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How do you develop social skills in preschool?

For many parents, “socialization” is one of the most important goals of sending their children to preschool. But what exactly do we mean by socialization? And what preschool environment helps children learn good social skills, rather than pick up bad ones?

As a parent, you are right to be concerned about socialization. There is evidence that the wrong preschool environment can actually be detrimental to social skill development, causing children to become stressed out by too much, too complex peer interaction.

It turns out that just exposing your child to interactions with peers in preschool is not a magic bullet to develop social skills. In fact, same-age peers, left to their own devices, are not good teachers. As Gwen Dewar, a biological anthropologist, explains:

You do need people to learn people skills. The question is–which people? Preschoolers need to learn empathy, … patience, emotional self-control, social etiquette, … and an upbeat, constructive attitude for dealing with social problems.

These lessons can’t be learned through peer contact alone. Preschools are populated with impulsive, socially incompetent little people who are prone to sudden fits of rage or despair. These little guys have difficulty controlling their emotions, and they are ignorant of the social niceties.

Yes, preschoolers can offer each other important social experiences. But their developmental status makes them unreliable as social tutors. A child who copies other children may pick up good habits–but she may also pick up bad ones.

Gwen Dewar

That’s why, in our view, helping a child develop social skills in preschool needs to be approached as thoughtfully and deliberately as teaching him reading or math. That’s why social skill development is purposefully integrated into every aspect of our Montessori preschool classrooms. It is woven into the fabric of what we do, from morning greeting routines to the rules for who can work with a material and when; from the way a preschool teacher models lunch-time manners to the way we guide students to sit attentively during circle time.

Developing strong social skills, to us, means appreciating the value other people bring to our lives, dealing with peers and adults fairly (both one-on-one and in group settings), developing the grace and courtesy skills necessary for mature interaction, and developing a basic benevolent attitude towards people.

For this newsletter, we want to highlight two specific areas of social skills learning which happen in our preschool classrooms, “Grace and Courtesy” skills, and social behavior in the classroom.

1. “Grace and Courtesy.”
  This Montessori term refers to a number of specific lessons, large and small, which we give to our preschool students to help them interact maturely and politely with each other and the adults in their world. Grace and Courtesy lessons cover more than just manners. They equip our young charges with the tools they need to grease the wheels of social interaction. We explicitly show preschool children how to interact through modeled lessons, as well as through our own general example, and we encourage children to practice these skills daily. For example:
  - Greeting someone–by shaking hands and saying “good morning,” while ensuring proper eye contact.
  - Requesting help constructively–by approaching a teacher, gently making her aware of one’s presence, then waiting patiently until she has completed her current task and is able to respond. Students apply the same lesson when asking more experienced peers for help. They also learn how to politely say “no” when they are asked for help and cannot (or may not want to) give help at that time.
  - Giving and receiving compliments–how to notice something well done or a nice behavior, and appropriately compliment the doer; how to graciously receive and respond to compliments.
  - Apologizing appropriately–learning to acknowledge a mistake or a slip in behavior, and to sincerely apologize and make amends to young friends and teachers.
  - Expressing emotions using words–from the toddler years onward, we teach our students to identify and name their emotions, so they can communicate and deal with their feelings without lashing out at others.
  - Table manners–from chewing with one’s mouth closed, to politely asking for seconds at snack time; from answering “yes, thank you” or “no, thank you” when offered a snack, to handling utensils appropriately: nothing that happens at snack or lunch time goes unobserved. Our teachers are constantly on the lookout for the opportunity to impart new skills to our students.
2. Social Behavior in the Classroom.Imagine the potential for chaos in a preschool classroom in which up to 24 young children work together simultaneously on numerous diverse activities, each child allowed substantial freedom of movement. This chaos simply does not exist in our Montessori preschool rooms. This is because preschool children learn to follow certain conventions and rules of conduct. Modeling these group and classroom behaviors is an important aspect of a teacher’s role, especially early in the school year. It is also a skill set that is essential to your child’s success, both in further schooling and in life. Whether it is a 7-year-old who needs to raise his hand in a group discussion in a classroom, or a 20-year-old who needs to know how to speak up appropriately during a work discussion, learning to interact maturely in a group setting is a critical life lesson.
  - Circle Time.
    While the majority of the work in a Montessori preschool classroom happens individually or in small groups, we incorporate some whole class activities, such as singing, joint read aloud and perhaps reviewing the calendar each day.During these group times, we teach our preschool students how to sit cross-legged in a circle with their hands in their laps, so everybody can see and hear the teacher, without being disrupted by a neighbor moving about. We show them how to actively watch a demonstration, and how to attentively listen to the words of others, so they can learn together. We show them how to raise their hands and wait to be called upon before speaking, showing their respect for their peers, and ensuring that they will be heard when it is their time to talk.
    
