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Montessori Education Week – 2025

EMTA receives American Montessori Society Affiliation and MACTE Accreditation

If you recently joined us for our Virtual Parenting Talk on Supporting Montessori At Home, you likely heard us discuss our association with Eagle Montessori Teaching Academy. Eagle Montessori Teaching Academy (EMTA) was founded in 2022 by Spring Education Group to provide quality Montessori Early Childhood teacher education. While the work and life of Dr. Maria Montessori is the inspiration for our teaching academy, it is the educators from the Montessori schools under the Spring Education Group umbrella – Evergreen Academy, LePort Montessori, and Montessori Academy Idaho – that provide the expertise for this endeavor. Our faculty come from different backgrounds and Montessori training traditions, but we find common ground in shared ideas about education, our culture of learning, and joyful dedication to achievement. In coming together, we forge modern and innovative ways to expand the Montessori learning environment while respecting the rich history and philosophy of the Montessori Method. The connection to EMTA provides our assistant teachers with a pathway to certification and creates a teaching network with many other Montessori programs. Such a network helps us all grow as educators!

So it is with great excitement we share that EMTA has received full accreditation from the Montessori Accreditation Council for Teacher Education (MACTE) and affiliation with the American Montessori Society (AMS) for its early childhood course level. Eagle Montessori Teaching Academy was chosen for this distinction, demonstrating its commitment to excellence in teacher training and program quality and its dedication to meeting rigorous standards in Montessori education.

Accreditation with MACTE ensures that the EMTA teacher education programs adhere to recognized standards of excellence, while affiliation with AMS provides access to a network of Montessori educators and resources. These associations validate the commitment to high-quality Montessori education and also attract educators who value professional development and growth within a reputable institution.

With these new recognitions, the Eagle Montessori Teaching Academy team is fortified in its mission to prepare adults for the transformative process of becoming Montessori educators who are culturally sensitive, creative, and responsive to the needs of children and families. A big LePort Montessori congratulations to the entire team!

Embark on a Montessori Summer Adventure at LePort: Ignite Passion, Foster Mastery

Celebrate Montessori Education Week – 2024

The Uninterrupted Work Period in Montessori

Language in a Primary Montessori Classroom

Packing School Lunches

Why Larger Classroom Communities Work in Montessori (Part 2 of 2)

Why Larger Classroom Communities Work in Montessori (Part 1 of 2)

Setting up your home for Montessori baby

Being an expectant or new parent can be overwhelming. I remember being assailed late in my pregnancy by well-wishers and advice givers who proposed dozens of items I should get before my baby arrived. It was enough to make my head turn and to doubt my own instincts, which yearned for a simpler, less complicated approach to parenthood. I admit I followed most of the advice, even when it seemed counter intuitive. Yet 18 years later, with two almost grown children and Montessori training under my belt, I know for a fact that I did not need all that much. Many of the “must-have” were labeled by misconceptions that did not help my children thrive.

Now, as a parenting consultant and Montessori guide, I help create beautiful Montessori infant environments without many of the staples of a traditional baby registry: No bouncer, no walkers, no exersaucers. No noisy battery-operated plastic toys. No cribs! Not even a high chair in sight! The contrast to the traditional nursery is so stark that it can be disorienting for parents who first enter such an environment.

After regaining their voice, parents often ask, “how do the babies sleep on these low beds, without falling out?” and “where do you feed them?” and “aren’t they getting bored?” Parents are concerned, naturally, about their babies’ well being in a setting that is so fundamentally different from the traditional nursery, the expected, and the norm. Yet once they learn more, once they understand a baby’s true needs at a deeper level, once they observe and experience a Montessori Nido (Dr. Montessori’s term for the prepared Infant Environment, the Italian word for ‘Nest”), they often feel drawn to it, and become eager to modify their own home environments along similar lines.

To understand why a Montessori home environment is so different, it helps to realize that as Montessorians, we view babies as “fully human”—as independent beings, on an active, urgent journey to become masters of their own inner and outer worlds. Our goal is not to entertain or serve babies; rather, we want to respect their inner drive for child-led exploration, and help them do for themselves whatever may be in their own power to do. Our goal is not to make it easy for an adult to feed, clothe and put a baby to sleep. Our goal is not to make the adult’s life easier. Instead, we recognize that, in the words of Dr. Montessori, “to assist a child we must provide him with an environment which enables him to develop freely.”

As a Montessori home consultant, I help families set up the four key areas of the home—sleeping, feeding, physical care and movement—with this principle in mind. These basic areas give the child important points of references, allowing him to figure out what is expected of him depending on where he is in his environment. They help the child feel secure by being able to predict what is coming next. He comes to expect food in one area, a chance to move about in another, and the quietness of sleep somewhere else. Routines, order and consistency along with these simple points of reference are of upmost importance during the first few years of life.

