montessori-education

Montessori Education

From the standpoint of education Dr. Maria Montessori observed that there are critical periods for optimal learning in early childhood and the role of a Montessori teacher is to provide the support and create the environment that will reinforce the development process of the whole child. The process of engaging a child requires observations of what the child is attracted to and then building and expanding on that with the educational material. With freedom of choice, the child is engaged with an “absorbent mind” which creates the development of intellect. Through repetition a child reaches a level of mastery and develops self -esteem and self -confidence.

The Montessori method is an individualized approach to education. It encourages creativity, curiosity and leads children to ask questions, explore, investigate and think for themselves as they acquire skills.

A brief comment about Montessori Education

Over 100 years of experience have proved Maria Montessori’s early childhood theory
that a child can learn to read, write and calculate using specific Montessori materials.
Children will develop at their own pace and level of readiness and interest, where they
have the freedom to choose activities that correspond to their interests within a prepared
classroom environment. This dynamic environment is designed to facilitate children’s
learning, adapting to their interests and the changing seasons.

The Role of a Montessori Teacher

Instruction is characterized by meeting the learning needs of each child with specialized montessori learning materials to develop concentration, self motivation and organizational skills. The role of a certified teacher is to create an environment of calm, order and joy in the classroom. Certified teachers demonstrate how to use the montessori teaching materials and create individualized presentations of activities based on the child’s interest and observations.

“Education is the kindling of a flame, not filling of a vessel”  Socrates

The 5 main aspects of Montessori Education

Practical Life

The Montessori Practical Life curriculum offers numerous benefits for children by focusing on activities that mimic daily tasks. These activities help children develop:

Independence and Self-Sufficiency

Independence and Self-Sufficiency: By learning to care for themselves and their environment (e.g., dressing, pouring, cleaning), children gain confidence in their abilities and become less reliant on adults.

Concentration and Focus

Concentration and Focus: The sequential nature of Practical Life activities (e.g., spooning beans, folding cloths) requires sustained attention, thereby improving a child’s ability to concentrate for longer periods.

Coordination and Fine Motor Skills

Coordination and Fine Motor Skills: Activities like buttoning, zipping, and cutting enhance hand-eye coordination and strengthen the small muscles in the hands and fingers, which are crucial for writing and other fine motor tasks.

Order and Organization

Order and Organization: The structured presentation of materials and the methodical approach to completing tasks help children develop a sense of order, neatness, and the ability to follow a sequence of steps.

Problem-Solving Skills

Problem-Solving Skills: Encountering minor challenges within the activities (e.g., spilling water, difficulty with a clasp) encourages children to think critically and find solutions.

Self-Correction and Perseverance

Self-Correction and Perseverance: The design of Montessori materials often allows for self-correction, teaching children to identify and rectify their own mistakes, fostering persistence and a growth mindset.

Respect for Self, Others, and the Environment

Respect for Self, Others, and the Environment: Practical Life activities cultivate a sense of responsibility and care for materials and the shared learning space, promoting respect for their surroundings and the people within them.

Preparation for Academic Learning

Preparation for Academic Learning: The skills developed through Practical Life, such as concentration, fine motor control, and a sense of order, lay a strong foundation for more formal academic learning in areas like reading, writing, and mathematics.

Grace and Courtesy

Grace and Courtesy: Many Practical Life lessons also include explicit teaching of social skills, such as how to greet someone, offer help, or move carefully around others, promoting polite and respectful interactions.

Sensorial Montessori Curriculum

The Sensorial area in a Montessori environment is designed to help children refine their senses, allowing them to better perceive and understand the world around them. Through a carefully prepared set of materials, children develop discrimination, order, and concentration, which are foundational for later abstract thought and academic learning.

Core Principles:

  • Isolation of Qualities: Each material focuses on a single sensory quality (e.g., color, shape, texture, sound, weight).
  • Repetition and Refinement: Children are encouraged to repeat activities to deepen their understanding and refine their sensory perception.
  • Control of Error: Materials are designed so that the child can independently discover and correct their errors, fostering self-reliance.
  • Prepared Environment: The classroom is organized to allow for free movement and independent exploration of the materials.

Curriculum Areas and Materials:

  1. Visual Sense

  • Purpose: To develop visual discrimination of dimensions, color, and form.
  • Materials:
    • Solid Insets/Knobbed Cylinders: Discrimination of dimension (height, diameter).
    • Pink Tower: Discrimination of dimensions (size/volume).
    • Brown Stair: Discrimination of dimensions (width/thickness).
    • Red Rods: Discrimination of dimensions (length).
    • Color Boxes: (Box 1: Primary colors; Box 2: Secondary colors; Box 3: Graded shades) Discrimination of color.
    • Geometric Cabinet: Discrimination of plane shapes (circle, square, triangle, etc.).
    • Geometric Solids: Discrimination of 3D forms (sphere, cube, pyramid, etc.).
    • Constructive Triangles: Formation of new shapes from basic triangles.
    • Binomial and Trinomial Cubes: Introduction to algebraic concepts through visual patterns.

