Freedom of Choice - An Important Principle of Montessori

“Let us leave the life free to develop within the limits of the good, and let us observe this inner life developing. This is the whole of our mission.” – Maria Montessori

Montessori encourages freedom within limits through the design of the prepared environment. Dr. Montessori gave a lot of importance to freedom in the classroom. She makes a powerful argument that the roots of tyranny are in adults forcing children to obey their commands. When a child spends his entire day, year after year, following the instruction of adults and has no right to follow his own interests, he may come to believe that his own interests are unimportant. He may come to believe that his thoughts are not as important as the thoughts of the adults who are teaching him.

Montessori believed in discipline. But she realized that the way to reach it was by creating environments where children found engaging materials to use. When they are fully engaged in the work that appeals to them at their particular level of development, they become self-disciplined. You see in Montessori classrooms a group of three-, four- and five-year-old’s hard at work. No teacher could command such discipline, yet the children freely give it to their own self-chosen work.

Freedom of choice becomes a habit of mind. Freedom to explore your own thoughts and interests can open the floodgates to creativity, as it has with such Montessori alumni as the co-founders of Google, Wikipedia and Amazon.com – all Montessori graduates.

At @pepschoolv2, we understand all these learning differences and created an environment for children where they come in each day and choose what they want to work on.

HANDS - INSTRUMENTS OF INTELLIGENCE

Recent research in neuroscience tells that the development of the hands is a key input into the development of the growing child.

In Montessori, we are deeply concerned with the development of the hands as “instruments of the intelligence”. Thus, as with everything else in Montessori, geography too is offered to children to explore with their hands first.

Using their hands, children explore a globe with land areas covered in sandpaper, and get a rich sensorial experience of the extent to which the Earth is actually covered with water. So much better than being told to memorize a factoid!

Soon, children begin working with puzzles that represent world maps and different continents — they begin by putting the puzzle together, and soon graduate to knowing the names of these countries. It is not unusual to see children as young as five, point out a country on the map that an adult may not be aware of. [Quiz: Can you spot Mali on a map? Or Kazakhstan?]

Along the way, children create their own world maps, read more about states or countries they may have visited, and make fact sheets or booklets on geography-related topics of their own choosing. What a rich way to be exposed to our world!

Montessori Care of the Environment - Indoor Plants

Looking after indoor plants is a great way to introduce care of the environment activities to small children and toddlers. If you have indoor plants this is fantastic way to do at home. If you don't have any indoor plants perhaps it's time to pick up one or two for your child to care for and observe?

Indoor plants can be observed but also need watering, access to sunlight, often they need repotting, dusting, fertilising and care! I love to have a variety of indoor plants however even one indoor plant at the child's height can be of benefit.

A small watering can that the child can hold and walk with is useful. For a very young child a small pitcher near the plant might be easier. A cloth or sponge nearby might be needed for cleaning (or mopping up) small spills. A small spray bottle can be provided for misting plants (especially if in a terrarium) or for spraying leaves for dusting. Dusting or leaf polishing can be done with a soft brush, sponge, cloth, cotton wool or even with a purpose made wool duster. In one of the examples above a small glass bowl of water is provided for the child to moisten the cotton wool before dusting. Perhaps some small scissors can be provided if the plants have old leaves that need to be removed.

Giving the child responsibility for a plant is worth considering. An adult can supervise and help the child if the plant is being over watered, not watered enough or if it needs to be moved for more sunlight. An older child can make observations across seasons and be involved in planting, repotting or potentially propagating. I love visiting the plant nursery and this is a really fun place to take children - perhaps they can pick out a plant of their own!

The Montessori Way of Learning Math and Geometry

In conventional school, the study of geometry is taught only with pencil and paper. It thus becomes sadly disconnected from real objects. What a shame when circles, triangles and all manners of quadrilaterals surround us everywhere as we go about our lives.

A key Montessori insight is that we can serve the development of the mathematical mind by giving sensorial experiences first, and only later moving to abstract symbols on paper. A child who is allowed to explore with real mathematical objects at an early age stands a good chance of becoming a real math lover later in life.