    While it may seem odd at first to see children follow such specific instructions, it is easiest for preschoolers to learn social rules in a simplified, straight-forward manner. Clear rules also make it easier to ensure that each child can participate: a shy child who might not speak up or find a voice in a free-for-all environment, will, over time, learn that he can speak up and will be heard in our carefully designed social environment.
  - Individual Work Time.
    During the bulk of our preschool day, children freely choose what to work on, and who to work with. All social interactions during these times are voluntary: no child is forced to play with others, to share a toy, or to help a peer. Instead, we set up clear rules to foster respectful, mature, genuinely inclusive interactions, rules which ensure each child’s work, personal space and autonomy are respected by his peers. For example:
    - A work need not be shared. In contrast to many preschools, where “sharing” may be a requirement, our approach is different. Once a child picks an activity from a shelf, he is free to work with it for as long as he wants. Another child may ask to join, and he is free to agree or, politely, decline this request. (If he declines inappropriately, he is gently encouraged to reconsider.) Only when the activity is placed back on its shelf may the next child take it. This clear rule, that only material that is on the shelves is available to be chosen, prevents much of the stress-inducing fighting over toys so typically seen in groups of young children–fighting that is absent from our preschool classrooms.
    - Work spaces must be respected. One of the first lessons our preschool students learn is to walk around the mats on the floor, where their friends have put out their work. We also show and remind our students to keep their hands to themselves, and not to touch another student’s body or activities without first asking for permission. This is an expression of respect, for the value of the work each child is doing, and for the general concept that a person’s personal space is not to be entered without permission.
    - Voices must be quiet, indoor voices. In our preschool classrooms, children are free to talk with each other during their work period. In fact, older preschool children often like to work with friends. To ensure everybody can work, we teach them to speak quietly, and to get up and move across the room, if they want to interact with somebody who is not right next to them, rather than calling to them.
    Because social interaction in a Montessori preschool classroom is voluntary, and because the children are encouraged to act toward each other with “grace and courtesy,” a Montessori preschool classroom is the embodiment of a benevolent and civilized social environment. Quoting Dr. Montessori:
    
    As visitors to the Children’s House have noted, [the children] seemed to be “little men” or as others have described them, “senators in session.”
    
    The children are so engrossed in their work that they never quarrel over the objects. If anyone does something extraordinary, he finds someone who will admire and be delighted with his work. No heart bleeds at the good of others; the success of each is the joy and wonder of the rest. And this often creates eager imitators. All seem to be happy and satisfied with doing what they can. The activities of others do not arouse their envy or painful rivalry.
    
    …A little child of three works peacefully alongside a boy of seven and is as contented with his own work as he is about the fact that he is shorter and does not have to envy the older boy’s height…
    
    All this might give the impression that these children are excessively repressed [but] for the fact that they are utterly lacking in timidity. Their bright eyes, gay and disarming countenances, and their readiness in inviting others to observe their work . . . make us realize we are in the presence of individuals who are masters of their own homes.
    
    Dr. Maria Montessori

It is this benevolent, positive interaction among happy individuals that we seek to foster in our Montessori preschool classrooms, and which we offer to your child, should you choose to enroll him at LePort.

How to lay the foundations of literacy in preschool

What differentiates a child that learns to read joyfully, becomes a voracious reader and succeeds academically, from one that struggles to read at grade level, and falls behind?

Decades of research provide a clear answer: for a child to become a reader, he needs three things (1) instruction in phonics, (2) a systematic way of building a store of “background knowledge” to help him make sense of what he reads, and (3) an early start to reading, definitely during his first six years before he enters Kindergarten.

Our preschool program at LePort provides your preschooler with all of these. We start pre-reading skills in our toddler program, and throughout make learning to read enjoyable for your child, so he will become a capable, eager reader by the time he graduates from the 3rd year in preschool/primary (the equivalent of traditional Kindergarten.)

What makes the Montessori approach to learning to read and write so effective? And why and how is it different from the way literacy is approached in other preschools and elementary schools? Here are five key highlights of what we do at LePort:

