What is a montessori school

[New Dawn]

Ok I have seen this school mentioned a few time is different threads and was wondering what it was....

We are moving state again soon so thought if it sounded good I might look into going to one when we move schools, As DS isnt doing so well in the " normal " school system...

So if someone could inlighten me I would be very greatful....

Plus is there one in the sunny coast area?

[Arimeh]

Tali - yes there is one in Buderim on the Sunny Coast - DS is going to the toddler room there.

They are a very different school than the other schools, focusing more on the way of life, and being independent and doing things for themselves, and learning about things like nature, animals, stuff like that - plus all the academic stuff.

I know more about the younger kids stuff than the older kids stuff - but they do have a website that tells you more.

Try googling it

ETA - I got this from Wikipedia for you:-

Philosophy

[edit] Introduction to the methodology in practice
With the opening of Montessori's first school in 1907 in Rome, her surname became associated with schools that used her educational approach to children as well as her educational materials tailored to children's developmental needs. Many schools throughout the world implement her approach to education for a wide range of ages.

"From the moment the child enters the classroom, each step in his education is seen as a progressive building block, ultimately forming the whole person, in the emergence from childhood to adult. All focus is on the needs of the child."[6]

One distinguishing feature of Montessori at the preschool age is that children direct their own learning, choosing among the sections of a well structured and stocked classroom, including Practical Life (fine and gross motor skills), Sensorial (senses and brain), Language, Mathematics, Geography, Science, and Art. The role of a teacher is to introduce children to materials and then remain a "silent presence"[7] in the classroom.


[edit] Concepts
The Montessori philosophy is built upon the idea that children develop and think differently from adults; that they are not merely "adults in small bodies". Dr. Montessori advocated children's rights, children working to develop themselves into adults, and that these developments would lead to world peace. The Montessori method discourages traditional measurements of achievement (grades, tests) under the premise that it is damaging to the inner growth of children (and adults). Feedback and qualitative analysis of a child's performance does exist but is usually provided in the form of a list of skills, activities and critical points, and sometimes a narrative of the child's achievements, strengths and weaknesses, with emphasis on the improvement of those weaknesses.


[edit] Premises
The premises of a Montessori approach to teaching and learning include the following:

That children are capable of self-directed learning.
That it is critically important for the teacher to be an "observer" of the child instead of a lecturer. This observation of the child interacting with his or her environment is the basis for the ongoing presentation of new material and avenues of learning. Presentation of subsequent exercises for skill development and information accumulation are based on the teacher's observation that the child has mastered the current exercise(s).
That there are numerous "sensitive periods" of development (periods of a few months or even weeks), during which a child's mind is particularly open to learning specific skills or knowledge such as crawling, sitting, walking, talking, reading, counting, and various levels of social interaction. These skills are learned effortlessly and joyfully. Learning one of these skills outside of its corresponding sensitive period is certainly possible, but always difficult and frustrating.
That children have an "absorbent mind" from birth to around age 6, possessing limitless motivation to achieve competence within their environment and to perfect skills and understandings. This phenomenon is characterized by the young child's capacity for repetition of activities within sensitive period categories, such as exhaustive babbling as language practice leading to language competence.
That children are masters of their school room environment, which has been specifically prepared for them to be academic, comfortable, and to encourage independence by giving them the tools and responsibility to manage its upkeep.
That children learn through discovery, so didactic materials with a control for error are used. Through the use of these materials, which are specific to Montessori schools (for example, sets of letters, blocks and science experiments) children learn to correct their own mistakes instead of relying on a teacher to give them the correct answer.
That children most often learn alone during periods of intense concentration. During these self-chosen and spontaneous periods, the child is not to be interrupted by the teacher.
That the hand is intimately connected to the developing brain in children. Children must actually touch the shapes, letters, temperatures, etc. that they are learning about--not just watch a teacher or TV screen tell them about these discoveries.

[edit] Implementation
Montessori is a highly hands-on approach to learning. It encourages children to develop their observation skills by doing many types of activities. These activities include use of the five senses, kinetic movement, spatial refinement, small and large motor skill coordination, and concrete knowledge that leads to later abstraction.


[edit] Classrooms
Montessori classrooms provide an atmosphere that is pleasant and attractive to allow children to learn at their own pace and interact with others in a natural and peaceful environment. In the ideal classroom, children would have unfettered access to the outdoors, but this is frequently not possible given modern day space considerations (and cost thereof).

In response, Montessori teachers stock their classrooms with nature shelves, living plants and small pets, or perhaps a window sill garden, allowing children to experience as much of the natural world as possible given modern constraints.

In the elementary, middle, and upper school years, Montessori schools ideally adhere to the three-year age range of pupils to encourage an interactive social and learning environment. This system allows flexibility in learning pace and allowing older children to become teachers by sharing what they have learned.