  1. Tactile Sense

  • Purpose: To develop discrimination of texture, temperature, and weight through touch.
  • Materials:
    • Touch Tablets/Fabric Box: Discrimination of textures (rough, smooth, silky, coarse).
    • Thermic Bottles/Tablets: Discrimination of temperature.
    • Baric Tablets: Discrimination of weight.
    • Stereognostic Bag/Box: Identification of objects by touch without sight.

III. Auditory Sense

  • Purpose: To develop discrimination of sound, pitch, and intensity.
  • Materials:
    • Sound Cylinders: Discrimination of varying sounds within paired cylinders.
    • Bells (Montessori Bells): Discrimination of musical pitch and scale.

  1. Olfactory Sense

  • Purpose: To develop the discrimination of smells.
  • Materials:
    • Smelling Bottles: Discrimination of various scents (e.g., spices, extracts).

  1. Gustatory Sense

  • Purpose: To develop discrimination of tastes.
  • Materials:
    • Tasting Bottles: Discrimination of basic tastes (sweet, sour, salty, bitter – used with caution and supervision).

  1. Combined Sensorial Activities

  • Purpose: To integrate multiple senses or refine complex discrimination.
  • Materials:
    • Blindfolds: Used with many sensorial materials to enhance other senses.
    • Silence Game: Developing auditory awareness and concentration.

Learning Outcomes:

Upon completion of the Sensorial curriculum, children will have:

  • Refined their senses, leading to increased awareness of their environment.
  • Developed skills in observation, discrimination, and classification.
  • Improved concentration and attention span.
  • Developed a foundation for mathematical concepts (e.g., dimension, geometry, patterning).
  • Enhanced fine motor skills and coordination.
  • Fostered a sense of order and logical thinking.
  • Built a strong foundation for future academic learning.

Presentation and Progression:

  • Materials are introduced individually and systematically, moving from simple to complex.
  • Children work at their own pace, repeating activities as needed.
  • The directress presents materials with minimal words, focusing on the movement and purpose of the activity.
  • Emphasis is on the process of exploration and discovery, rather than rote memorization.

This curriculum provides a framework for guiding children through the sensorial experiences that are fundamental to the Montessori approach, preparing them holistically for future learning.

Montessori Math

Montessori Math Materials are integral to our program, designed to ignite a child’s curiosity and cultivate a profound understanding of mathematical concepts through tactile, hands-on experiences. This carefully sequenced progression of materials guides children from foundational counting to advanced arithmetic, transitioning seamlessly from concrete manipulation to abstract comprehension. This approach empowers preschool children to confidently perform operations such as addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division, fostering progressive and natural learning.

 

Benefits of the Montessori Approach:

  • Holistic Development: The hands-on learning methodology strengthens neural pathways in the brain, significantly enhancing critical thinking skills and overall cognitive development.
  • Self-Paced Learning: This method enables children to advance at their own unique pace, ensuring a personalized and effective learning journey.
  • Fosters Concentration, Order, and Confidence: The materials promote active experimentation through a trial-and-error approach, allowing children to self-correct and confidently tackle complex problems.

Sample Math Materials (Not an exhaustive list):

Math Materials Description Purpose
Teen Boards Boards featuring numbers 11–19. To work with symbols and form quantities using number cards and beads.
Number Rods Wooden rods of varying lengths that visually represent numbers with red and blue bars, each corresponding to a fixed quantity. To represent quantities in units.
Bead Stair A set of colored beads, each representing numbers from 1 to 9. To facilitate understanding of quantities.
Dynamic Addition Utilizes both decimal bead bars and cubes alongside number symbols. To perform operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division.
Sandpaper Numbers Numbers crafted from sandpaper cards. For tactile number recognition, prepare children for writing numbers and introducing symbols that represent quantity.
Static Addition Employs colored tiles from the stamp game to represent numerals in units of ones, tens, hundreds, and thousands, replacing decimal beads, bars, and cubes. For static addition, reinforcing math operations within the decimal system at a higher level of abstraction.
Intro to Decimal System Golden Beads Beads in cube form, fixed. To introduce quantities of 1s, 10s, 100s, and 1000s.
Hundred Board A board with tiles numbered 1–100. For number sequencing and order.
Spindle Boxes Individual boxes from zero to nine in separate compartments. To associate quantities with number symbols and introduce the concept of zero.
Numbers and Counters Red counters and numerals. To associate quantities with symbols, introduce odd and even numbers, and practice skip counting.
Dot Game Utilizes graph paper with decimal units to solve math problems. To further understand addition within the decimal system at an abstract level.