Teach “phonemic awareness” early and playfully. Research tells us that one fundamental difference between children who learn to read easily and those who don’t is that “the former can discern individual words in sentences and sounds within those words. … The ability to discern sound seems to reflect some basic difference in neurological wiring.” The good news is that these critical phonemic awareness skills can be taught. At LePort, toddlers play “sound games”, where the teacher guides them to isolate the “d” sound at the beginning of “dog.” Slightly older preschool students pick out an object from a tray based on its beginning sound. And preschool children as young as 3 or 3 ½ year old learn to associate these sounds with the corresponding letters, as they say the sounds while they look at and trace “Sandpaper Letters.” (This sound-focused approach is in sharp contrast to most preschool programs, which teach letter names, a la the ABC song, which do not help children learn to read!)
Break skills down into a careful sequence of steps. A key success factor for teaching preschool children is to make the process of learning rewarding. In our preschool classrooms, children have many opportunities to learn component skills of writing and reading through activities they enjoy. They learn to control a pencil as they create artwork by coloring in geometric shapes with the “Metal Insets.” They sit down on the floor and “build words” using the “Moveable Alphabet.” They take a box of small objects, and engage in independent reading, by decoding little labels and placing them next to a fan, a cup or a dog as they work with the “Phonetic Objects Box.” No worksheets here, no boring drills, no rewards or punishments; just joyous, child-chosen, purposeful learning!
Teach writing first, then watch for the “explosion into reading.” Writing is putting symbols together to form words, and it is a more natural process than reading, more akin to speaking, where we put sounds together to make words. That’s why, in Montessori preschool, students build words with small moveable letters, before they read. Then, usually between age 4 and 5, comes a moment of beauty, when the child discovers he can make sense of the black scribbles on paper: he “explodes into reading”, in a joyful, natural discovery of his own capabilities.
Immerse children in a language-rich environment. Study after study show that a strong vocabulary at age 3 or 4 is a predictor of reading success later on: “The three-year-old test subjects who had the highest rates of vocabulary growth turned into third graders with the strongest language skills and highest reading comprehension.” That’s why language development is everywhere in our classrooms: teachers read aloud to students daily, and students learn vocabulary in carefully structured “three period lessons” all over the classrooms, from colors to shapes, from naming dimensions, to learning the names of animals for toddlers, and the names for the parts of animals later on.
Guide children carefully from decoding to reading for meaning. English is a complex language: the 26 letters of the alphabet are used to represent 44 different sounds, which can be spelled with over 70 phonograms, or multi-letter combinations, such as “ck” or “oo” or “igh.” Because of this complexity, children need explicit instruction in deciphering the “advanced code”, as well as appealing, yet deliberately controlled reading materials that allow them to enjoy reading as they gain practice. That’s why our Montessori program offers many ways of practicing reading “phonogram words”. It’s also why we have recently invested tens of thousands of dollars in designing and implementing an outstanding reading program called Books to Remember to all of our primary classrooms, going much beyond what even other high-quality Montessori programs offer.

Does it work? Here’s what one LePort preschool parent says:

Every day at preschool is a learning process: my children are never bored. Early on, my daughter came home all excited about the sandpaper letters – and I didn’t even know what they were. But now, with the help of the sandpaper letters, my daughter writes in beautiful cursive: she writes all the birthday and thank you cards for the family, and she’s just 6 years old!

This summer, before my daughter started in 1st grade, she was reading the Wizard of Oz by herself. She would stumble over some of the big words, of course – but she read the whole book! And it’s not just that she reads, and how advanced she reads: it’s the way she reads, her clear pronunciation, the expressiveness of her reading: it’s almost perfect. And I think a lot of it is due to the Montessori Method: they learn the letter sounds, not the letter names. At first, I was concerned that she didn’t know that “A” is called “Aye”- but when they start reading, it really makes sense to just do the phonetic sounds. It’s hard to believe: my daughter is reading real books, fluently and with expression – and she just turned 6 in April!

Preschool Parent

The most exciting part of this, of course, is that it is also possible for your child.

Why Choose a Montessori Preschool

What if you could send your child to a preschool that follows methods which align with the latest, cutting-edge insights from neuroscience, and which have been proven for over 100 years, in thousands of preschools?

Such a combination is possible, and accessible to your child!

Authentic Montessori preschools, like LePort, educate your child in a carefully prepared environment, under the guidance of teachers trained to diligently follow the approach first developed by Dr. Maria Montessori over 100 years ago, based on her careful field study of how preschool children actually learn. Now, a century later, modern science is validating at a brain-cell level and in large-scale studies what Dr. Montessori observed as a field scientist over a century ago.

Unfortunately, Montessori is not widely known today, despite the compelling evidence that it works wonders for young children, and despite the fact that many famous people, such as Sergey Brin and Larry Page of Google, credit their Montessori education with helping them become the innovative, successful people they are.

Trevor Eissler, a jet pilot turned Montessori advocate and author of the book Montessori Madness! A Parent to Parent Argument for Montessori Education, describes how he discovered Montessori:

It just so happened that during the several months that my wife and I were discussing [preschool] options, a new friend of ours asked my wife if we had considered the Montessori school her daughter attended. We had not. Did we know anything about Montessori she asked? We did not. Had we heard of Montessori? Nope.

Trevor Eissler

You may be in a similar position, and we recommend the same next step Mr. Eissler took: come and observe in a Montessori preschool classroom. A Montessori preschool education is so revolutionary that you have to see it to believe it. Recalls Mr. Eissler:

I remember setting foot in that Montessori classroom. I sat down on a chair–a very, very small chair–near the door. I had just stepped into someone’s living room. Or was it a science laboratory? Or maybe an office building? I couldn’t put my finger on what exactly was different at first, but this was unlike any classroom I had ever seen. It felt different, too. Peaceful. Purposeful.

