Montessori students going out

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We hear it all the time. Most any time Montessori teachers are out on a field trip, “going out” as Dr. Montessori termed it, invariably a docent, or tour guide, or waiter will comment on the deportment of our students. A few years back, I was with the Juniors, early adolescents, touring the Smithsonian Museum of American History in Washington, DC, and a group of restoration experts working on an early flag. We saw their nearly-completed work, the Star-Spangled Banner repaired and cleaned, laid out behind smoky glass. We snaked through the display that included many supporting displays and historic pieces. As the last of us moved past the docent, she called the teachers back. “Excuse me, but where is this group from”? We told her who we were. “Well, I have to tell you, I have NEVER in all my years, had a school group as well-behaved and engaged as what I just saw from your group, and I’ve been doing this for a l-o-n-g time.” I relate this story not as news, but as an example of the kind of response Montessori students elicit when they’re out and about. But it was a later occurrence, in the same museum, where the nascent adults showed not just an interest in content, but in humanity. 

A docent at an exhibit on Working Women spent 10 minutes or so giving further information on the displays that surrounded us. As the class thanked her and moved away, the Junior eighth-grade girls paused to thank her personally. She was obviously very pleased by this. But the next questions almost moved her to tears. Our students wanted to know: “How did she, personally, get her start at the Smithsonian? How long had she been working here? It must be a wonderful job…” As the woman proudly displayed her Forty Years of Service Pin to an awed group of teenagers she smiled a little sheepishly and said that she almost didn’t make it due to a broken hip. “Well, I hope you’re able to keep on doing this for a long, long time.” Our teens congratulated her even more heartily and as they were strolling away wished her many more wonderful years at the museum. The exchange was longer than I am relating, and was heartfelt. We have no doubt that in all her wonderful years, this sincere, interested group must have made quite an impression. showing an interest in who she was, not just the material she was covering. This deeper understanding of an experience, this comprehension of the whole, this awareness of the connection to others, this empathy as an expression of full interest, is one of the many intangibles we are gifted to observe. We hear it all the time. It never gets old.

supporting montessori at home

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A common question among “Montessori parents”, is how they can best support their children’s education at home. While the scope of this question can fill books (just click on links at the end of this article), there are a few general outlines that any parent can follow at home. As a parent and teacher, I’ve always found that good parenting and good teaching constantly overlap. Common sense rules at home and in the classroom. A strong component of any Montessori classroom is the support it gives towards a child’s independence. From a Toddler putting on their shoes, a Primary child making snack, an Elementary child checking their own math problems, to a Junior student running their own business, our classrooms encourage the child’s efforts towards autonomy. There are several ways of introducing this element at home. To support a child dressing themselves, easily accessed crates (one for socks, one for shirts, etc….) allows the child to choose their own outfit. While you may cringe at some of the combinations they come up with, the lesson is well worth it. Similar efforts can be made to allow the child to get their own snack, make their own lunch, or choose want they want for breakfast (for instance, pictures of pancakes, cereal, etc… can be put in envelopes marked by day).

The Practical Life shelves in a 3-6 classroom hold buttoning and zippering frames, pouring and pincer grip activities, and food preparation. The tools used are child-sized, but not toys, and allow the child to do the same types of work they see their parents or older siblings perform. For the home, similar tools can be purchased or adapted (for instance, sawing off some of the handle end of a rake). And finally, employing an element of choice in your parenting will dovetail nicely with their work at school. While the child relies on you to set the parameters for their behavior and safety, giving the child freedom within structure is an excellent vehicle for development.

As enrollment in Montessori schools has risen, so has the veritable cottage industry that supports Montessori in the home. The following are links to several books that may help further your interest:

”Montessori from the start: The Child at Home, from Birth to Age Three” by Paula Polk Lilliard

“Teach Me to Do It Myself: Montessori Activities for You and Your Child” by Mija Pitamic

“How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way” by Tim Seldin

“Teaching Montessori in the Home” by Elizabeth Hainstock

can kindness be taught

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One positive aspect of the social media explosion is the ease of staying in touch it affords. Alumni and their parents share their post-Cornerstone experiences more freely, because it’s just a click/send away. For some of our past students, Cornerstone represents twelve years of their life, building a sense of ownership and home that is not forgotten by a mere change of address. In short, we get letters. This came in from a parent, a forwarding of an email they had received from a high school teacher of a Cornerstone graduate: “I just wanted to let you know your son ended the semester with one of the only A+ with Honors I have ever given. On that note, while I know you know how talented he is, I want to throw in my 2 cents that he should take as many AP classes as possible next year. I have tried hard to keep him challenged in my class, but he is so far beyond other students that I don’t think regular classes are the place for him.” Truthfully, this is not uncommon for our graduates, but the parent highlighted the second part of the teacher’s email as being more meaningful: “The other thing I think is great about your son is that even though he finishes his work easily he helps other students. There is one student in particular that sits next to him and she struggles every day. With the patience of a teacher he helps her ALL class. Sometimes I think she is going to wear on his patience but he just gently answers her questions.“ 

