot the yarn just yet – that will come in a progression of the lesson once he is fully engaged in the work and shows readiness for it.

She picks up the burlap rectangle and inserts the threaded needle from the underside of the material into the first hole of the prepared track to the left. She will do the sewing from left to right, which she knows is an indirect preparation for writing and reading left to right, but she does not mention this to the boy. She pulls the needle through the opening on the upper side of the rectangle, reining it in with slow deliberation, letting the boy watch as it snakes through the hole and lengthens on the upper side. She is careful to leave a two- inch length of yarn on the underside because there is no knot to hold the thread securely at this time.

She takes a moment for all of these movements to be taken in by Jack’s observing mind. Now she places the burlap rectangle flat on the table and, using the point of the needle, counts five holes aloud and plunges the needle down into the fifth hole. She turns the burlap to access the pulling of the thread through the hole, being very careful to not include the two- inch end. Eyeing the underside of the rectangle, she repeats this step from the bottom side, again counting five holes in a row, plunging the needle through to the upper side. She takes her time in repeating these movements until there are 5 uniform stitches to observe on the top surface of the material.

At this point, she has ascertained by his close attention and the slight movements of his fingers in his lap that he is ready to take over the work. She sits on her stool and observes as he takes up the needle and thread and counts to five holes and begins his own sewing. She stays for several stitches to observe and lend whatever support or clarity is needed. Already, she is pleased to note the calm that begins to consume the boy and without a word, she slowly slips away to observe him from a distance. She wants to be ready to re-enter his work when he reaches the end of the first track, to show him how to be sure to leave enough thread to keep the stitches secure and to return the ball of yarn and select another color if he so chooses. She takes a moment to survey the room and Sandra’s easel work.

The easel paper is alive with vivid meadow flowers and a very engaging horse figure in the middle. It is a joyous painting, worthy of a frame and exhibit! And as she observes, she watches as Sandra, who stands a bit back from the easel, observing her creation, takes up a brush and begins dragging it through the paint. The Guide watches holding her breath, as the girl continues obliterating the picture with her brush strokes turning the paint into a muddy brown that now covers the original work.

She has seen this before, but it is never easy to observe. She thinks of the Tibetan Monks she once observed at a ceremony in which they painstakingly painted a sand mandala, taking many hours to do so, and then blithely blew the sand away – impermanence! She recognizes that the need is hers to preserve this child’s beautiful, creative work, but the child is complete within her self – she has expended her creative efforts in the picture, and having been satisfied, destroyed it. She did not need the product; she was happy with the process.

The Guide reluctantly turns from the easel scene and her gaze falls on Jack. He sits immersed in his sewing activity, completely unaware of the rest of the world about him. She notices he has already selected green yarn for his next track – a calm and centering color, she thinks.

Filed Under: Montessori Blog Tagged With: attention, burlap, child, concentration, guide, lesson, material, montessori, needle, observing, rectangle, work, yarn

23 Apr

The Power of Play: A Two-Hour Work-Cycle

Sarah Moudry by Sarah Moudry | Montessori Blog
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The work-cycle is the time, everyday, the children have to work/play at school. Once a child has adapted to the routine of school, he moves from one activity to the next, with very little adult interaction.  He sometimes will choose to be in a group activity, or check-in with the teacher through conversation.  Generally, he plans his day and proceeds with his “auto-education”.  The children’s ability to do this is what allows each child the specific education they need, and each teacher the ability to observation each child and their growth.

Here are five characteristics of play that allow the child the ability to move through his morning effortlessly, as described by Dr. Rachel E.White for the Minnesota Children’s Museum’s report, The Power of Play.

  • PLAY IS PLEASURABLE. Children must enjoy the activity or it is not play.
  • PLAY IS INTRINSICALLY MOTIVATED. Children engage in play simply for the satisfaction the behavior itself brings. It has no extrinsically motivated function or goal.
  • PLAY IS PROCESS ORIENTED. When children play, the means are more important than the ends.
  • PLAY IS FREELY CHOSEN. It is spontaneous and voluntary. If a child is pressured, she will likely not think of the activity as play.
  • PLAY IS ACTIVELY ENGAGED. Players must be physically and/or mentally involved in the activity.

When parents tour a Montessori school they often ask about the difference between play and work.  Play is the work of the child.  We use the term ‘work’ in order to hold it in high regard and respect it as purposeful and meaningful.

This info-graphic is made from the observation of one child for the full two hour work cycle.(2 hours for 12-36 months, 3 hours for beyond 3yrs) I have used different colors and shapes to highlight the different types of activities chosen throughout the morning.

Filed Under: Montessori Blog Tagged With: actively, cycle, engaged, montessori, motivated, play, work

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