Your child’s intelligence and social characteristics will be formed beginning at an early age. This is also when your child is most receptive, curious, and excited about exploring the world around him or her. A Montessori classroom nurtures that excitement and curiosity by offering a variety of materials to stimulate and intrigue your child. The Montessori Director is trained to recognise when your child is ready to learn a new skill, and to foster his or her natural instincts and abilities. Your child is valued as an independent thinker, and encouraged to make choices on his or her own. A Montessori education provides students of all ages, from birth to 18, with information in a way they can understand and enjoy. Learning is fun, empowering, and custom-fit to suit your child’s individual learning style.
Montessori children are free to choose within limits and have freedom to choose only what they can handle with responsibility. The Montessori director and assistants in the class ensure that the children are directed to appropriate work at their own developmental level and work at their own pace without interfering with the work of others.
The Montessori Approach is experiential and hands-on learning. Children work with specially designed materials before learning abstract, pencil and paper, methods. Children use a wide variety of books and many other resources but do not rely upon one textbook for information. Montessori children tend to do their own research rather than relying on one particular textbook. The use of a wide variety of books and multi-media resources help to build the child’s critical thinking skills.
By the end of age five, Montessori children are normally curious, self-confident learners who look forward to going to school. They are normally engaged, enthusiastic learners who honestly want to learn and who ask excellent questions. There is nothing inherent in Montessori that causes children to have a hard time if they are transferred to traditional schools. Some will be bored. Others may not understand why everyone in the class has to do the same thing at the same time. But most adapt to their new setting fairly quickly, making new friends, and succeeding within the definition of success understood in their new school. There will naturally be trade-offs if a Montessori child transfers to a traditional school. The curriculum in Montessori schools is often more enriched than that taught in other schools. The values and attitudes of the children and teachers may also be quite different. Learning will often be focused more on adult-assigned tasks done more by rote than with enthusiasm and understanding.
Montessori classrooms are strikingly different from traditional settings. The materials used to teach reading, writing, mathematics, geometry, geography, science, biology, music, and social studies are all unique to the Montessori classroom. Classroom materials developed for our youngest students, for example, take abstract ideas and put them in a concrete form that makes sense to their developing minds. Unlike other schools, your child will also share his/her Montessori classroom with older and younger students. This way, students learn from their peers, and respect their own and each other’s ability to be a teacher as well as a student. Finally, Directors observe their students, stepping in when they see a child needs assistance or ready to learn a new skill.
Yes, Montessori classrooms encourage deep learning of concepts working from the concrete to the abstract rather than just rote practice of abstract procedures. The child understands concepts through the three-dimensional materials he/she works with and moves to abstraction when the concepts are clear. The Montessori classroom also provides education in a wide variety of subject areas to give the child both breadth and depth in learning.
The arrangement of a Montessori classroom follows the differences found between Montessori and traditional education. The Montessori classroom is set up to show a child-centred approach where the teacher or director is not the focal point of the class, the children are. The children are not dependent open being fed the teacher’s knowledge but are given presentations and then explore the materials in the environment independently, discovering concepts for themselves. They are assisted by the director only when they need it and work at their own pace until they complete their work, thus building concentration skills.
Montessori is not opposed to competition; Dr. Montessori simply observed that competition is an ineffective tool to motivate children to learn and to work hard in school. Traditionally, schools challenge students to compete with one another for grades, class rankings, and special awards. In Montessori schools, students learn to collaborate with each other rather than mindlessly compete. Students discover their own innate abilities and develop a strong sense of independence, self-confidence, and self-discipline. In an atmosphere in which children learn at their own pace and compete only against themselves, they learn not to be afraid of making mistakes. They quickly find that few things in life come easily, and they can try again without fear of embarrassment. Dr. Montessori argued that for an education to touch children’s hearts and minds profoundly, students must be learning because they are curious and interested, not simply to earn the highest grade in the class.