Trevor Eissler

Mr. Eissler’s book is an excellent introduction to the Montessori Method of preschool education. He gives a tour of all the aspects that make Montessori unique. In the end, when asked why he chose Montessori, he boils it down to a simple paragraph:

Inside a Montessori classroom, children are laying a foundation for a lifetime of self-fulfillment. They learn to choose a project, work on it to completion, and reap the internal rewards that come with newfound knowledge and a job well done. They are not doing work for the good of a political system, a nation state, or a parent; nor to increase the gross domestic product, compete with the Chinese, or get a good report card. The children are learning to control the entire creative, planning, productive and evaluative processes from start to finish. They are learning to be fulfillment junkies. […]

The snowball effect of self-fulfillment is a gift that keeps on giving. Children in Montessori schools experience this process repeatedly every day. The design of the educational method strengthens the natural bond between positive feelings and learning.

Trevor Eissler

Interested in learning more about Montessori preschool? Here are a few easy steps you can take:

Call us to set up a tour, if you haven’t already done so. If you are interested in spending some time observing in a preschool classroom, do let us know when you call, and we’d be happy to set that up for you, too.
Read more about the Montessori Method on our web site, where we explain the overall Montessori philosophy, and walk you through the main preschool classroom areas, from “Practical Life” to the “Sensorial Exercises”, from “Language” to “Mathematics” and “Cultural Subjects.”

We hope you are intrigued, and we look forward to answering your questions, and to hopefully welcoming your family to our Montessori preschool.

A Surprisingly Non-Academic Approach to Strong Academics

When parents tour our Montessori schools, we often hear questions about academics: when will my child read? How do you teach math? Will your program get my child ready for Kindergarten? In this competitive world, parents of toddlers are rightfully concerned with future academic success. And research supports this concern: children who start elementary school poorly prepared have a hard time catching up and diagnoses like ADHD have grown exponentially, even in the youngest students.

But does this mean you need to subject your toddler to programs like preschool prep or Baby Einstein, and enroll your preschooler in Kumon or similar preschool academics programs?

We think the questions and concerns about early academics are legitimate: a child’s experiences in his formative toddler and preschool years can have a significant impact on his future academic and life success. Poor preparation can, in fact, leave children behind, making it harder for them to achieve their full potential.

Montessori preschools do an exceptional job preparing children for academic success. Montessori children start their elementary career ready to flourish: most learn to read in our age 3-6 classroom, and solve arithmetic problems into the thousands. But the important point is how. Montessori children do not learn by drill-and-kill memorizing of flash cards, or repeatedly watching academic videos, or completing endless worksheets.

Montessori schools approach academics in a surprisingly non-academic way, laying strong foundations for self-motivated, successful learning as early as in the toddler program. Much of what we do is what Maria Montessori called indirect preparation: toddlers and younger preschool students engage joyfully in activities that impart a wide range of prerequisite skill which then, down the road at age 5 or 6, enable an almost explosive growth in academic achievement. Here are some examples of this indirect preparation for academics:

- The ability to concentrate. ADHD diagnoses have grown by over 5% per year in the past years; about 12% of all boys ages 5-17 have at some point in time been diagnosed with ADHD, which can severely impact a child’s ability to function in life and in school. While there is no consensus on what causes the disorder, ADHD symptoms include an inability to sustain focus on a task for extended periods of time. Treatment often includes programs that help children learn better executive function skills. Learning to concentrate on an activity, to immerse oneself fully in a chosen task, is one of the most important goals for a child who enters a Montessori preschool or toddler class. In Dr. Montessori’s words, “The first essential for the child’s development is concentration. The child who concentrates is immensely happy.” When your child joins the Montessori toddler program, we offer him activities that appeal to him, and then give him the freedom to work with a chosen activity for as long as he likes. In this environment, even 18-month old children regularly focus for 10, 15, even 20 minutes on one task. As your child progresses through the Montessori preschool sequence of activities, he’ll tackle increasingly more challenging, longer tasks. It’s not at all unusual for a 5-year-old Montessori child to spend an entire 3-hour work period engaged in one chosen task, such as tracing, coloring and labeling a map of Africa, for example.
- Developing executive function skills. A recent article in the New York Times explored the question of what really drives life success. One surprising discovery: being able to set goals, to self-motivate, to make mistakes, learn from them, and persevere in the face of challenges may well be more important than scores on academics or intelligence tests. Unfortunately, those are skills rarely taught, not in school and not in most preschool programs. Montessori is different. As early as the toddler program, Montessori children choose their own activities. However, there’s usually only on of each activity, so children learn to patiently wait their turn (no adult-enforced sharing happens in Montessori classrooms.) Children are free to make mistakes—indeed, Montessori encourages us to “become friendly with error.” Further, it’s usually the activity itself that shows them their mistake—water spills, a porcelain plate breaks, a tower doesn’t stand—and the children learn to pay attention to mistakes and learn from them (as against avoiding them for fear of being criticized by a teacher.) And as tasks get longer and more challenging, students learn to keep at it, often working on the same projects for several days at a time, not because a teacher instructed them to, but because they chose to do so. This internal discipline is precisely what life success requires, and what Montessori teaches so beautifully!