Here’s what these areas look like in a Montessori home:

Voila Montessori’s baby-focused nursery designed in collaboration with mollieQUINN. Photo: Laura Christin

The sleeping area is characterized by the absence of one nursery essential, the crib. Instead, we provide a simple low bed (just a mattress on the floor often suffices), along with a Moses basket. The low bed can be any size you choose (crib size, twin, queen etc.), depending on the location and space you have. This “floor bed” will need minimal changes over time if properly set-up as a safe relaxing area for the child. The area should be toy-free with no nearby mirrors: a sleeping place needs to be void of any distractions to help an infant self-soothe, relax and ease into sleep.

“A bed which has enough space to allow for movement and no obstruction
to vision is the first thing to provide in order to assist
the development of voluntary movement.” ~ Dr. S. Montanaro

The floor bed is maybe the most controversial of the Montessori infant suggestions. Parents often wonder, will my child roll off his floor bed, or crawl off and begin to play? Well, that’s certainly the case—but is that an argument against or for the floor bed? By rolling off onto a soft carpet, from the height of a few inches, a child learns to recognize boundaries with little risk. By having the freedom to get out of bed when no longer tired, a child feels empowered, rather than trapped. Think about it from a child’s perspective: wouldn’t such a bed allow a baby to discover something fantastic, namely, that he is in control, that he can get himself to sleep and get himself up again: “I am the master of my movements, I don’t need to stay in my container and cry until somebody rescues me, I can even go to bed when I am tired, no need for me to wait until my sleepy cues have been interpreted.”

Needless to say, the floor bed requires the adult’s trust in the child’s capabilities and a commitment to letting the child explore her physical boundaries. It means that the entire room a child sleeps in needs to be extremely safe (baby-proofed). So while needing no expensive crib, the Montessori sleeping area requires space and a different type of careful set-up. It may not be easy, but trusting and allowing your child from the very beginning to be aware of their body scheme and physical boundaries will help her on her quest for independence as she matures into a self confident, well adjusted child.

The feeding area is first set-up for the caregiver who is either breast-feeding or bottle-feeding the infant. For the first few months, when babies are dependent on us for food, we should have a comfortable place to feed and bond with them. Keep this area free of any distractions (especially free of TVs and other screens). Feeding is an important bonding time for the child and caregiver. Set up your area so that you have everything you need at arm’s reach, and so that you can sit back, relax and enjoy this precious time that , while exhausting for sure, goes by all to quickly.

“Clearly then the nursing mother should be comfortably seated in a quiet place and feed the child while looking at it. Although it is technically possible to offer the breast and read a book, talk to someone or watch television, we must realize that, in this way, we detach psychological nourishment from biological feeding. As Erich Fromm puts it:
‘We only give the milk but not the honey.’” ~ Dr. S. Montanaro

Later, as the child’s interest in adult foods develops and he becomes capable of sitting upright unassisted, Dr. Montessori recommend a small weaning table and chair, especially for snacks or meals the child takes separately from the parents or other caregivers. These low chairs and tables allow children to independently seat themselves, instead of being lifted up and strapped in. They allow children to sit and have a meal with others of similar ages. They make it possible to set a pretty table, with small, open glasses and real ceramic plates, as a low drop is much less likely to lead to broken china than a drop from an adult-height table.

For meals taken together as a family, I find chairs such as the Tripp Trap a great alternative. These chairs allow an older infant to sit at the table with the family, instead of being pushed back in their own high chair with a tray. Seated at the family meal table, the baby can again have access to a plate, glass and utensils (which often barely fit on a high chair tray). Thus joined at the table, meals are a time for bonding and social relationships. They become a learning opportunity, as adults model proper cultural etiquette using real utensils, real glass cups and plates, and adults are fully engaged and present with children at mealtime. It is important to keep distractions such as iPads, phones or TVs away from this important meal-time ritual.

The physical care area—which includes diaper changing and getting dressed—is designed to facilitate care giving as an opportunity to interact. I highly recommend a changing table in European style, where you face your baby directly, rather than one of the typical US design, where you baby lies perpendicular to you. Being able to look your baby in her eyes as you change her, being able to talk to her and interact with her, is critical to make changing diapers not a drudge and chore, but an opportunity for bonding and learning. Make sure you have all the critical supplies close by, so you can give your child your undivided attention, so you can explain to her what you are doing, and ask for her active participation—such as lifting a leg or pushing an arm through a sleeve.

Only when we become able to give maternal care with the child’s
collaboration are we really doing things ‘with the child’ and not ‘to the child’. ~ Dr. S. Montanaro

While I recommend that changing tables be set up in the bathroom from the start, space may not allow that in all cases. Once children become mobile (strong crawlers or cruisers), I recommend moving diaper changes into the bathroom. Often, a pad on the floor is a good step; as the child can get to it herself, rather than being lifted (sometimes against her will) onto a high surface. Once a baby can stand well, you have the option of doing diaper changes standing up. It helps to provide a grab bar of some kind. If you want to go fancy, you can place it in front of a mirror, so the child can see what happens when you change her and clean her up.