Math and geometry are presented and treated in the same way as art, building with blocks, music, gardening, and all other subjects. Thus, in this spirit of joyful exploration, we marvel at the wonder of the 5 year old child who observes a rectangle in his classroom and then notices that its shadow becomes a parallelogram. Or the 3 year old who realises he can make triangles with his roti dough or scissors. Or indeed the 7 year old who tries his hardest to construct a circle using a combination of small sticks (straight lines), not yet understanding that it will take an infinite number of them!

Benefits of Matryoshka Doll in Montessori Learning

Matryoshka Doll - An Important Montessori material

The first Russian nested doll ("matryoshka") set was carved in 1890 by a couple of Russian craftsmen; today they can be found across the world, including in Montessori environments. We love our Indian version of the original Russian matryoshka dolls!

What do these dolls have to do with Montessori, you may ask?

Initially, young children love the surprise of opening these beautiful dolls to find another inside. Soon they begin working to undo and put together the dolls in the right order. Nesting materials like these dolls help children understand spatial relationships, develop fine-motor coordination, build the language of comparison (big, bigger, small, smaller), as well as prepositions (inside, outside, under). These dolls also give children the opportunity to concretely experience the concept of a whole object that contains individual parts that are nestled within.

Learning new words during Elementary years

In the elementary years, when children are reading fluently, it is quite common that they come across words that are new to them. In some cases, the meaning can be deciphered from the context (a fantastic cognitive exercise!); in others, a set of dictionaries come in very handy. Along with helping children understand the meaning of new words, the presence of the dictionary ensures that they can become fully independent in their reading, without resorting to asking the adult each time.

Further, this is the age when etymology (the study of word origins) becomes fascinating to children. Along with the usual dictionaries, we highly recommend having a book of word origins handy. Etymology and word study provides an excellent basis for learning to spell, and contributes to understanding the history of different cultures. Imagine the amount of history and geography one can learn from stories of how words, people and places were named!

LOOKING AT THE WORLD THROUGH THE MONTESSORI METHOD

My reflections on how Montessori education charted the course for my life.

By Daya Ambirajan

Independence is a quality that has been important to me ever since childhood. I like to do things and decide things by myself, without being told what to do by external forces. Throughout my life, my process of learning has reflected this — in both my hobbies and academic career, most of my learning has been done independently. I enjoy tinkering with things in order to figure them out — literally, in the case of my hobbies including guitar and crochet, and figuratively, in the case of mathematics. I like to take my own time to figure out for myself where I need improvement, rather than have someone spoon feed the answer to me. 

I attribute this quality to the Montessori system. Rather than explaining concepts outright (like in a traditional classroom), the Montessori teacher acts as a facilitator. They enable the child to seek out learning on their own, through materials placed in the classroom. I spent my early schooling years in the early 2000s in a Montessori environment, so I have experienced this firsthand.

The Montessori system allows children to pick and choose their own activities under a framework laid out by the teacher. Within this framework, they can choose the activity, as well as where and with whom they would like to work. In my preschool years, I chose to spend my first two years of school solely building my vocabulary and learning language. I only spent the last six months working on mathematics in order to catch up with basic concepts. While this may look like a discrepancy in my learning, my knowledge of math did not suffer. In fact, I did well in the subject throughout school. 

This ability to understand my own needs has aided me in making important decisions to this day. I used a process of elimination to choose my stream in the 11th standard, and again to choose my undergraduate degree — I first ruled out the subjects that I did not desire to take, and this was only possible because I understood my own strengths and weaknesses. 

Another quality that my preschool years have instilled in me is that of focus. The ‘three-hour work cycle’ within the Montessori method is the idea that children should be left uninterrupted for three hours at a time, free to pick up any activity they want to do. In my Montessori days, I would pour liquids from one container to another for hours on end, so much so that my classmate wrote his very own report card for me about my methods of pouring. This activity is not a traditional form of education by any means. However, it gave me the space to concentrate for a long time on something I enjoyed. 

This ability to choose something I enjoyed as a hobby and focus on it for long periods of time has helped me throughout my life. When I was in the 11th standard, I crocheted around a hundred items for a stall in a local sale. This is a feat that would not have been possible without the ability to stick to the project and complete every item that I had planned to make for the sale. So, Montessori education not only helped me to identify that crochet is something I enjoy, but also to sit with it till a project is complete to my satisfaction. 