The discipline that we are looking for is active. We do not believe that one is disciplined only when he is artificially made as silent as a mute and as motionless as a paralytic. Such a one is not disciplined but annihilated. We claim that an individual is disciplined when he is the master of himself and when he can, as a consequence, control himself when he must follow a rule of life. Dr. Maria Montessori, in The Discovery of the Child

- Strong motor skills. Handwriting is an important skill a child needs to master to succeed in elementary school and beyond. Children who cannot write well often under-achieve against their potential. Motor skills (and several other skills, such as visual-perceptual skills) are supremely important in learning to write. Montessori toddler and preschool purposefully develops these foundational gross and fine motor skills. Scrubbing a table or cleaning the blackboard strengthens shoulder and arm muscles. Peeling an egg, scooping beans, pouring water from a small pitcher, making orange juice, squeezing a sponge: these all strengthen wrist muscles and control. A series of activities, from the Knobbed Cylinders to the Metal Insets, from pinning activities to puzzle maps, help children strengthen their fingers and develop a proper pincer grip for later pencil use.
- Oral language skills. A strong vocabulary and elaborate language is an important predictor of future success in literacy tasks. The Montessori toddler program builds these skills systematically. Children learn much vocabulary with matching object/card sets. Our highly educated Montessori teachers consistently use elaborate (age-appropriate) language. They may say things like “Sarah, I notice your pants are wet. They must feel very damp and uncomfortable on your skin. Shall we go and find you some dry, cozy pants to change into?” rather than “Oh, you had an accident. Time to change!” Of course, we read many stories, sing songs, and discuss daily events with each other. We also introduce toddlers beginning phonemic awareness skills: a teacher may hold up small objects, like a cat, a pan, and a mop, and have children identify the beginning sounds.

Earned self-confidence. In today’s age, many people talk about fostering children’s self-esteem. All too often, that means lavishing praise upon toddlers for every action they take. Unfortunately, research has shown that empty praise not only fails to foster real self-confidence, it in fact can inculcate an anti-effort mindset. In Montessori, we don’t play this game. We are convinced that self-confidence must be earned by real personal achievements, resulting from sustained effort. That’s why we present lessons step-by-step, and set our students up to explore, practice, and earn mastery. When they do succeed, we don’t offer empty praise. Instead, we help them appreciate their real-world achievement by offering up what Montessori calls a point of interest: “Notice how when you put the cup down slowly, without making a sound, the water stayed in it”, or “See how straight the mat stands in the basket when you roll it tightly?” When this is repeated frequently, over a child’s years in the Montessori toddler, preschool and elementary school programs, children learn that with effort, they can master tasks. They come to enjoy the struggle to master tasks, and don’t fear the natural failures that are part of the learning process.
Self-esteem doesn’t contribute much to success. But success contributes mightily to self-esteem. Kids have to “do” something, and do it well, to get a self-esteem boost. Madeline Levine, PhD, in Teach Your Children Well

Just imagine your child, at the end of his third year in Montessori preschool: he’ll be able to look around the class and all the materials in it. He’ll know that when he first entered the class, all these activities were strange, challenging, and maybe even a bit intimidating. But now, as a 6-year-old, he knows he has mastered them. Can you see the earned pride in his eyes—and the confidence that this real achievement will give him as he enters elementary school?

What’s the big deal with independence in Montessori preschool?

Montessori preschool and toddler programs emphasize helping children become independent far more than traditional education approaches. Why is that?

According to Dr. Montessori, “If teaching is to be effective with young children, it must assist them to advance on the way to independence.”

Toddlers are naturally eager to learn how to accomplish new things. “Do it myself” might well be the motto for the toddler years! Enabling a toddler to become more independent has benefits, both now and in the long term.

So if independence is vitally important, how do we go about fostering it?

Let’s start by quoting some hard-hitting words from Dr. Montessori:

“We believe that children are like puppets. We wash them and feed them as if they were dolls. We never stop to think that a child who does not act does not know how to act, but he should act, and nature has given him all the means for learning how to act. Our primary duty toward him is to assist him to perform useful acts.” Dr. Maria Montessori

A goal in our classroom is to act as an educator, someone who guides your child toward independence. We do this, in part, by preparing the environment, teaching individual skills step-by-step, slowing down, and embracing error. By following those same concepts in your home, you can support your child as they gain independence.

For example:

Prepare the environment.

Give your child access in the kitchen. Arrange plates and silverware for him on a low open shelf, or in a drawer. Provide a step stool so he can reach the counter to work with you, or place a small table and chair in the kitchen for him to work at.
Organize the family room so he can participate. It’s best to offer low shelves with only a few toys out at a time and a place for each item. That way, he can put his things away, and find them, when he needs them.
Set up his room and bathroom to support his growing independence in dressing and washing up. Look for a high step stool that will enable your child to access the sink. In his room, display a few (3-4 at most) sets of clothing on a low shelf or in shallow baskets. Make sure there is a clothes hamper for him to place dirty clothes in at the end of the day.