[edit] Areas of the Classroom
In the Montessori Curriculum, there are 6 overall areas:


[edit] Practical Life
This area is designed to help students develop a care for themselves, the environment, and each other. In the Primary years (3-6), children learn how to do things from pouring and scooping, using various kitchen utensils, washing dishes, shining objects, scrubbing tables, and cleaning up. They also learn how to dress themselves, tie their shoes, wash their hands, and other various self-care needs. They learn these through a wide variety of materials and activities. While caring for yourself and your environment is an important part of Montessori Practical Life education in these years, it also prepares the child for so much more. The activities build a child's concentration as well as being designed in many cases to prepare the child for writing. For the first three years of life, children absorb a sense of order in their environment. They learn how to act a certain way naturally by absorbing it. These ages, from 3-6, the children are learning how to both build their own order and discover, understand, and refine the order they already know. So it's typical for you to see a child spend a half hour working on one practical life activity with a strong concentration and attention to detail. Language preparation comes in many forms in the practical life area. In many languages, the setup is from left to right, top to bottom, in horizontal lines as much as possible to prepare the child for reading and writing. (Many countries, such as those that read and write Chinese, may adapt this to fit the way they write and read). Many of the fine motor skills being used involve a pencil grip and help the child develop that grip to be able to later use a pencil more easily.

Practical life in the elementary years and high school years involves many of the same skills, but also begins to take a bigger drive towards community service oriented activities.


[edit] Sensorial
All learning first comes to us through the senses. By isolating something that is being taught, the child can more easily focus on it. For example, colors are not taught by having the child think of everything that is blue - blue jeans, the sky, icebergs, a picture of a blue cartoon elephant hanging on a wall. Colors are taught with the color tablets. The color tablets are all exactly the same except for one thing - their color in the middle. This helps take away the confusion for the child and helps them to focus on specifically what blue is.

Exact phrasing of terms is important. An oval is not an "egg shape." A sphere is not a "ball." The Montessori method places great emphasis on using the correct terminology for what we see. This is readily apparent in the sensorial area.

The sensorial area also falls over into the math area quite regularly. The red rods in the sensorial area are a direct link to the segmented rods in math that teach 1-10. The pink tower has a connection to units and thousands that the child learns later in the 3-6 curriculum. Even the trinomial cube will be used in the elementary years to figure out complex mathematical formulas.


[edit] Cultural
This includes both the studies of the world and various cultures. Montessori children come out of a 3-6 environment not only understanding the concept of a continent, country, and state, but also the names of many countries around the world. Montessori uses colored maps to help the children remember continents, countries, and states.

More importantly, the goal is to get an understanding that there are various cultures and these cultures have a lot to offer us. When a student is doing the map of Asia, pictures, stories, facts about different Asian countries, and a variety of learning opportunities open up to give the child a real sense of the world and how it is different - even within the same area.

For the elementary years, a very in-depth cultural curriculum is implemented. Children begin to learn about the capital states and begin learning about governments. A focus on appreciating and enjoying other cultures is also a core part of the curriculum. A child may even take his interest in geography and expand it to a wide range of learning opportunities in other areas. For example, a child may decide to study the history of his city which might begin with early settlers. People may have settled in that area because it was near a river. This information may lead the child to include, in his study, the different natural life around the river and how that may have helped the early settlers. The growth rate of the area in different time periods may also be included and presented in the form of a graph. In one cultural lesson, the child therefore may include math, science, history, and geography in one study. This is just an example, but the possibilities of what a child takes interest in are endless. The teacher is there as a guide to help draw in different aspects for the child to look into and research, rather than having to be the source of all the information.


[edit] Science
Children at the early childhood age are very detail-oriented. They know what a bird is. Now they want to know the various body parts of a bird. They want to know the life cycle of different animals. They begin to really look at the parts of a plant and wonder, "What are those long things coming out of the middle of a flower?" The science curriculum takes the opportunity for the child's natural questioning and draws a curriculum for the 3-6 age range.


[edit] Language
The language curriculum in 3-6 involves everything from vocabulary development to writing to reading. Children learn their basic letter sounds through the use of sandpaper letters, where the letters are cut from sandpaper and glued to a wooden board. As the child traces the letter, they get a real image for how the letter feels. They can also feel if a mistake was made because of the different feel of the sandpaper from the board. They begin making words before they can read words with the moveable alphabet, a large box of cut out letters made from wood or plastic that the child can arrange on his or her rug.

A focus on grammar, story writing, and reports are in the elementary years. Grammar is taught with very hands-on materials. In a 6-9 classroom, the child learns about nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, and interjections. In the 9-12 classroom, a focus is also placed on learning gerunds, abstract nouns, and other more advanced grammar concepts.

An appreciation for literature is another strong point in the Montessori elementary curriculum.