If space permits, I recommend setting up a “care of self” area in the bathroom, too. This area can include a low shelf or table, upon which is placed a basin of water and a small piece of soap for hand washing, along with a little towel for drying. It’s not too soon toward the end of the first year to offer a small potty, along with a bucket for soiled clothing and a basket for clean clothes to switch into.

With this careful preparation, toilet learning during the toddler years is likely to be much smoother: The child will have played an active role in his elimination process from an early age. He will associate toileting with the bathroom, and will likely become more curious and more eager to master this skill independently.

The movement area at first consists of a comfortable thin mat or a folded blanket placed on the floor. It is best if placed against a wall with a horizontal mirror along the side. Very young babies spend time here looking at simple mobiles created to develop the child’s visual sense. The mirror gives the child information about her body scheme (self-concept) and encourages movement, as children are very attracted by the image of themselves. As the child begins to get into a stable sitting position on her own, it is a good idea to place a low bar, such as a ballet bar, in front of the mirror to encourage pulling up to a standing position. This bar offers a sturdy support to practice standing and cruising. It’s much better at fostering gross motor skills than contraptions such as bouncers, saucers, and playpens, which often limit movement or provide unnecessary crutches. Your child’s conquest to develop his equilibrium will be met with confidence and a sense of empowerment if he is able to discover his amazing capabilities naturally at his own pace.

As your child begins to be mobile, the entire home will become the movement area! Let her explore. Movement is life and an essential basic need for the child. Children need to be able to safely move and explore their home environment. Take time to explore with her, creating areas that you know are entirely safe for exploration. One of my child’s favorite activities when he first started crawling was emptying the corner cupboard in the kitchen and crawling into it. The look of accomplishment on his face was well worth my effort to re-arrange the kitchen to make it a safe place for him to explore!

A child’s home should be simple and free of clutter. Less is truly more: a baby’s mind is still trying to find its way in the world, and too much stuff can be disorienting. For the movement and active area, use low shelves, with only a few toys, attractively displayed. (Extras can be stored away and swapped out.) The abundance of items can often overwhelm a child and get in the way of his need for concentration. Choose attractive and varied toys that are “passive”—that is, toys your child needs to engage actively with, rather than those that passively entertain without effort by the baby. Experience your home like your child sees it: crawl around and move things that you want your child to engage with at his level. This may mean lowering family photos and artwork so your child can admire them, and so they can be the springboard for engaging conversations and story telling.

The impact of adapting your home in this way is well worth the effort.

Not long ago I worked with a lovely single mother living with her eighteen-month-old son. The mom admitted it was hard to stay home with her son, since she felt she would “go crazy.” She would spend a large part of her day at the park with her son to avoid the common frustrations she experienced when he was at home for an extended period of time.

It did not take me long to see that the environment was not satisfying her son’s needs for independence, collaborative work and his need for order. The toy shelves were over-flowing with toys, the kitchen and bathroom had not yet been adapted for a young child and strangely enough the backyard was fenced off. I worked with this mother to make adaptations in her home—such as creating child-centered spaces in the kitchen, bathroom, and backyard by reducing the toys available down to a more manageable level. With these simple changes, my client was finally able to enjoy staying home with her son as she saw him being engaged, self-disciplined and able to concentrate on the developmentally appropriate activities set out for him. As she wrote to me,

“The changes in my son were immediate! Every new task and responsibilities I presented him with were so exciting to him. He thrived to help, participate and was eager to learn. He could play with one toy for long periods of time, was a lot more focused, calm and serene. Our house became his own playground and a place where he can now safely explore and take part of.”

A Montessori home environment may be devoid of many of the traditional items found on a baby registry—yet it is a rich, beautiful environment for children to explore. For ideas on how to get started in your home, download our “Montessori babies must-have” list.

Jeanne-Marie Paynel, M.Ed, holds AMI Montessori diplomas for ages birth through six. She is a Montessori Parent Liaison for LePort Montessori Schools and the founder of Voila Montessori, where she guides and empowers parents to create age-appropriate home environments for their children.

Discipline in the Montessori Classroom (2 of 2)

Part Two of Two— Lack of Skill or Unmet Needs, not Badness: How We Handle Discipline Problems in Montessori

In part one of this post, we argued that discipline in Montessori is about helping the child to achieve mastery of his mind and body, so he is capable to willingly conform with (reasonable) rules of life.

This raises the question about what we do when a child does not act in a self-disciplined manner. In other words, how do we handle discipline problems?

As always within Montessori, our answer is individualized to the child and situation before of us. If the child is new to Montessori, we frankly expect her to not be able to be disciplined! As we outlined in part one, discipline grows through practice, not by command. With a new child, our goal is to help her acquire mental and bodily control by connecting her to interesting work in the environment.

A true discipline challenge arises when a child either isn’t able to connect with materials and thus doesn’t achieve self-discipline after an extended time in the Montessori environment, or when a child who previously was behaving well suddenly starts to hurt others or to violate our community rules.