Teach individual skills, step-by-step. There are many tasks your child can accomplish on their own, if the time is taken to show them how.

He can set his place at the table. You can make him a placemat with outlines of plate, spoon, fork and cup. Or you can show him one thing at a time.
She can feed herself. Start with finger foods, then introduce spoon and fork. Allow ample time for your 2-year-old to feed herself—and resist the urge to take over!
He can carry dirty dishes into the kitchen. An older toddler can scrape his plate into the trash can, and perhaps even place it in the dishwasher with some coaching.

Slow down. One of the benefits of the Montessori preschool and toddler environment is the abundance of time. We are careful to preserve an unhurried day for our students, so that we can go at a toddler’s pace. If weekdays are just too crazy (we understand!), then set aside an hour or two on the weekend. Spend time together in the kitchen, for example, to jointly prepare a meal.

Embrace error. When toddlers and preschoolers learn, it can get messy. Things can and will get broken; liquids will spill; food will land on the floor. In Montessori preschool, we view all of this as a natural part of learning, not as mistakes. Cleanup is therefore a part of every activity, not something separate from it. The common phrase regarding learning from one’s mistakes is well-known for a reason. We learn our lessons best through trial and error, and that is often accompanied by messes and broken pieces!

Independence is a big deal in Montessori preschool for many reasons. At a very fundamental level, though, the motivation for independence is clear. As Dr. Montessori says, “These words reveal the child’s inner needs: ‘Help me to do it alone.’”

Five differences that enable Montessori elementary students to thrive

I remember setting foot in that Montessori classroom. I sat down on a chair … near the door. I had just stepped into someone’s living room. Or was it a science laboratory? Or maybe an office building. I couldn’t put my finger on exactly what was different at first, but this was unlike any classroom I had ever seen. It felt different too. Peaceful. Purposeful.

Trevor EisslerMontessori Madness

Montessori elementary classrooms are fundamentally different from traditional elementary school rooms. In fact, they are so different that it can be hard to understand how they work, and why they are so great at helping children thrive.

While it would be easy to write volumes about this topic (and some have: read Paula Polk Lillard’s book, Montessori Today, if you want a detailed description of the Montessori elementary classroom), here are five key differences, and how they matter to your child’s success.

montessori preschool palos verdes Teachers are guides, not lecturers. They individualize instruction to keep each child optimally challenged. In traditional elementary education, much instruction happens at an all-class level; students generally move through the same curriculum at the same pace. This is more true now then ever, as mandatory standardized testing forces teachers to ensure that all students meet common minimum standards. This approach by definition fails to optimally challenge most of the students, most of the time: a child who is advanced in a subject will be bored; one who is behind will quickly become anxious and concerned about his shortcomings. Montessori is different. Most instruction happens in small groups: teachers observe students and bring together children who are ready for a particular lesson. After a lesson, each child has time to practice a skill or further explore an area, either alone or with freely chosen partners. Writes Lillard: “Because the children are in a period when they have immense energy and curiosity, the secret to maintaining their interest is to keep them challenged.”In a Montessori classroom, an advanced student will be challenged to perform at his best: it’s not unusual for a 3rd grade Montessori student to tackle what would typically be considered 5th grade math, for example. At the same time, a child who struggles can get the extra support he needs, without suffering the negative effect on his self-esteem that comes from needing remedial work in a traditional elementary school setting.

montessori preschool palos verdes Children have choices, there’s no one-size-fits all curriculum. Students are encouraged to be curious; they are engaged and love learning. When do you do your best work: when someone makes you do a task, or when you freely choose it? Autonomy is a huge factor in motivation, and Montessori elementary enables children to have a say in their learning. Of course, each child has to learn certain skills; mastering arithmetic isn’t optional. But instead of forcing each child to complete the same worksheet, the Montessori elementary classroom ensures repetition by offering a variety of materials for practicing a given skill: multiplication practice includes work with the Bead Chains, the Stamp Game, the Checkerboard, the Large Bead Frame, and the Flat Bead Frame. When we take our students on field trips, the people we encounter, from museum guides to park rangers, regularly comment that our students are the most curious and engaged group of children they have seen. This is a common refrain for Montessori elementary schools: the children love learning, because they have a chance to be actively engaged in the process.

montessori preschool palos verdes

The classroom is full of materials instead of textbooks and worksheets. Children learn to solve problems and think, instead of repeat memorized jargon. Much traditional elementary school work is unfortunately focused on work with textbooks and worksheets. While there is nothing wrong with books (we love free reading time!), you will not find traditional textbooks and worksheets in the Montessori elementary class. Dr. Montessori viewed the early elementary years as a critical stage in the mind’s development, when the concrete thinking of the preschool years matures into abstract thinking. During the Primary years, children explored many materials, such as the Trinomial Cube or the Golden Beads, primarily for the sensorial interest. Now, in elementary, children use materials to understand how the world works. They are interested in the why and the how of things; they’ve become “reasoning explorers of the abstract”, in Lillard’s vivid description. The materials in Montessori are not mere instructional aids: Just like in Primary, much of their learning happens as the children use the materials to explore topics from grammar to division, from the fundamental needs of man, to the role of water in erosion. With the materials, learning is focused on the world; children acquire a mindset of thinking about things and figuring them out, rather than memorizing words or processes on an adult’s say-so.