Montessori taught me that everything should be considered as work — right from the cleaning and maintenance of space. It has taught me to break down whole processes into parts, and to acknowledge and dedicate time to every part. Thus, it has enabled me to take activities such as cleaning, maintenance and organization into account when planning. It has also enabled me to see the whole picture of any project I take on, and all the tasks that are required to complete it.

Montessori education helps children learn using the world around them, rather than from a textbook. Our teacher, for instance, used the word ‘sharing’ in order to teach children the concept of division in math. While in many instances, division is a purely theoretical concept, connecting it to the real-world idea of sharing helps children ground what they learn in class to the real world. Personally, I was so struck by the idea of division essentially meaning to share something equally among several parties that as a small child, I made a valentine’s day card with division signs on it. 

The Montessori idea of concrete-to-abstract, that is, using a concrete prop (such as the idea of people to share with) to explain an abstract concept like division is a technique beneficial throughout life. It has helped me with my high school and college classes as well, especially those to do with social sciences. In preschool, we were always taught abstract concepts using observation (i.e., what we could personally see). With these tools in hand, all I had to do to understand concepts in social science was look around me. Marxist concepts such as class conflict and hegemony were readily available to me just by looking at the people around me and how they interacted with others. Thus, Montessori has given me the ability to see concepts in social science as more than words in a textbook, and as actual observations of people interacting.

So, as a Montessori-educated individual, I can confidently say that the driving principles of my early education and the tools that it has given me still help me to this day. The method of teaching and learning has left me with a broader understanding of the world and how to navigate it than a more traditional kind of schooling would have. It has taught me independence, given me the ability to solve problems and come up with solutions, and it has taught me to truly understand the mechanics of the world around me.

Art is more than Drawing

Art is a way of approaching life, of moving and speaking, of decorating home and school and oneself, of selecting toys and books, It cannot be separated from other elements of life. We cannot "teach" a child to be an artist, but as Dr. Montessori says, we can help him develop:

An eye that sees

A hand that obeys

A soul that feels

It is important that we do not provide adult-made models, coloring books or sheets, or prepared "color-in" papers. Never show a child how to draw or paint something - like a flower or a house; the child will often simply repeat and repeat what you have shown. Famous artists like Paul Klee and Pablo Picasso worked for many years to achieve the originality, spontaneity, and childlike qualities that our children all possess naturally.

The best we can do for our children is to prepare a beautiful environment, provide the best materials, and get out of the way!

Problem Solving Skills, The Montessori Way

How do children get better at problem-solving?

The Montessori answer is this — children improve their problem-solving skills by continually having opportunities to independently solve real-life problems that pose just the right level of challenge. If the challenge is too easy, they get bored; if it is too hard, they become frustrated and give up.

Getting kids to assemble DIY furniture independently is a great way to promote problem-solving in small, collaborative groups! It is not trivial to do, and certainly not too hard.

In this exercise, children had to figure out how all the constituent parts of their newly purchased document cabinets, file holders and shelves fitted together. No help other than the (scanty) printed directions!

In 90 minutes, it was all perfectly done. A wonderful way to spend a morning, and certainly better than having adults do it for them!

Five Ways Pets Support Montessori Learning

When observing children as part of her early childhood education research, Dr. Montessori noticed that children gain immense satisfaction from caring for living things.

Having your child take care of family pets can be a way of bringing the Montessori philosophy into your home. It develops a number of skills along with many positive character traits, which helps in the development of the “whole child.

Five Ways Pets Support Montessori Learning

1. When caring for pets, children learn how to express love, empathy, compassion and respect for other living things. This is part of Cosmic Education – a cornerstone of the Montessori Philosophy, which teaches the interconnectedness of all things.

2. Having pets to care for helps students learn responsibility and gain self-confidence. Whether remembering to feed the pet on time or clean after it, children enjoy taking care of their little friends while learning how to be responsible and empowered.

3. Learning grace and courtesy in the way they treat animals helps children extend those concepts to their interactions with others. Kids get to practice using gentle touches with animals by petting them softly and treating them respectfully.