In both cases, our core assumption is that the child has some unmet needs, whether physical or mental. In effect, we view a lack of discipline as an illness, rather than evidence that the child is bad—and our treatment reflects this perspective. We don’t cajole, punish or shame. We don’t administer punitive time-outs or withdraw love and affection. Instead, we try to diagnose and treat the underlying problems. This can take many forms, depending on the child, the classroom setting and the family. Here are a few examples:

A young toddler who bites.
Biting is a very common issue with young children. To manage it, we try to observe carefully and identify the root cause. Is the child teething and just needs his gums stimulated? In that case, providing sturdy food (bagels, carrots, apples) to chew on or a teether (if very young) can help him feel better. Is he upset by another child who is intruding in his space, and unable to express his needs with words? In that case, we may need to supervise him more closely, keep him apart from the other child, and work on providing words to signal his needs: “I see you are upset that Max took your toy. You can say ‘stop that’ to let him know, then come find me to help you.”
A new three-year-old who runs in the classroom or yells loudly.
If the child is new to the class, we may need to give him a more productive outlet for his big movements and loud activities, while he learns to better control his body. We may just take him and a few friends out on the playground, and encourage them to get their needs for rowdy activity out of their systems outside—fully realizing that acquiring self-discipline isn’t instantaneous!
A child who keeps interrupting his peers and annoys them.
Often, this type of behavior happens when the child hasn’t yet found work he finds engaging. So our first thought will be to offer him some choices that we think will meet his need for mental nourishment. If that doesn’t work, we may separate him from his peers—not in a punitive time out way, but to give him a chance to observe them engaged in the many fun activities available in our classrooms. Often, we find that after some time of watching, the child will be eager to try an activity, and he’ll be able to focus on his own work.
A new child who won’t settle down to any activity, despite the guide’s best efforts to introduce her to a wide range of interesting activities.
Sometimes, a child just can’t seem to get herself settled into our classroom routines. It may be that the child joined at age 4 ½ and just is beyond the activities we normally offer to a new child: this fall at one of our campuses, we had an older boy who was restless, until his experienced teacher introduced him to the Stamp Game, and advance math activity usually introduced to children who have had several years in the Montessori classroom. This boy, who was unable to sit still for anything, latched onto the big numbers, and quickly mastered them, then went back happily to many of the foundational, easier activities.

Sometimes, we may need to call a meeting with the parents to diagnose the problem. Issues at home can show up in behavior problems at school. Maybe the child is hungry when she arrives in the morning, and needs a breakfast with more protein, rather than quickly digested simple carbs. Maybe her bedtime is too late, and she needs more rest to arrive fresh and able to tackle her day with enthusiasm. Or maybe there was a change in the family—the death of a beloved pet, the arrival of a new baby—and she needs to work through her emotions to regain her balance.

If we identify a challenge at home, we count on the parents to work in partnership with us to help the child thrive. We recognize that it may not be easy to change the family dynamic—to serve dinner earlier to ensure sufficient sleep when dad comes home late, or to make time for a nutritious breakfast before heading out for the day. Sometimes, we need to ask parents to get children outside help—for instance, if a child acts aggressively because a speech delay prevents him from communicating his needs verbally. We understand that facing challenges like these can be tough for parents. Yet time after time, we have observed that it requires close cooperation between school and home to help children move beyond such behavior problems and flourish.

A child who misbehaves is a child who needs our love and understanding. We will not let her get away with her destructive behavior (that would be abandoning her) nor intimidate her into submission (which would only lead to the problem resurfacing later and probably in a more violent form). Instead, we will work with you as the parents to diagnose and fix the root problem so she can once again participate joyfully in our classroom community.

Discipline in the Montessori Classroom (1 of 2)

Part One of Two— The Theory: What is Discipline and How Do Children Achieve It

“The undisciplined child enters into discipline by working in the company of others; not being told he is naughty … Discipline is, therefore, primarily a learning experience and less a punitive experience if appropriately dealt with.”
—Maria Montessori

When you bring to mind the word “discipline,” what type of image do you see? If you’ve grown up in a traditional educational environment, you might think of sitting quietly at a desk, listening attentively. You’ll probably associate being un-disciplined with negative consequences—being put in time-out, or sent to the principal’s office, or a note being sent home.

In general, when we think of discipline, we view it as something imposed upon us by others. The Oxford English dictionary defines discipline as “the practice of training people to obey rules or a code of behavior, using punishment to correct disobedience.”

If that’s the definition of discipline, as Montessorians we want nothing to do with it!

Our conception of discipline is not one of passive, adult-imposed obedience, but one of active, purposeful self-mastery. As Dr. Montessori put it,

In our system, we obviously have a different concept of discipline. The discipline 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. (The Discovery of the Child, p. 50)

Our goal, in Montessori, is not obedience but self-discipline. That’s why we do not use time out chairs, color-coded behavior charts, demerits, treasure chests, or other rewards and punishments to control our students’ behaviors. Yet, when parents peer into our Montessori classrooms, what they see are students who are working calmly, peacefully, and diligently.