montessori preschool palos verdes

The day has two 2 – 3 hour work periods, instead of a schedule where activities are constantly changed. Protecting children from interruptions when productively engaged is key to their development of concentration and interest in their work. Dr. Montessori commented that traditional schools have broken up the day in many short time periods, in an attempt to hold the children’s interest, and that they have failed miserably, as children remain mentally fatigued despite the alleged benefit of variety. In contrast, writes Montessori, Montessori schools have proven that children need a cycle of work for which they are mentally prepared; such intelligent work with interest is not fatiguing and they should not be cut off from it by a call to play. Interest is not immediately born, and if when it has been created, the work is withdrawn, it is like depriving a whetted appetite of the food that will satisfy it.
This is why there is no morning recess in your child’s class, and why we don’t provide you with an hour-by-hour schedule. It’s one of the often-overlooked benefits for Montessori elementary students: author Paula Polk Lillard notes upon observing in a Montessori elementary class that the children “have time to think. That is what impresses me most, I realize. These children are thinking.”

montessori preschool palos verdes

Children learn with and from each other, in a mixed-age environment. Instead of competing with each other, they grow into a community, and practice all-important social skills every day. In traditional education, the emphasis in preschool is on “socializing” the child, and children are expected to do much together in groups. Come elementary schools, class time is largely focused on individual work, in strictly same-age classrooms, and social interactions are limited to recess and lunch.This approach—focus on group activities in preschool, and individual activities in elementary school—is fundamentally wrong, according to Montessori. Young children in preschool, left to their own devices, often choose to do things by themselves, and much activity in a Montessori Primary class is in fact individual work. As children near the end of Primary, they often start to work together in pairs. In fact, becoming interested in and able to work with a peer is one indication that a child is ready to move up to elementary!In Montessori elementary, children interact with each other, across age groups, all day. You’ll often see 2-4 children working together on projects, negotiating roles and learning social skills in a safe, supervised setting as they choose co-workers and figure out that they can work with a range of companions, not just with their closest friends.

A Montessori elementary classroom is very different from traditional schooling. These five highlights are just a start to understanding this unique learning environment. We encourage you to explore more: Read up on how we teach each of the subjects on our web site. Pick up Paula Polk Lillard’s book. And, most importantly, make time to observe in your child’s Montessori elementary classroom!

Creative Play and Montessori Principles

Several recent articles in major newspapers discussed the demise of creativity in kids, and linked it to a lack of “unstructured, messy play.” For example, The New York Times reports:

For several years, studies and statistics have been mounting that suggest the culture of play in the United States is vanishing. Children spend far too much time in front of a screen, educators and parents lament — 7 hours 38 minutes a day on average, according to a survey by the Kaiser Family Foundation last year. And only one in five children live within walking distance (a half-mile) of a park or playground, according to a 2010 report by the federal Centers for Disease Control, making them even less inclined to frolic outdoors.

Behind the numbers is adult behavior as well as children’s: Parents furiously tapping on their BlackBerrys in the living room, too stressed by work demands to tolerate noisy games in the background. Weekends consumed by soccer, lacrosse and other sports leagues, all organized and directed by parents. The full slate of lessons (chess, tae kwon do, Chinese, you name it) and homework beginning in the earliest grades.

We’d agree with many of the issues these articles highlight, such as the deplorable amount of time US kids spend in front of TVs and computer screens each day, or the creativity-stifling impact of teaching that focuses on improving standardized, multiple-choice test scores.

At the same time, we don’t agree with the view of creative development underlying these articles. They pieces intermix valid criticisms of forced parental structure or too much computer time with a lot of talk about encouraging messiness, putting up with chaos, clutter and uncertainty, and fostering the child’s imagination by letting fantasy run wild. The implicit assumption, which we dispute, is that creativity is borne out of disorder and impulsivity. Polemics against too much forced structure are important and valuable. But more important is the answer to the question of why play is so important to children, of how, fundamentally, creativity comes about—and what the connection is to a child’s intellectual development.

Notice that descriptors such as “clutter” and “noisiness” evoke a picture of an environment quite different from a Montessori classroom, which seems to suggest that the structure of Montessori—the sequential materials, the orderliness, the purposefulness, the calm—are in some way undercutting a child’s creative development. If this were true, then why are Montessori educated children renowned for their curiosity, their creative problem solving, their ability to think outside of the box? Put differently, does a Montessori education stifle imagination and rob children of the essential play of childhood, as these articles suggest?