[edit] Math
Children go from a very concrete understanding of math to a more abstract concept. For example, the difference between 1, 10, 100, and 1000 because they have felt it countless times. They felt it originally in the pink tower when they were 3 years old and later in the math materials. The idea of squares and cubes becomes concrete because of the use of the Montessori Bead Cabinet.

As stated above, the sensorial leads into the math area very well. A child who attended a 3-6 Montessori classroom will have likely worked with a material called the trinomial cube. After working with it in 3-6 for several years, then in a 6-9 classroom extensively, the student may be ready to take on another phase of the material. Rather than working with it as a sensorial material, by matching up colors and shapes, a 9 year old might be ready to use it to understand that: (a+b+c)? = a?+3a?b+3a?c+b?+3ab?+3b?c+c?+3ac?+3bc?+6abc

The child can then work out the math equation to figure out the cube of a+b+c with different variables. This is just one example of how sensorial materials cross over into math.


[edit] Pedagogical materials
Every activity has its place in the classroom and is self-contained and self-correcting. The original didactic materials are specific in design, conforming to exact dimensions, and each activity is designed to focus on a single skill, concept, or exercise. All of the material is based on SI units of measurement (for instance, the Pink Tower is based on the 1 cm cube) which allows all the materials to work together and complement each other, as well as introduce the SI units through concrete example. In addition to this, material is intended for multiple uses at the primary level. For example, manipulative materials initially used to allow the child to analyze sense impressions are also designed to improve fine motor coordination needed for writing.

Other materials are often constructed by the teacher: felt storyboard characters, letter boxes (small containers of objects that all start with the same sound) for the language area, science materials (e.g. dinosaur models for tracing, etc.), scent or taste activities, and so on. The practical life area materials are almost always put together by the teacher. All activities must be neat, clean, attractive and preferably made of natural materials such as glass or wood, rather than plastic. Sponges, brooms, and dustpans are provided and mishaps, including broken glassware, are not punished but rather treated as an opportunity for the children to demonstrate responsibility by cleaning up after themselves.

At higher grade levels, the teacher becomes more involved in creating materials since not only the students' capacities but also the potential subjects widen considerably. Many of the earlier materials, moreover, can be revisited with a new explanation, emphasis, or use; for example, the cube that a five-year-old used as an exercise in color matching is revealed to the elementary level student to physically embody the mathematical relationship (a+b)?=a? + 3a?b + 3ab? +b?.


[edit] Lessons
A child does not engage in an activity until the teacher or another student has directly demonstrated its proper use, and then the child may use it as desired (limited only by individual imagination or the material's potentially dangerous qualities). Each activity leads directly to a new level of learning or to a concept. When a child actively learns, that child acquires the basis for later concepts. Additionally, repetition of activities is considered an integral part of this learning process, and children are allowed to repeat activities as often as they wish. If a child expresses boredom on account of this repetition, then the child is considered to be ready for the next level of learning.

Children are introduced to equipment that is designed especially for the lesson at hand. For example, children are introduced to sandpaper letters as the first step to reading. Sandpaper letters are simple lower case letters cut out of fine-grained sandpaper and mounted on wooden cards. Simple sounds that flow together are introduced first. In addition, children are taught the sounds of the letters, not the names. For example, the teacher would show the child the "K" sandpaper letter and say /k/ /k/. An emphasis is placed on the correct way to say the sound, so there is no "uh" added to the end of the sound. (Such as "Kuh" for the letter "k"). The child is encouraged to trace the letter as he or she says the sound aloud. Once the first letter is mastered, the child will be introduced to another.

When children have learned seven or eight letter sounds, they are introduced to the movable alphabet. The movable alphabet is a set of letter cutouts. The vowels and consonants are different colors. Using these letters, the child will learn how to blend CVC (consonant vowel consonant) sounds to form words such as "mat" and "cat."

Home schoolers may find both the philosophy and the materials useful since each child is treated as an individual and the activities are self-contained, self-correcting, and expandable.

Certain aspects of the Montessori Method can be scale down to a homeschooling environment such as:

Breaking tasks down into simpler components, isolating difficult parts, the emphasis on work (looks like play) within boundaries.
Clean, tidy and calm child friendly environments can be created and maintained.
Children self direction, responsibility to tidy up and respect people and things can be practiced.
Other aspects can't be replicated or would be difficult for most these include:

Obtaining the a broad range of high quality materials (which are expensive for most people).
The experience and knowledge of specialist experienced trained teachers.
Purposely built or adapted buildings.
The schools social environment:
Where children help and are helped by other children learning to care for and interact with each other.
Where children can see children who can do more as well children who can't do as much and in so doing gain an understanding of what they have achieved as well as what they could attempt.
Access to non-related adults.
For many presentations, a 3 step process is used in the lesson. This is called the "3 period lesson."

