Independent Critical Thinking in the Children’s House

In the Children’s House (the Montessori Early Years Programme for 2½ to 6 year olds), children work with a variety of materials, and the ease of movement, along with the freedom of choice—what they would like to write, convey, or create—is clearly evident. This may take the form of a card, a sculpture of a mammal, or a detailed research project. Here’s a wonderful example of self-led research, something we see very often in the Children’s House.

The children had been learning about mammals and that sparked this child’s spontaneous interest in wanting to research and learn about giraffes in particular. He decided to make a giraffe out of paper mache at his after school art class and then at school, began exploring the parts of the giraffe, its habitat, and its characteristics. Later, he confidently shared these findings with a group of peers (both younger and older), and then extended his interest further by creating a detailed chart—painting the giraffe in its habitat and labelling its parts.

All of this unfolds in the Children’s House almost effortlessly, but it is often the result of carefully following the child—introducing ideas that may spark creative exploration, without defining what the outcome of that exploration should be.

The beauty of this approach is that one child may choose to investigate the mammal in depth, while another may simply explore painting a three-dimensional animal form. This kind of research integrates multiple areas of the curriculum, as seen in this child’s work. He engages with the sensorial (exploring the form of the animal), the written (expressing both creative and factual ideas), and the logical (organising his thoughts and research process). These are all fundamental building blocks for higher-order thinking.