What is Montessori?

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What is Montessori and how can I implement the principles in my home? Now that my son is at a Montessori school and I am transitioning into a stay-at-home parent, I have been considering this a lot. Not as much WHAT Montessori is. I know the basics of the method from my days as an education major. But HOW can it benefit my child at home? How can I incorporate it into our lives?

In order to start looking into this, I really need to understand Montessori more thoroughly. I know the basic ideas and some of the common learning materials and methods, etc. but my goal was to understand Montessori at a deeper level so that I can use what I’ve learned in my parenting more than I already did.

The American Montessori Society has a lot of great information and resources for both parents and teachers who are interested in the Montessori Method. I have learned a lot from their page!

The structure and concepts of the Montessori Method that I have learned are all things that I find a lot of benefit in with how we raise our children at home. Most of what I found were things that I wanted in my home already!

Living Montessori: The Parent Perspective from American Montessori Society on Vimeo.

The Montessori Ideals

Montessori is a child-centered approach to learning as opposed to teacher-centered. It is not an environment where the teacher holds the knowledge and transfers it to the child by telling them and showing them. The teacher is there to provide guidance, scaffold activities, and monitor needs, but the child learns through discovery.

It centers around the idea that children are natural learners. Think about how your preschooler goes through their day! They are natural little scientists. They want to see why and how things happen. They experiment with their surroundings. They are constantly soaking up new words and knowledge. This is what Montessori is founded on-a child’s innate ability to learn. Montessori principles aim to foster that natural learning to encourage children to keep learning this way even into adulthood.

What makes a program considered Montessori?

Multi-age groups

So many people hear this and say, “How does that work? They’ll all be at different levels…” Well, this might be a real shocker for some people that, newsflash, my fourth-grade class had everyone at different levels. In fact, the reading levels that I was working with ranged from pre-primer to 8th grade…

In addition to the students being on multiple levels, they are at different ages and different development levels (within a 3-year range). When you really think about it, it is smart. Think of how your children at home learn from each other and help develop certain social skills. Your older child learns to encourage, understand when someone is struggling, and how to be patient. They become stronger in their skills from trying to help someone who is not as strong.

Your younger child learns, well, EVERYTHING from the older. The key is that they have someone that is similar to them to look to. They want to catch up to them and get to play with them and do all the things that older brother can do. They are just close enough to it that they stretch for it, too!

Uninterrupted blocks of work time

Children are given time to explore and work. The student is given the freedom to take their time to understand the task at hand. This also means that they are given the freedom to move onto another task that they need.

The independence that is fostered through this is so important. The children develop this independence as well as a stamina for work. My son has gotten much more willing to work at a task until it is finished because that is what his day looks like at school.

Freedom (within limits)

Many people hear the basic gist of Montessori and immediately think, “That doesn’t seem smart, you can’t just let the kids do whatever they want!” Well, you can when what they want is to learn… But really they aren’t just let loose in a room and told, “go learn!” They are given extremely detailed instructions and practice for EVERY task.

The way that the structure is set up, there are guidelines to how the child goes through their work. They are often given a specific part of the room (the room is divided by skills) that they are supposed to be focused on. Example, when the child is to be working on practical life skills in a preschool classroom, they have already been trained and are familiar with the materials for that. There are specific shelves they know they can take from and specific procedures for each material. Our school has a “no lesson, no touch” policy in their classes. The students quickly learn that until they are given the lesson for that particular item, they should just leave it.

They know exactly what they should do when they need to use the restroom or wash their hands. The teacher spent much time practicing these procedures with them so that they can do it on their own.

Order

I LOVE the absolute order that your find in a Montessori classroom. Everything has its place. Every task has its procedure. The children know where to get exactly what they need. They know exactly how it is supposed to be done. Many of you probably know that children feel safe when there are defined structures and routines in their day. This also allows the students to be independent. You don’t often see a student asking the teacher to do something for them or help them with a task because they have the confidence to do it. This goes along with the freedom mentioned earlier. They are able to have this freedom because of the strict order that was established first.

The Benefits

As you can see, all of the points that I have learned seem to be extremely beneficial for how children learn. Montessori focuses on the WHOLE child, physical, emotional, social, and cognitive. This is where the success comes. We can’t just focus on drilling facts or just focus on letter sounds as quickly as possible. A child has to know HOW to learn before they CAN learn. They have to feel safe and be able to navigate their world.

I am so happy that I chose to place my son in a Montessori setting, and I feel very fortunate to have a public Montessori school near enough to go to. I hope to learn more and start implementing more of this type of learning into our home life to encourage and foster his independence and growth!

Resource: The American Montessori Society. “Introduction to Montessori.” https://amshq.org/Montessori-Education/Introduction-to-Montessori 

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