2 or 3 materials are selected from what the children are working with.

Period 1 consists of providing the child with the name of the material. In the case of letter sounds, the teacher will have the child trace the letter and say, "This is /k/. This is /m/." This provides the children with the name of what they are learning.

Period 2 is to help the child recognize the different objects. Most of the time with the three period lesson is in period 2. Some things the teacher might say are, "Point to /k/. Point to /m/." or "Give me /m/. Give me /k/." After spending some time in the 2nd period, the child may move on to period 3.

Period 3 involves checking to see if the child not only recognizes the name of the material, but is able to tell you what it is. The teacher will point to the "m" sandpaper letter and ask the student, "What is this?" If the child replies with, "mmmmmmmmmmmmmm," we know the child fully understands it.

Maria Montessori was very clear to point out that if the child does not go through the 3rd period, it is OK and the teacher must simply put the material away to try some other time. There is no pressure from the teacher to learn these things, just trust that the child will learn them eventually and they are not necessarily ready for that

[Aimz]

I HOPE we are somewhere near a Montessori school when our kids reach school age - I think they are FANTASTIC!!

I went to Rudolf Steiner in Primary School and it is very similar in terms of teaching methods and values. I loved it!

[New Dawn]

Thanks heaps for that Mel.... Now comes that hard part trying to tell BHL that this might be better for our children than "normal " school...

But I wonder if it would too hard for DS to go into this type of system after been in the other for so long....

ATM we have been told that he is only in the 4% for his age group... They tried to make out he is really quite stupid and that he needs to be explained thing over and over again before he will get them, I was told that he wont understand anymore than 3 instuctions at a time... and we need to explain what words mean even if he can read the word he want be able to understand what it means ( he read very well ) plus I am to ask and explain to him what are traffic lights are for and what a policeman where's a uniform for ect ect...


I did all this I when through 50 flash cards asked him what they said and what they meant he didnt get one wrong... Asked him what traffic lights were there for he got it right, asked about police he told me so we know who to go to if your lost or if your scared.... Asked him why they have sirons he told me so that when we are driving we know to move over so that they can pass as they are after a bad man.... Plus he even told me about why the firetruck and ambulance has them as well...

So I really am starting to wonder about " normal " schools... I know DS cant spell and therefore doesnt like to write... But I cant spell, and who likes to right stories when you cant spell the words you want to say... So of course you do the next best thing, Muck around....

Sorry this school makes me so mad....

[Indadhanu]

But I wonder if it would too hard for DS to go into this type of system after been in the other for so long

Tali, I think if your DS is not going that well in a traditional school then it would be easier for him to transition over IYKWIM. If he isn't thriving in a traditional school you'll probably see him jump straight into Montessori without any problems.

[Arimeh]

Yup tali I agree with leash on that one.

I think he would have no problems adapting to Montessori.

And I can tell you that the buderim one goes up to high school as well.

[Indadhanu]

Hi Tali,

Yep there is a Montessori in Buderim, and Noosa I think, and also Caboolture. The Buderim on is called Harmony (i think?) and goes from early childhood through to high school.

I think if you googled Montessori you'd find much more information than I could give you, my understanding is fairly basic (though there are mums on here who have kids attending a Montessori school who might be able to offer some insight), but my understanding is Montessori is a school based on the ideas of a woman called Maria Montessori. Her ideas are that childhood is firstly the most important educational time in a persons life, and secondly that children learn differently so some children need direction from a teacher, but others learn from experiences and doing rather than teacher-based learning, and it caters for all (though tends to focus on the later which is the opposite from traditional schools), and I quite like Montessori schooling as they tend to teach very holistically (ie. teaching about all religions and celebrations rather than a select few, teaching about different family structures instead of just mum-dad etc).

I hope this is right... thats what I believe Montessori to be? I'm sure theres so much more to it!

[*charmalea*]

oh wow i hope theres one near me , it sounds like what im looking for ... i was going to go for UNSCHOOLING as i find that its less pressure on the child , but i think Montessori sounds wonderful

[~Amy~]

i would say google it & have a read through some of the different sites about it. My dd has been going to a montessori daycare for almost 2 years & is thriving there. My ds started a couple of months ago & also loves it.
I would of had dd in the school by now, but unfortunatly the one on the gold coast had to close down. Luckily the centre she goes to allows children up to 6yrs, so she can start cycle 1 there. Hopefully by the time she is 6, another school will of opened up.
I really recomend it.
Another option is to find one in your area & go ask them if they could explain things to you. That way you can see what the rooms look like & get a real grasp of what goes on there. Im not sure if they do that, but couldnt hurt to ask..

Oh, i would say there would be a waiting list to get your ds in. Maybe call one up where you are intending on moving & find out

Anyhoo good luck with it all!