In this environment, it’s usually easy to recognize a new child: he’s the one who wanders about, going from this to that, interrupting his classmates, talking noisily, bumping into shelves and sending materials flying. Yet in a matter of a few months, when his parents come to visit during our “Watch Me Work Wednesdays,” they see him sitting at a table, focused on his work. They see him walking about with new-found poise. They notice how he willingly and without cajoling complies with classrooms rules, such as walking instead of running, lining up quickly with his hands behind his back when it’s time to go out to the playground, and using a low, quiet voice in talking to his peers.

The big question is how do Montessori children achieve this very visible change of behavior, in a matter of weeks or months?

Fundamentally, we view self-discipline as a set of skills that children master through repeated, deliberate practice, in a carefully prepared environment. To become self-disciplined, a child must master his mind and body, and understand and be willing to follow classroom rules that respect his needs as a young child. He does so by acting actively in his environment—not by being told to behave himself!

In this blog post, you’ll read about the main principles we use in our Montessori primary classrooms to help students achieve self-discipline; Part 2 of this series then offers up specific examples of how we deal with discipline issues.

Achieving Concentration: The Mastery of Mental Control

The first and most important task a Montessori primary guide tackles with a new student is to help him find an activity that calls to him, something that engages his hand and mind and allows him to lose himself in joyful concentration. Often, the activity is something simple—pouring water from one pitcher into another, or solving a puzzle where he sets ten knobbed cylinders that vary in width into their proper holes. Always, it is an activity that engages the hand and the mind, something that allows the child to repeat a physical movement and to bring it under his volitional control.

Dr. Montessori observed that self-discipline and better behavior (what she called “normalization”) always

… comes about through “concentration” on a piece of work. For this we must provide “motives of activity” so well adapted to the child’s interest that they provoke his deep attention. … The essential thing is for the task to arouse such an interest that it engages the child’s whole personality.

When we see a new child connect with a material, and repeat an activity a dozen times, we know he’s well on the way to the transformation that so astounds parents! That’s why we ensure children receive many individual lessons—so they can discover materials that call to them. It’s why we jealously protect long, uninterrupted periods for child-chosen work—instead of interrupting children’s concentration to join adult-led specialist classes like art or music. It’s why we work hard to help children choose work, instead of assigning it—because only something the child herself finds engaging will enable her to repeat an activity and achieve mastery.

In contrast to traditional education, which exhorts the child to just will himself to pay attention, as Montessorians we recognize that purposeful attention—“concentration” in Montessori terminology—needs come from within. It needs to start with something the child himself finds engaging! Only after the child has practiced directing his mind toward something he finds fascinating is he then able to direct his attention volitionally toward something someone else wants him to focus on, such as a teacher’s presentation in elementary school.

Purposeful Movement: The Mastery of the Body

In addition to directing and focusing her mind, to become disciplined the child also has to learn to control her body. Here again, what must be done is not to tell her to “sit still” or “don’t bump into things,” but to give her activities she finds interesting that allow her to gain control over her movements.

The Montessori guide supports this development of self-control by showing the child precisely how to conduct each daily activity. Writes Dr. Montessori:

If we showed [children] exactly how to do something, this precision itself seemed to hold their interest. To have a real purpose to which the action was directed, this was the first condition, but the exact way of doing it acted like a support which rendered the child stable in his efforts, and therefore brought him to make progress in his development. Order and precision, we found, were the key to spontaneous work in the school. (The Absorbent Mind, p. 186)

In our classrooms, we thus provide purposeful activities that encourage the child to control and refine his bodily movements. When a child places the heavy knobbed cylinder block slowly down on the table, trying to make no sound, she’s engaging her core muscles and balance. When she carries a pitcher of water while walking around shelves and rugs, she controls her impulse to run. When she spoons beans from one ceramic bowl into another, she enhances her ability to carefully control her hands. Thus it goes with dozens of activities, practiced spontaneously every day.

Our teachers support this process by constant modeling: They slow down their movements when giving lessons, so the child can see each careful step and is able to imitate it. They speak less, and show more, so the child can focus on the movement, and not be distracted by the words. They give what we call “Grace and Courtesy” lessons, such as showing a child how to walk around a friend’s rug so as to not disturb his work, or asking a child to show his skills: “Susan, can you show me how you carry a chair?” so the child takes ownership and pride in walking carefully and not bumping into others with the chair she carries.

With this constant practice, we see the child’s movement become more graceful, the clumsiness of early childhood disappearing. We can watch as her mind assumes effortless control over her body!

Practicing Discipline in the Community

Only after a child is able to purposefully control his mind and body can we expect him to act in accordance with our community rules. As Dr. Montessori so succinctly put it,

How can we expect them to do their work carefully and patiently, if care and patience are among their missing gifts? It is like saying “walk nicely!” to a person without legs. Qualities like these can only be given by practice, never by commands. (The Absorbent Mind, p. 209)

Once children have achieved self-mastery of this type, they become quite eager to follow legitimate community rules. By legitimate we mean rules that protect the rights of others, and that do not place undue limits on the child.

