Listen to this piece by the BBC World Service – Witness about the revolutionary teaching method that started with the first Montessori nursery set up by Maria Montessori in Rome in 1907. The audio clip features interviews with Maria Montessori’s great granddaughter Carolina Montessori and also someone trained by Montessori herself. Witness is a radio programme by […]
“…we should be careful that the lure of the digital world doesn’t take away significant experiences that can have real impacts on children’s rapidly developing brains. Mastering handwriting, messy letters and all, is a way of making written language your own, in some profound ways.” Full Article
Barbara Kingsolver, American novelist, essayist and poet, talks about how Montessori education helped her children to develop perseverance. She says, “Raising children became mostly about enabling them and standing back and watching”. Read on here
Learning to write by hand has learning benefits that could be neglected if too much focus is put on keyboarding. Full Article Here
“..at this developmental stage children benefit from messing around with paints, or clay, or crayons; they gain little, on the other hand, from assembling together some construction paper shapes that their teachers cut out ahead of time.” Read article here
The development of the will is an essential part of the Montessori approach: “My second-born is strong-willed. That doesn’t mean he’s wrong or should be corrected to be obedient just for the sake of being obedient.” Article from Washington Post here
A very helpful article about transitions from the Children’s House to Montessori Elementary “To link transition to anything other than the child’s developmental characteristics, and to the child’s own decision to physically move to a new class, is to substitute the adult’s needs for those of the child.” More here
“Research by Kevin Rathunde of the University of Utah, conducted with Csikszentmihalyi, found that flow was higher in Montessori schools than in traditional schools because of the more flexible schedules of Montessori schools—students who are fully concentrating on a task are not interrupted as often.” Looks like Montessori ticks most of these boxes! Read more […]
It is normal for toddlers to test. We just need to find the right response. More on ‘toddler testing limbo’ here.
“A study finds that children who demonstrate more “pro-social” skills — those who share more and who are better listeners — are more likely to have jobs and stay out of trouble as young adults.” Article in npr.org