My children go to a Montessori school. There are a lot of comments I hear people make about Montessori education that aren't particularly accurate. People have heard things fairly extreme, such as children do whatever they want and that all the teaching is done by older (and apparently indentured) students.
Montessori is a little difficult to easily define. All the certified Montessori teachers I know have said the same thin. But I can tell you this: the classrooms aren't out of control and the children don't get do "whatever they want to." But there is a basis in those statements; it's just gone a bit awry. I think one of the best phrases I've ever heard to describe a Montessori classroom environment is that the children have, "freedom with responsibility."
Yes, they can choose their own work. But that work must be work they've been given a lesson in. That might mean the work is too advanced for them and they're not yet ready for it. It also demonstrates control as a child must request to be introduced to a new activity. Part of that responsibility as they get older is a balanced education, which means you can't avoid math just because you don't like it. Each student makes a lesson plan with their teacher that covers all curricular needs for the child. The child can then choose their work for the day, but their work selections across a week would need to balance out.
And what about children teaching other children? Yes, children do that. But that's no different than what happens in your back yard. My daughter knows how to do the most death-defying moves on our trapeze bar on the play structure. She has learned how to do this because an older child, Keira, showed her how.
Montessori classrooms are mixed ages about over a three-year span. Children like to help and many times an older child will offer to help a younger child with some activity or work. I asked my daughter's teacher if there had been issues getting the new shoes on we'd sent in the week prior. I knew they were a challenge for my child. The teacher said, "I haven't seen any problems, but it's very common for an older child to step in and help a younger one if they see that child's having a difficult time.
From a lesson standpoint, other children can give lessons as well. Let me interject here that a "lesson" is something you are given by someone that helps you understand how to do a particular "work." For instance, I might give you a lesson on how to fold an origami duck. You would listen to my words, follow my instructions and I would make sure I gave you help if you needed it and answered any questions you might have. That's the basis of a lesson.
We give lessons all the time at home here, such as "would you like me to give you a lesson on how to get toilet paper off the roll?" This turned out to be an important lesson, because without that lesson (and the expectations it set) there was a lot of unnecessary unrolling of bathroom tissue. My children knew all about lessons, immediately stopped and got ready to "learn something new." They now know how to select a reasonable amount of tissue and how to tear it off. (Sometimes we have to have remedial lessons on this point, but hey, unrolling a roll of tissue is kind of fun, I agree.)
Back to the student's teaching students thing though. So what if a child wants to learn something they don't know how to do? The teachers are busy at the moment but there is a five-year-old who very much wants to show a three-year-old how to use the safety glasses, vice and saw. This is exciting for the older child. And sometimes, the younger child understands another child better than they do an adult.
So there is freedom in the classroom, but it's responsible freedom. I think about my life as an adult and I can draw a parallel. I have the freedom to get in my car and drive anywhere I want. However, I use that freedom responsibly by following all the traffic rules.
This is not at all what I planned on writing about today. I had a whole topic in mind but I wrote the first paragraph and then I spent all the above talking about the educational environment I see my children thriving in—an environment we try to extend into our lives at home. My post was meant to be about something I saw that don't fit into that mentality.
So should I just end the post and finish this tomorrow? Hrm, the kids are quiet upstairs and I don't hear my husband asking, "when you're finished I need to get some work done at the computer if you're available to watch the children." So with that said, I'll go on to my initially intended topic.
My daughter and I attend a gymnastics class with my neighbor and her daughter on Saturdays. It's fun, you spend time following your child around and helping them through whatever the teacher is asking them to do. Some of the children are too shy to go out in the gym alone without a parent in tow so at this age it's a parent/child class. The class starts with fifteen minutes of jumping into the foam pit which is where the teacher is sitting. He throws blocks of foam at the children to entice them to jump in...which they love.
Next we "warm up" by sitting in a circle doing little things like sitting "criss-cross apple sauce." (We called it "Indian style" in my day but apparently that's out now.) They do leg straddles, touch their toes, roll backwards. do butterfly flaps and donkey kicks among other things. The teacher is a big man with a delightful personality for children. He can make any child smile. He can correct a child in such a way that to the child as well as to the parent he's not correcting them, but doing more of a "here's how you do it" thing. That's fairly important too, because these children have both attention span, timidness and lack of bodily control to contend with.
There is, however, an air of a "structured activity" going on. When he says sit criss-cross apple sauce, you're suppose to be sitting that way. If you're not, then you're doing it wrong. There was one mother that told her child if he didn't do it exactly the way the teacher told him to do it, she was going to pull him out of the class. This child wasn't even three-years-old.
That's when I got the "freedom with responsibility" thing going off in my head. Does it matter if my daughter is sitting quietly and listening to the teacher on her knees instead? What if she's touching her toes, but doesn't have her legs straddled? And don't get me wrong here, this is not the most highly-compliant age we're dealing with. These children have challenges doing the things the teacher is requesting in general, which is why we do them every week because they're still learning.
It was just a vibe I got on Saturday that made me glad my children are getting the education they are. There is value in differences. There is also value in structure. But there seems to be a good balance in knowing the importance and place of each at their school.
The Big Boy Update: Projectile vomiting. My son may have gotten into a peanut. I'm not sure if it was that or something else, but he did the most amazing vomiting to get it out of his stomach. His stomach was full and he was trying so badly not to make a mess. He was very sweet afterwards. I told him it was all right.
The Tiny Girl Chronicles: My daughter has two words that are making me laugh of late. She has a "Nin-Gin Turtle" jacket instead of a Ninja Turtle jacket. And then this afternoon she found a baby and the baby had a little pacifier that stuck in its mouth. She use to call them, "fas-sires" but since she hasn't had one in a long time she remembered the word as "fas-supp-eyer".
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