Can kindness, in fact, be taught? As Montessorians, we would answer, “No more than we ‘teach’ geography or arithmetic or science”. Rather, a Montessori school creates an environment, carves a space, maintains a culture that allows a natural process to take place. And while it isn’t quantified on any conference report, the grace and courtesy aspect of our curriculum is an integral component of the fabric of our classrooms. This serves, strongly, as the tapestry on which our lessons are woven. It is so present in fact, that a consistent comment I hear from prospective parents, even after a mere 20-minute observation, is the kindness they witness amongst our students, regardless of class level. Last week, after an especially moving observation, a parent sat with me in the hallway outside of the Junior Class, asking me the how’s and why’s of our school. They enthusiastically embraced the peacefulness and kindness they saw that morning. “Does that happen every day?”, she asked, perhaps a little suspicious. At that moment, Quetzal and Nicholas walked by, hand-in-hand. “Yeh, I said, “Pretty much.”

walking with great care

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Walking with great care, the young child brought the stamp game to the table, gently placed it down, and opened the lid. Smiling shyly at me, she carefully began laying out the first and second addends, in horizontal rows, one under the other, carefully aligning the thousands, hundreds, tens, and units by place value. A scene from any lower elementary classroom in the world. In this case, however, the school was Kiara Karitas, and it was located on the other side of the world from me, in Jakarta, Indonesia. The girl, Hee Youn, was a first-year student in their lower primary classroom. A few years back, the larger Montessori community of educators and parents and administrators and children celebrated the centennial anniversary of the first Montessori school. That milestone spoke to the lasting power of a profound pedagogy; one that has truly stood the test of time, allowing children to learn to their potential, to gain an insight to knowledge that is both integrated and internalized, and to develop loving hearts and inquiring minds. In my role as a school board member for my local district in southern Maine, where math curricula, literacy programs, and science textbooks shift with the vagaries of educational reform, I see firsthand the disadvantages of moving from one Newest Thing to the Next Newest Thing, and the expense and learning curve it requires for teachers and children alike. But what struck me in Jakarta (and Seoul, and Nashville, and Sarasota…) was how the span of Montessori not only reaches back 100 years, but also across the world. What does it say of an educational system, that it can speak so forcefully, with such profound results, to parents and children in schools from New Hampshire to California to Asia, Africa, Europe and beyond? What does it say about the Montessori method, that can unite so many schools in a common model, using the same Montessori materials and same prepared environments? What does it say about this worldwide and historical community of teachers, students, and families, who wear different clothes, write in different languages, give and receive lessons spoken in different tongues, but are united all the same? I wouldn’t have bothered to ask Hee Youn. She was too busy, and wouldn’t have cared. And frankly, my Bahasa is lousy.

the role of familiarity in a montessori classroom

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Many Montessori schools have the great benefit of a full complement of programs. Toddler students, as young as 18 months old, will stay at their school for as many as thirteen years before they graduate as 8th graders. A lesser few Montessori schools may even have programs for infants on one bookend and high school at the other. The familiarity with the building and grounds, the people, and certainly the pedagogy, is of great comfort to both children and their parents. But familiarity is also of great benefit in an educational sense. Piaget, himself the president of the Swedish
Montessori Society, did a well-known test called the “mountains study.” He put children in front of a simple plaster mountain range and then asked them to pick from four pictures the view that he, Piaget, from where he was sitting, would see. The test was initially used to show a child’s development in visual-spatial awareness, namely that children younger than age seven were egocentric and unable to see another’s viewpoint. However, a follow-up study using a scene familiar to children, the setting and characters from Sesame Street rather than the completely foreign Swiss Alps showed that the familiarity of setting had a dramatic effect on the child’s learning.