Language

Within a rich and meticulously prepared environment, our educators craft experiences that empower children to master communication and literacy at their own pace. Montessori language materials include object matching, sequence cards, learning opposites, sandpaper letters, pictures, large movable alphabet sets, rhyme words learned through songs and stories, and writing exercises.

The Montessori Language Curriculum unfolds in three distinct stages:

Preparatory Stage (Phonetic Stage): This foundational stage introduces children to the sounds of letters through engaging circle time activities. Children are presented with a sandpaper letter and associated items (e.g., “dog” for the “d” sound) and/or the Montessori series of Pink cards and symbols. This establishes the groundwork for effective communication and the development of writing and reading skills. The Montessori Metal Insets are also utilized to help children refine their fine motor skills and perfect their pincer grasp.

 

Symbolic Stage: At this stage, children begin constructing CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words using the Pink series of Montessori words and the moveable alphabet, thereby cultivating a strong understanding of phonics. Children practice writing words in their journals, continuously refining their work. This is also the stage where children learn to read. Educators facilitate discussions through reading stories and provide dynamic exchanges to encourage engagement and participation, prompting children to share their ideas about the sequence of events and their comprehension of the plot. Children are also encouraged to express their creative thoughts by drawing a picture of a different ending or by creating a follow-up dramatic play.

 

Reading and Writing Stage: In this advanced stage, children learn to decode and encode unfamiliar words, including digraphs and phonograms. A digraph is a combination of two letters that produce a single sound blended to represent a different sound, such as /sh/ in the word “ship.” A phonogram is a combination of three or more letters that produce a single sound, such as /ough/ as in “tough.” Montessori materials used to practice these sounds are from the blue and green language series. Flashcards are utilized to learn sight words, which appear frequently in reading and writing and are not easily represented by graphics or remembered (e.g., “the,” “are,” “do,” “I,” “she,” “me,” “you,” “he,” “to”). A three-period lesson is employed to help children commit these words to memory.

Science/Culture/Art/Music

The Montessori Curriculum actively supports children in objectively understanding their world through the organized scientific method. We integrate children’s home cultures, which serve as a primary source of learning about their backgrounds, into our classrooms to explore similarities and differences. For example, if a student observes that a classmate’s father is wearing a turban and asks the teacher about it, the educator can utilize this into a narrative to introduce Sikh culture, exploring its origins and other cultures that wear turbans. This observation then becomes thoroughly integrated into the entire curriculum for an in-depth cultural study. In the Language Curriculum, conversational words that are spoken in the cultural language are introduced, including “hello,” “goodbye,” and “thank you”. In the Math and Language curriculum, children learn to count numbers from 1-5 in different languages. For music and dance, children are exposed to various types of music and costumes relevant to the culture or country being studied, including instruments from different places (e.g., a guitar and a sitar). Foods can also be introduced at picnics, such as roti compared to a loaf of bread, to discuss similarities, differences, and tastes. An appreciation of beauty and culture in a Montessori classroom exposes children to a variety of art media, artistic styles, cultures, and historical periods, allowing them to learn about the diversity of artistic expressions across cultures.

 

Some examples of materials include:

  • Geography
    • The sandpaper globe
    • Colored globe
    • Flags
    • Continent globe
    • Continent boxes
    • Land and water forms
    • World puzzle maps
    • Exploring life on the continents using nomenclature cards
    • Mapping
  • Life Sciences ( nomenclature cards and figurines)
    • Living/non-living things
    • Plants and Animals
    • Vertebrates and Invertebrates
    • 5 classes of animals
    • Botany cabinet
    • Skeletal system of our body
  • Science
    • Exploring magnetism
    • Exploring buoyancy
    • Density
    • Volume
    • Solutions and mixtures
    • Evaporation
    • Chemical reactions
    • Light and color.
  • Art

Children are encouraged to experiment with various materials to foster creativity, such as loose ends like popsicle sticks, googly eyes, paper plates and:

  • Liquid tempera paints
  • waterpaints
  • Crayons
  • Markers
  • Oil pastels
  • Pencil crayons
  • Playdough
  • Modeling clay
  • Sand
  • Glue
  • Construction paper

Google Founders  and Innovators who attribute their success to Montessori Education:

Link: https://www.diygenius.com/the-montessori-method-creating-innovators/

 A Montessori Morning

Education method is based on teachings of the Montessori Teachers College of Calgary.