In our view, nothing could be further from the truth. The superficial messiness of play, the focus on imagination and chaos, obscures a more fundamental difference between play and many other activities. The New York Times authors get close to this essential attribute when they discuss a need for “unstructured, child-led and child-created” activities, such as building a fort out of sofa cushions, making up elaborate pretend stories to act out, or drawing creative pictures, and contrast them with adult-led, pre-structured pursuits, such as organized soccer leagues, step-by-step adult-led crafts sessions, or foreign language classes.

In our view, what is really missing from many children’s experiences is not a license to engage in impulsivity per se, but rather an environment which enables children to independently choose to develop and pursue their own interests, and which equips them with the skills and knowledge to do so competently and successfully. Let’s look at these three elements in turn: choice, pursuit of interests, and knowledge and skills.

First, to engage in creativity, a person’s mind has to be voluntarily engaged in an activity. Whether it is drawing a painting, writing an article, or solving a challenging puzzle, a mind works best when it wants to do something, not for external rewards (stickers, grades, trophies, praise), but for the satisfaction of the activity itself. When children play, they by definition do so by their own choice: no-one forces a child to pretend to sail off to adventures on the living room sofa, and no stars are handed out for arriving at the pretend destination.

Second, creative people actively pursue a goal. While you can passively default to sitting in front of the TV, you cannot passively play, or passively achieve any worthwhile goal in life, whether it is building friendships, achieving success in a career, or mastering a hobby. Play is goal-directed activity, even though it might appear unstructured from the outside. It also typically involves problem-solving in the broadest sense. When 3-year-olds builds a sofa-cushion fort, they have to figure out how to place the cushions, where to get that sheet they need for the roof, how to gain an adults’ help if they can’t get up to the shelf where the sheet is hiding. It’s their goal—and they solve whatever problems arise in their pursuit of that goal.

Third, creative people have to have skills and knowledge to actually achieve their ends. No matter how inspired a writer may be, how creative his story idea may sound, he needs to have mastered grammar, acquired a strong vocabulary, and have learned the personal skills, such as organization and time management, which will enable him to successfully pursue such a long-range, challenging goal. Especially in today’s advanced civilization, ignorance makes creativity impossible. Worthwhile achievements of any type require a plan, and the ability to execute on it. Play, at its best, is skill and knowledge building, in a wide variety of forms. The toddler who stacks Legos is working on fine motor skills; the 4-year-olds who pretend-play at shopping are practicing language skills and daily processes they’ll need to master to become successful adults. Even video games derive a lot of their appeal from building skills—albeit often very limited skills only applicable in the video game’s own world.

Montessori education fully embraces these three principles. In Montessori classrooms, children have 2-3 hour periods of unstructured work time, each morning and afternoon. Each child chooses what activity to take from the shelves and work with. He actively engages with the material, he keeps at it until he masters it. It is his choice, his goal, his effort that will bring him the satisfaction of mastering a new material. Every activity offered to children in a Montessori classroom is carefully designed to help the child develop a critical skill, whether it is learning to pour without spilling, or learning the letter sounds. In fact, Dr. Montessori was convinced that a child has to know about reality first, before he can be truly creative, so she created a well-rounded collection of materials, one that gives children a balanced exposure to the basic elements of the world and human knowledge. This balanced education ranges from basic life skills to simple arts activities; from training the senses to observe carefully, to categorizing observations systematically so they can be easily retrieved later; from math and language, to geography, science and music. Dr. Montessori saw this rounded education as the foundation from which an individual can develop true creativity, in the sense of doing new things with real materials and ideas. Every item in the Montessori classroom is carefully chosen to give each child the “keys” to the world that may serve to spark his interest in discovery and creativity.

Montessori students, from the earliest age, learn that they are in charge—they choose, they pursue, they build skills and learn how to use their time and resources effectively. (And, by the way, they also learn to clean up their own messes, and acquire the habits of mental and physical order that are, in fact, another prerequisite of real creativity!) By daily experience, they become active explorers who enjoy tackling and mastering new challenges, rather than passive consumers reluctant to move off the couch, or to open any book beyond required homework.

The crucial difference is that Montessori education develops the capacity for creative effort, rather than mere impulsivity. It is this, the ability to apply oneself joyously to the task of pursuing or creating something personally meaningful, that is the hallmark of creativity. This is why the child who is allowed to uncritically “do what he wants,” without developing a capacity for discipline in pursuing what he really wants, inevitably ends up passive. Buy your child a new toy every time he gets bored, without giving him the opportunity to use his mind to find something interesting to do with the toys he has, and the result will be that he simply becomes less willing to do the work of escaping his own boredom.

So if your children want to build castles in the yard and have a princess picnic with a friend, or engage in messy arts projects, as Montessorians we say that by all means you should encourage them to do so. We just encourage you to keep in mind that creativity is the ability to apply effort in uniquely interesting ways. And because of this, we hold that a pro-effort, child-led classroom environment such as is found in a well-run Montessori school, helps rather than hinders the development of creativity. And as the icing on the cake, it will also help your youngsters learn to clean up the messes they make in their daily play!

– Heike Larson

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