4. Ability to understand and properly interpret a non-verbal language is a special skill – and pets offer a great opportunity to master it. For example, when playing together with the pet, a teacher might tell the student: “That sound the bunny is making is him asking for space. Let’s give him some room to feel safe.”

5. Having an animal at home or in the classroom allows children to develop the skills they’ll need when studying science and other school subjects in the future. For example, students get to observe the animal’s habits, grow in curiosity, ask questions, look for clues, make hypotheses and find answers.

A Look at Montessori Practical Life:

What is Practical Life?

Practical Life plays a very important role at PEP Schoolv2.  Montessori practical life materials are the first activities a child is introduced to at PEP. One of the reasons for this is because Montessori practical life lessons and the related Montessori practical life activities help support early skill building as well as a child’s desire to be self-sufficient. Montessori practical life skills are those that are based on activities that a child sees around them every day and that adults tend to perform with ease. In this post we share some Montessori practical life ideas with you.

Montessori Practical Life Activities and Montessori Practical Life Materials

Have you ever wondered why your child is fascinated with how you fold the towels, set the table, or mop the floor? Children, like all human beings, want to communicate with others, to do important work, and contribute to society.

This desire is particularly strong in young children as they develop the mental and physical skills to stand, walk, use their hands, and participate in real work.

To capture this interest, and direct it purposefully, Dr Maria Montessori developed Practical Life exercises. These activities help children to understand, and participate in their world, while also assisting them in developing the inner building blocks of their person during the critical first six years of life.

Areas of Practical Life

Within the Montessori Curriculum, activities of Practical Life revolve around five key areas, including: Preliminary Exercises, Care of Self, Care for the Environment, Grace and Courtesy, and Control of Movement.

In the Preliminary Exercises, children learn the basic movements of all societies, such as pouring, folding and carrying.

Care of Self incorporates activities connected with personal care and the maintenance involved in everyday life, such as washing hands, and getting dressed.

Care for the Environment is focused on teaching children how to interact with their environment in a way that exhibits love and respect. Typical activities include: watering a plant, washing a table, and arranging flowers.

Through Grace and Courtesy exercises children learn the skills associated with social interactions. Key activities include greetings, introducing oneself, and how to appropriately interrupt others.

Control of Movement is focused on teaching children to refine and coordinate control of their bodies through activities such as Walking on the Line and The Silence Game. 

Building The Reading Habit In Children

In the Montessori curriculum, we use stories to introduce ideas, teach new concepts, and to reinforce or extend lessons.

The change in our brains when we listen to a story versus a lecture composed of facts and figures is dramatic. When listening to a story versus a list of facts, a child uses additional parts of her brain and is able to connect emotionally with the characters. The child also builds a stronger emotional bond with the storyteller.

On top of that, listeners of a story deepen their capacity for empathy and grow their attention span. Every one of these results in what Montessori education hopes to instil in children.

As a parent, you have a natural advantage over the school: you know your child in a way an educator can never do. From the very beginning of life, your child has learned many things from you simply by imitation. In the same vein, you can help prepare her for reading in the same way.

Simply put, your child will want to read and write if she sees that you enjoy reading and writing. It won’t matter what it is that you like reading: newspapers, magazines, light fiction, poetry or serious non-fiction; it only matters that she sees you having a good time while reading it! The other most important factor in helping your child on the journey towards reading is to read to her whenever you can.

Here are some tips on promoting the reading habit at home:

1. It is very important that your child can access books independently. When your child is very young, have a small shelf at her own height so that she is able to choose books for herself when she wants to read. If you don’t have room for a shelf, prop some books on the floor up against the wall, making sure the front cover of each book is visible -- remember that it is impossible for children to choose books when they can only see the spine!

2. Let the number of books available for the child to directly access at any time be limited (this applies to toys too!). Keep changing the selection of books accessible from time to time.

3. Read aloud as often as you possibly can to your child, and at-least once a day. It is possible that reading together is the only shared activity in a day for busy, working parents and it can help create a special bond between you and your child. Physical contact is often vital and it is important that both of you must be able to look at the book at the same time.