While in many situation the child’s natural needs—to move, to touch things, to work with his hands, to explore with all senses—put him in opposition with adults, in a Montessori classroom, the environment and rules are designed precisely around his needs.

Observes Dr. Montessori:

The tendencies which we stigmatize as evil in little children of three to six years of age are often merely those which cause annoyance to us adults when, not understanding their needs, we try to prevent their every movement, their every attempt to gain experience in the world (by touching everything, etc.). The child, however, through this natural tendency, is led to coordinate his movements and to collect impressions, especially sensations of touch, so that when prevented, he rebels, and this rebellion forms almost the whole of his “naughtiness.”

What wonder is it that the evil disappears when, if we give the right means for development and leave full liberty to use them, rebellion has no more reason for existence? (Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook, p. 88)

Of course, a Montessori classroom is not an environment where anything goes. What rules we have are there to allow freedom within an active community. We expect children to speak in low voices—so others can concentrate. We require them to walk around work rugs, rather than over them—so they do not destroy another child’s work. We allow each child to only have one activity out at a time—so everyone can have a turn.

This active discipline is the point of arrival. It grows out of a child’s increased mastery over his mind and body—and his eagerness to put this mastery into practice.

It is our object to train the child for activity, for work, for doing good, and not for immobility or passivity. It would seem to me that children are very well disciplined indeed when they can move about a room in a useful, intelligent and free fashion, without doing anything rude or unmannerly. (The Discovery of the Child, p. 54)

We hope you agree!

To Share or Not to Share? (Part 3 of 3)

Part Three of Three: Uninterrupted Work and Concentration in the Montessori Classroom

In Part One of this blog post series, we discussed our concerns with the conventional view that sharing is an inherent virtue. We differentiated between voluntary sharing for mutual gain, and surrendering under the threat of compulsion. We suggested that adults should not pressure or even encourage children to share on demand, but should instead protect their right to uninterrupted play. In our view, this approach encourages children to view other children as potential playmates, rather than threats, and results in an attitude of genuine goodwill and benevolence towards others.

In Part Two of this series, we offered up some guiding ideas for practicing voluntary sharing at home. We emphasized the importance of prevention, of setting up a carefully prepared environment—human and physical—that enables children to interact peacefully and respectfully with each other, instead of squabbling about toys.

Part Three discusses how we handle sharing in our Montessori classrooms, and the role our clear roles play in fostering both a peaceful community, and an environment that enables children to achieve the deep concentration they need to learn successfully.

Sharing in a Montessori Classroom Environment

“The child’s body lives also by joyousness of soul.”
—Dr. Maria Montessori

In our Montessori classrooms, instead of sharing on demand, we teach children to take turns—similar to a library model, where many people, in succession, use the books.

Here are our simple Montessori classroom rules and how we apply them:

The one material rule. A child may have one and only one activity out at a time. He can take any material he has received a lesson on from a shelf and work with it in a clearly-defined work space, such as a small table or a rug rolled out on the floor. Once he is done, he needs to put the material back in its proper spot on the shelf, before he can move on to his next activity.
The taking only from the shelf rule. Children may take materials only from the shelf, not from each other. Even when one child is done with an activity, he can’t just give it to a waiting peer. Instead, he needs to place it back on the shelf. The other child may then take it from the shelf.
The voluntary interaction rule. Children may work together with one material, if they both choose to do so. If one child has an activity out, another child may ask whether he can join, and the first child is free to accept or decline that request. We also teach children to respect each other’s workspace by, for example, working around and not over the rugs where other children work.

In the beginning of the year, or with a new class, we explicitly explain and model these rules. The teacher reinforces the rules as needed, providing words to children (“Max, I have the pink tower now. You may have it when it’s back on its stand”), guiding children who haven’t yet mastered keeping their hands to themselves (“Susie, you may watch Max working with the Pink Tower. Please stand back with your hands behind your back.”), and redirecting those who need more help (“John, I see you are having a hard time waiting for the buttoning frame. I’ll help you pick another work: would you like to work with the zipper frame, or would you rather paint at the easel?”)

Over time, as a classroom community gets established, the children themselves become empowered to enforce these rules. It’s not at all unusual to see a five-year-old gently remind a younger child to walk around rugs, or a four-year-old explain to a three-year-old that she can have a turn when the spooning work is back on the shelf.

Clear rules, and a respect for each child’s right to work without being forced to surrender the materials, is a key factor in the peacefulness parents observe when visiting our Montessori classrooms. Yet this respect, this refusal to allow one child to interrupt another’s activity, has another, equally important purpose: protecting a child’s right to work enables him to meet his need for mental nourishment, and, in doing so, helps him become a more centered, better adjusted young person.