A Montessori environment makes use of this principle in a myriad of ways. A most visible example of this concept would be the “hierarchical colors.” In Early Childhood classrooms, for 3-6 year olds,, an arithmetic material introduces a mnemonic color-coding to place value. Units are green. Tens are blue. Hundreds are red. Thousands? They’re green, because thousands are still units; just units of thousands. These hierarchical colors are then used as a constant device as the child moves towards more complex and abstract math. The Stamp Game, for all four operations, utilizes wooden squares, “stamps”, to solve in all four operations. The bead- frame (for addition, subtraction, and multiplication), the checkerboard (multiplication), and the “racks and tubes” (division) all use the same identifying colors. The colors of the short and long chains, the colors that correspond to each part of speech, all serve as a conceptual grounding for the child, a link to the concrete experiences that preceded it, and a guide to further exploration. The material is new, the concept is more complex, but the familiarity of color (or shape, or timeline, etc..), isolates the difficulty, and frees the mind.

fast-forward, please

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Dad – I’m making a little baby box about Lyra’s birthday with some of her hospital stuff. I wanna include a paragraph from you about remembering when she was born or when you first met her. Skip the trauma part.

There’s a picture of a baby on the kitchen windowsill at my daughter’s house. It’s small and round and cropped in an outline of Lyra’s six-month-old face. Her eyes are scrunched closed. The photograph itself is attached to a popsicle stick, and this allows it to stand in a clay pot, sharing space with an aloe plant. It is just one of a couple dozen shots of Lyra, spanning her first year of life, still to be found, now over two years later, in odd spaces around their house. Lyra looking surprised, Lyra mid-laugh, Lyra in sunglasses. Lyra with a small teddy-bear bandage holding tiny oxygen tubes as small as new stems of grass, onto her blush cheek. There are no photos of the feeding tube, none showing the nickel-sized electrodes dominating her small chest, none taken at the NICU.

All of those photos, all of those Lyra-adorned cupcakes, had once been frosted and laid out on a fold-up table along with the other party food, the pizza and cookies and cake. The birthday cake had a single candle that day, marking a year, a tally of emotions that come with a first child, for Amarinda and Brendan, and a first grandchild for Sandi and me. Gathered that bright and lush September Saturday in Maine, which was bravely holding onto the last of that summer’s warmth, were Lyra’s uncles and aunts, cousins and friends, all there to celebrate an infant turned one. She sat on a dozen different laps, sampled most of the food, and was generally unaware of the fuss and festivities unfurling around her. Every first birthday party is for the adults after all, to see each other, to catch up, the how’s the new job and I can’t believe he’s almost a teenager conversations, and the common question of, “can it already have been a year since Lyra was born?”  And if there were thoughts of a year prior, when she arrived eight weeks ahead of expectation, well, those past emotions had healed and changed and grown right along with her.

If we had known, those first fraught hours and days of her life, that in twelve short months we’d be eating Lyra-cupcakes and helping her open the many birthday presents she received from us, her devoted legion, it would’ve been less scary. We could collectively have said, “Oh, THAT’s how this works out.” But life doesn’t work that way, does it. The Buddhists tell us to stay in the moment. To be mindful and dwell in the present. Be now. But in some cases, being able to glimpse just a whisper ahead, would be good for the soul.

Dedicated to Flor, who says I shouldn’t just write about Montessori.

i think i’m gonna like this

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A few summers ago, I was in Charleston, SC teaching Montessori philosophy, methods, and 6-9 (lower elementary) mathematics to a group of aspiring teachers. South Carolina had become a hotbed for Montessori those days, and it was expanding into public schools as rapidly as it was in the independent schools sector. In this particular group, there were both seasoned teachers in regular education, and 3-6 (primary) teachers, and one 9-12 (upper elementary) teacher, all spending a good chunk of their summer learning 6-9 (lower elementary) Montessori pedagogy. Near the end of the week, I was showing some “exponent and powers” lessons, and had a series of squares and cubes arrayed on a mat in front of me, the beauty of the mathematical patterns formed were clearly evident. The 3-6 year old teacher noted, “Those 10 cubes are the same sizes as the pink cube in a primary classroom”. The 9-12 year old teacher remarked, “In upper elementary we use it for cubing and volume work.” There was one of those great thoughtful pauses from the group, and one of the youngest of the cohort, just out of college, said softly, almost to herself, “Wow. I think I’m going to like this…”

the role of imitation in a montessori classroom

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Everyone knows that imitation is the sincerest form of flattery. While this may or may not be true, it is certain that imitation is also a powerful learning tool. Studies abound illustrating the human tendency to mimic, both consciously and subconsciously. Participants watching a video featuring rude exchanges between actors are liable to be rude themselves when put in social situations immediately afterwards. It is clear that as a species our behavior profoundly influenced by the people that surround us, and this can impact both our actions and our learning.

