One of our favorite activities at the school is gardening. We have kept plants in the curriculum as, among other things, a way to teach the children about growing food. As usual with Montessori, the best way is the hands-on way. Watch the edges of the playground and you will notice a series of box planters. Over the years these have yielded some wonderful classroom treats.
We have been in the early childhood education game for a long time. We have seen so many things in terms of words and actions from preschool aged children and confess we are rarely surprised any more at the variety of behaviors.
Joy is a reflection of living our values, and we would argue that finding it as parents is critical to our children's success in life. There are a number of things you can do to be joyful yourself as well as teaching your children to be the same way.
Self-esteem can be a mixed bag. When people move from a sense of justified pride earned by working their way through a task to being convinced of their own superiority with little to no justification, something has clearly gone awry. But there is a clear area where self-esteem is healthy and where, particularly in children, it can serve as an armor against all manner of negative influences. Building that positive self-esteem and thickening the armor starts early. As parents of preschool children, there is no time like the present.
Rather than the traditional public school approach of "sit down and shut up" (which has thankfully started to disappear in many places), we actually find it beneficial to take the attitude of "if it keeps them working and it isn't hurting anyone, then we don't care".
If you consider yourself a hands on learner, whether completely or even partially, we suspect you will be able to relate to why we love this aspect of child development. The playground presents an opportunity for societal learning and practiced citizenship in a hands on fashion. As individuals, children on the playground are presented with a number of scenarios that they must work through.
Entering first grade, children are confronted with social hierarchies and politics to navigate that are going to be, in some fashion, new to them. One of the advantages for children in childcare is that all of them have at least been in a group social situation by the time they move to elementary school. But mere attendance in a group environment does nothing to prepare a child for the transition.
Think back to childhood. Who did you look up to? Were there people in the media and entertainment that you looked up to and idolized? Sports stars? Actors? Pop singers? From a perspective of being worthwhile in your development, how did that work out? If you are like most people it probably didn't work out well.
Making positive memories with children is one of the great joys of parenting (and childcare). The first time you hear your grown children waxing eloquent about the wonderful time they had when you did something special as a pair or as a family is absolutely priceless. It is a concrete example that you as a parent handed something of value to your child
We are always looking for ways to be better parenting partners. This includes staff training, virtual coffee klatches, engagement with parenting and early childhood education organizations, research and good, old-fashioned conversations with you directly. But to date, being better/simpler business partners has been a bit of a challenge.
There are a few ideas that get floated about when it comes to children that make us cringe. Perhaps the worst of all of these ideas is the one that can be paraphrased as "that child did something 'bad', so they are a bad kid". When "that child" is our own, these labels can lead to feelings of guilt and even shame as a parent.
We know that more than a few of our parents were Montessori educated themselves, but for those who weren't we offer up our belief that it is never too late. Below are some suggestions for how we can all become Montessori adults.
ne of our favorite attributes of Montessori is the emphasis on freedom. Within our environment freedom focuses on numerous things, but we will look at four today. Freedom to choose the work they will do, the freedom to repeat work until it is mastered without respect to time, the freedom to move about the classroom, and the freedom to help others. When compared to a traditional classroom or even to daycare these concepts of freedom are quite radical.
Compassion, which differs from empathy, is defined as a consciousness of the distress and suffering of others that drives a sympathetic response to help alleviate it. There is a growing body of evidence that compassion is in many ways an innate instinct rather than a learned value and it appears in varying degrees depending on the person. We see this quite strongly in some children at school where they are immediately concerned if another child so much as groans in discomfort.
Courage is a moral strength. It allows us to move forward in the face of fear, challenges and even real danger. We say that those with courage are brave. But at times it seems that we limit the definition of what it means to be brave to a narrow band of seemingly heroic acts. Courage and bravery can seem relegated to warriors and superheroes. And this is a shame, because we see acts of courage every day at school that…
While she is remembered for the innovative and lasting education method that bears her name, Maria Montessori was much more. She was a physician, a scientist, a tireless activist for women's rights, and an advocate for peace. To Dr. Montessori, the hope for a true and lasting peace was tied up in the education of children. A moral education focused on a respect for diversity, citizenship and acceptance of personal responsibility was at the center of her hope for the future.
Honor means we possess the traits of honesty, fairness and integrity. These are high goals to be sure. They are truly challenging to exhibit consistently as we are all flawed human beings. But somewhere along the line striving to be honorable went from being required if you were to be admired to being seen by many as an impossibility and thus not even worth working toward. Cynicism not only crept in; it took over.
Joy is an emotion or a feeling - right? By definition it is an emotion of great delight or happiness or the expression of a glad feeling. So why include joy in a list of values that we seek to imbue the children with if it is in fact not a value? This is precisely the conversation my wife and I found ourselves in when revisiting how we do "Greystone House things" earlier this week.
Whether talking about our leaders and their responsibility to govern fairly and within the bounds of their defined power or of ourselves and our responsibility to accept the consequences of our actions and reactions, this concept separates adults from children and commoners from despots. But the thing is, there is no switch that flips.
Our series on values started with an overview. In that overview we mentioned we were adding in a new value and breaking off another. We felt that these new values were important enough to merit their own emphasis . Because we have already covered this week's value, self-reliance, we wanted to address one of our new values. This related value is leadership. In a standard classroom where chairs sit in a row and order is maintained by a central figurehead…
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