Dr. Montessori observed that children are not just physical but also spiritual beings, that they need mental nourishment just as much as food and rest, that just as a hungry child becomes grumpy and disagreeable, so a mentally starved child is prone to misbehave.

The type of deep concentration which Dr. Montessori observed as transformational for children (what modern psychologists have identified as a “flow state”) cannot happen if the child is worried about being interrupted at any minute by another child who may, at will, take away the material he is working with. To truly focus and stretch his mind, a child has to feel safe—not just from physical aggression, but also from unwanted interruptions, whether by adults or other children. As Dr. Montessori put it,

Montessori schools have proved that the child needs a cycle of work for which he has been mentally prepared; such intelligent work is not fatiguing, and he should not be arbitrarily 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. (To Educate the Human Potential, p. 80)

In our Montessori classrooms, we purposefully create a respectful environment where children can fully engage in all kinds of stimulating mental activities. We give them the space and time to tackle “big work”—spending an hour replacing all the knobbed cylinders while blind-folded (without needing to be afraid that another child may make off with one of them!) or passing a whole afternoon writing a story with the small movable alphabet, knowing that in the next morning, the story will still be there to be copied. Montessori children are known for their advanced academic achievements, their ability to write, to read, to do arithmetic before they even enter elementary schools—skills that are honed during child-initiated, uninterrupted working periods.

Ask yourself: would children be able to tackle this type of deep, challenging work if we practiced sharing on demand—as is the case in many non-Montessori day care centers and preschools?

Consider also the subsequent benefits of an environment that protects concentration. Dr. Montessori observed that once children get comfortable in a Montessori environment, once they feel safe and connect with a material, once they concentrate, many common misbehaviors—tantrum, hoarding of toys, uncontrolled and clumsy movement, etc.—disappear:

One of the chief reasons for the spread of our schools has been the visible disappearance of these defects in children as soon as they found themselves in a place where active experience upon their surroundings was permitted, and where free exercise of their powers could nourish their minds. Surrounded by interesting things to do, they could repeat the exercises at will, and went from one spell of concentration to another. Once the children had reached this stage, and could work and focus their minds on something of real interest to them, their defects disappeared. (The Absorbent Mind, p. 199)

Our clear turn-taking rules enable children to feel safe. They allow one child to work, and another to observe. They set the stage for children to concentrate, to help themselves to the mental nourishment their growing brains require. This, in turn, makes them happier, more fulfilled; it supports their mental maturation and health. Happier children are better-behaved children, children who are less likely to act out, throw tantrums, or be overly possessive of classroom materials.

At first glance, the Montessori alternative to on-demand sharing seem counter-intuitive in today’s sharing-focused parenting culture. Yet providing a safe environment, where children can work to their heart’s content free from constant interruptions, actually serves the needs of children. It enables them build their attention spans, to overcome behavioral issues, to develop self-discipline and to master more complex academic materials,. And it ensures healthier, more collaborative peer relationships, and offers a world in which others are not a potential threat, but a potential source of joy.

To Share or Not to Share? (Part 2 of 3)

Part Two of Three: Practicing Voluntary Sharing at Home

In Part One of this blog post series, we discuss our concerns with the conventional view that sharing is an inherent virtue. We differentiated between voluntary sharing for mutual gain, and surrendering under real or implied compulsion. We suggested that adults should not pressure or even encourage children to share on demand, but should instead protect their right to uninterrupted play. In our view, this approach encourages children to view other children as potential playmates, rather than threats, and results in an attitude of genuine goodwill and benevolence towards others.

In Part Two of this article, we detail how such an approach can be put in practice at home, while Part Three outlines our approach at school. Part Three also elaborates on an important additional benefit of protecting uninterrupted play, namely, the ability of the child to enter the deep concentration necessary for meaningful learning.

Practicing Voluntary Sharing at Home and Out in the World

Sharing often comes up at home with siblings, during playdates, or at playgrounds, when two children desire to play with the same toy, at the same time. Often, the children fight and then appeal to an adult to be the arbiter of their disputes. Unfortunately, whatever decision the adult makes during the arbitration, usually at least one child feels hurt and resentful of the other.

As Montessorians, we know that the best way to solve this problem is to not let it come up in the first place! We believe that the solution comes from carefully considering the challenge of sharing ahead of time, and then carefully preparing the environment—physical and human—to set everyone up for success.