How does this manifest itself in a Montessori environment? One clear component is the multi-age classroom itself, an aspect that holds many advantages for students, parents, and teachers. Children enjoy the security and comfort of staying in one room for three years. Parents don’t have to reintroduce their child’s strengths and challenges to new teachers each September; knowing his or her teachers will gain a deeper understanding of a child’s needs given a three-year cycle. For teachers, the variety of ages and developmental stages in the same classroom allows children to move more freely through a scope and sequence of study, as the so-called “shotgun” approach, requisite to a single-aged classroom, is not necessary.

As important as these elements are, Montessorians have known all along that there are also clear pedagogical advantages to a multi-age classroom and the opportunities it affords to use imitation as a tool for learning. Younger students watch older students, hear the language of the lesson given on the next rug over, observe the use of more complex learning materials, and mirror their behavior. This is why we often hear Montessori teachers emphasize to these older students their role as models and peer teachers. And, of course, the teachers

themselves give lessons in such a way, with great care and exaggerated movements, as to stress key elements in any given lesson. For example, the forty-seven steps to washing your hands. We can see how Montessori’s use of the phrase, “the absorbent mind” reflects her understanding of the importance of imitation.

the role of interest in a montessori classroom

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Most adults observing a Cornerstone classroom are quick to notice its strengths. The use of manipulative materials, the small group lessons, the beauty of the prepared environment, the freedom of movement, all form an impressive tableau. A more in-depth observation would also clearly reveal the integration of subject areas, the social interaction, and the element of choice. Within that structure, students move with purpose (most of the time) and ease, seemingly without adult compulsion. Children voluntarily seek out activity, come to lessons willingly and happily, work with peers of their own accord, and, with guidance, take responsibility for their education. The structure for this drive does not come from a draconian adult or some other extrinsic force. Instead, the children appear to have an intrinsic urgency to act upon the environment. Why?

A crucial aspect of any Montessori classroom is perhaps less discernible due to its conspicuousness. The driving force in the child’s interaction and progression through the curriculum is deep interest. It is the tree that can’t be seen for the Montessori forest. This passion is created through creative and impressionistic lessons, the presentation of grand concepts, the use of large numbers, the emphasis on the power of imagination, and the liberty to choose a compelling activity for one’s self. More than a natural incentive, interest further serves as a powerful tool for learning. Studies clearly show that we are much more likely to assimilate information if it holds strong interest. One such study had participants list a series articles in terms of their interest. Not surprisingly, comprehension scores on these readings mirrored the ranking given. Areas of higher interest naturally hold our attention, heighten our focus, and compel us to iteration and practice. Consequently, the learning that takes place is more meaningful, more profoundly held, more deeply understood, more logically connected and synthesized.

And need we mention joy? So, at the end of the day (the metaphorical day, not 3 o’clock dismissal), it is the child’s likely response that speaks volumes in its simplicity. “Why do you like going to school?” “It’s fun.”

learning in context in a montessori classroom

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A Montessori education provides a rich and integrated curriculum that stresses learning in context. The study of geometry includes a study of its Latin roots, a study of unlike denominators in arithmetic includes the writing of the rule, a study of an ancient civilization coincides with a study of rivers, ph studies evolves into soil testing. Specific Montessori materials can also reflect this sense of context. For example, the Detective Triangle Game, located on the language shelf, consists of a box of triangles of different types (scalene, isosceles, etc…) in different colors and of different size. Labels accompany the work: “Find the large, red, equilateral triangle.”…etc; geometry as a grammar work. Speaking more broadly, the concept of Cosmic Education, unique to this pedagogy, is the overarching theme of a Montessori classroom. It holds the fabric of a Montessori experience together and places everything the child learns in context. Cosmic education states, grandly, that a human developmental process underlies all growth, and further, that education has a role to play in this development. It is a belief that theoretical structures, in all areas of study, should find practical use within our classrooms. Simply put, Cosmic Education presents three concepts; that all things are interdependent; that humans have a role in the universe; and that each of us has a cosmic task.

One aim of Cosmic Education is the development of the whole human being. It would follow then that academic achievement is not the only goal of a Montessori classroom. The child will realize their full natural potential, learning that involves the physical and emotional being, not only the intellect. A second aim is the formation of relationships. By building a sense of marvel and respect for the vast scale of things and appreciating the dignity of all things, we show a relationship between the child and the universe. A third aim is the realization of responsibility, to all life, to the human species, and to the child themselves. And a last aim is one of independent action. In broad terms to take, but to give in return, to share willingly and with compassion, and to appreciate both the conscious and unconscious service of those plants, animals and humans that have come before us. Cosmic Education then, is not a singular area of study, but rather a connective web that unifies the curriculum, providing both respect and responsibility to the child throughout their school years.