4. Ensure that you have shown your child how to handle books -- we often forget that this is a skill in itself. Show your child how to gently turn the pages of a book, how to carry a book, and how to put a book back on the shelf after reading.

5. Because children enjoy the same book over and over again, it is very likely that they are going to ask you to repeat them for many consecutive days! Choice (of the book) & repetition are critical needs for children less than six, and It is important to follow these needs (even if it may be boring for you!)

6. You will end up reading certain books many times -- however, do not be tempted to paraphrase a book just because you are anxious to get to the end! Remember that children very quickly remember the story, and it will be disconcerting to them.

7. To clarify expectations, be clear before you begin how much you are going to read (as a daily practice). With small children, the appropriate stories tend to be quite short and you can decide together whether you read one or two. Once you are reading books with chapters, you will have to agree on the number of chapters you will read per night.

8. Over time, as you settle into the daily reading practice, look at the printed words on the page and ask your child open-ended questions about what she thinks might happen next, and what she believes the characters might be thinking. This will encourage her to give active attention to the story, and active participation of this kind has been shown to have a good effect on reading ability in young children.

9. Remember that all such reading must happen on physical books! (Not tablets, phones or any other reading devices). Children gain a lot from the physical sensations a book offers: the size of the book, the smell, the type and texture of paper, the richness of the illustrations and so on. It is clear that some books make a deeper impression on children than others, and in part, this can be due to the fact that more senses have been aroused by these books than just the ear and the eye.

When your child begins to go off by herself and chooses a book, handles it gently, gets comfortable and starts to look through it in a world of her own, you will know that you have succeeded! Building the inner motivation to read books is the first step; the actual act of reading the printed word will easily follow.

[Adapted from Lynne Lawrence, “Montessori Read & Write: A Parents’ Guide to Literacy”]

Control the urge to intervene

Observe how carefully this 22-month old child is trying to string beads together.

Of all our many responsibilities towards children in school, perhaps the greatest one is to develop and protect their sense of concentration. Very often, this is achieved by controlling our adult urge to interfere in their work, and allowing them to correct their own mistakes.

While this is easy to say, it is very hard to do even for trained and experienced Montessori teachers. We have to keep reminding ourselves that struggle is good, that the young child learns best when struggle leads to discovery.

To help foster the child's concentration and independence, Dr Maria Montessori had her own advice for teachers (and parents!):

"I suggested to some teachers that they should wear a belt with beads attached. Then every time they have an impulse to interfere, they would draw a bead along. This is very useful, because when we have an impulse, we must act, and the reaction with the bead is a help. From day to day, one would make observations upon oneself in this way until one came to the point of not having to draw any more beads. We should then find that we had acquired a great calm and sense of repose. Perhaps we should have become transformed within. At any rate, we should have learnt the following: that almost all these impulses to action are unnecessary."

Fantasy & Reality in Montessori

An immediate difference most people notice between conventional kindergartens and Montessori environments is the absence of fantasy in Montessori.

When young children are building their own models of the world based on their formative experiences, is it fair to offer them things that are inconsistent with reality? Rather than providing children with amusing but fake tools, we prefer to offer them the real thing (real mops, brooms, knives, glasses, and so on).

However, this does not mean that Montessori children are discouraged from pretend play. Very often, children enjoy experimenting in different ways: both inside the environment (with the real tools of practical life), and outdoors (with that all-time favourite - sand). But this natural inclination to pretend should not be mistaken for a love of fantasy. Dr Montessori believed that children revealed their unmet desires during pretend play -- no wonder then that children love "making" yummy food in the sand pit!

Movement and Cognitive Development

Nearly a century ago, Maria Montessori pointed out that it was a grave error to think of purposeful movement as something different from the higher functions of the mind. Recent research now shows that movement and cognitive development are indeed closely related.

As Montessori educators, we recognise that children have an need to engage in movement. Purposeful movement is at the center of the Montessori approach to early childhood education, as it confers emotional, intellectual and physical benefits.

If you watch a Montessori environment closely, you will see coordinated movement is everywhere: be it carrying materials carefully, balancing on narrow beams, or carrying and moving chairs without any noise.

As children spend time in a Montessori school, they learn to coordinate their body and place it under the ready control of their mind.