Here are some principles we encourage you to consider as you prepare yourself and your home for this parenting challenge:

Be clear on your goal: do you want to encourage voluntary sharing (trading value for value), or do you want to compel children to surrender their toys on demand? Our suggestions in this blog post focus on fostering voluntary interactions to mutual benefit. We want to help children see each other benevolently, to treat one another with respect, and to respect the rights of each child to their things and personal space. If your goals are different, you’ll want to think about different rules than those we outline here.
Clearly differentiate between personal property and community toys. In a home, (just like at school) there are many things that don’t have one clear owner. Instead, many items are family or community property—from books we all can read, to the common arts and crafts supplies, from blocks to balls. Other items belong to one specific person—mom’s iPad, one child’s cuddly animal, another child’s set of hot wheel cars. To foster peaceful interactions, it’s helpful to clearly differentiate between these two categories of things. Here are some ideas to implement this at home:
- Set up clear, separate places for both categories of items. In my house, each of my two children has a cabinet in the family room that holds their personal property. Family toys are stored on a different set of open shelves.
- Be clear when new items enter the home on which category they belong: this cuddly animal is a personal possession; that set of blocks—although received as a birthday gift by one child—is to be used by all children in turn. Often, this clarity is more important than the shelf placement in avoiding fights!
For community toys, support taking long turns. Taking long turns means that when a child is playing with an item, it is his until he is all done with it. Adults don’t impose and enforce time limits. Instead, you set up rules in advance on turn taking. Here’s how this can work out in practice, modeling after the approach we use in our Montessori classrooms:
- A child may only play with one community toy at a time. He can take the toy from the shelf, and he needs to return it to the shelf when he is done. No hoarding! (A side benefit of this rule is that it encourages regular mid-play clean-up and prevents messes of toys on the floor or table!)
- Designate a specific place for the child to put the community toy while he is playing with it. In my house, we used work rugs of different colors for each child when my children were young. I ensured my one-year-old son stayed away from the things my three-year-old daughter had on her pink rug, and encouraged him to put his things on his blue rug. Low tables also work well as designated play spaces.
- Support long turns. This means not setting time limits (“Max, you have five minutes, then it’s Suzie’s turn”). It also means allowing big work to extend beyond normal transition times when possible—e.g., by placing a name card on an unfinished puzzle, instead of requiring it to be put away at bed time.
For personal property, respect a child’s right to dispose of it as he wishes. Never require a child to share a personal item—but also don’t allow insensitive taunting and other rude behavior either.
- Put personal, non-shared items away before friends visit. If your son isn’t ready to share his brand-new truck, then don’t have it in the playroom when friends come over. Instead, put it away in his bedroom or a closet ahead of time. Discuss what should be out and what should be put away before visits: if your child is bought in to the idea that things in the playroom are community toys for the duration of the play date, he’s much less likely to grab a toy away from a visiting child!
- Don’t leave personal, non-sharable items lying around unattended in public places. Often, fights on playgrounds break out when one child leaves a bucket or other item unattended, and another child begins playing with it. In our family, the rule is that if you bring personal property to the park, you may keep it until you are done with it. If you leave it lying around, you signal that it’s ok if others take it. If you prefer others not take it, then you need to put it back in your bag, or bring it to a parent for safekeeping.
Protect your child’s rights when needed; otherwise, sportscast rather than becoming an arbiter. Empower children to self-enforce clear rules you set up in advance—and to identify and articulate the emotions they experience in their encounters with each other.
- Equally support a child’s option to say yes or no when another child wants to join their play or take a toy. This can be hard, when you really would like to see your children play together! It’s tempting to try to guide, to say, “Suzie, I see Max really would like to play with you”, or to ask, “Suzie, could you please share with Max.” Because of the implied moral judgment, and the risk that the child will comply just to please you, it’s much better to instead just sportscast your observations and explain the choices: “Suzie, I see Max would like to join you in playing with the blocks. You may say yes or no, it’s your choice.”
- Protect your child’s turns and property against insensitive takers. If another child tries to grabs your child’s toy against her wishes, politely but firmly protect your child. “Max, Suzie wasn’t done with that yet. She said no when you asked for a turn. I’m going to give this back to Suzie. You may have a turn when Suzie is all done.”
- Help each child identify and articulate their own and the other child’s emotion—without pressuring either child to change their actions. This can be hard when you are faced with one or two children who have unpleasant emotions! But it’s really important: by giving children words to express their emotions, you help them learn to introspect into their own emotional states, and to view others as sentient human beings, too. Say things like, “Max, I see you are very upset that you may not have the truck right now. It’s hard to wait, isn’t it?” or “Suzie, I see Max really would like to have this toy. When you are all done, I think Max would be happy if you could find him and let him know that the truck is back in the toy box and ready for his turn.”
- Explain your house rules to other children and adults who visit. Different people have different approaches to the topic of sharing. It’s usually better to explain your rules ahead of time, rather than try to intervene when conflicts have already started!
- Explain to your children that other families may have different rules, or that other rules may apply in public places. Especially as children get older, and go to play in other homes, or are out of your constant direct supervision on a playground, it’s good to counsel them on being observant of others’ different expectations. For instance, while extremely long turns may be ok at home, it’s impolite to hog the swing at the park for a whole afternoon. So just tell your child ahead of time that at the park, we have limited times on certain pieces of equipment, when others are waiting—because that’s the considerate, polite thing to do in a shared, public space.

Being very clear on these rules is important as you set up your prepared environment. When children are very young the clarity of the rules makes it much easier for them to accept and comply. Clarity is also important with older children, if this is a change in how you approach sharing in your home.

As children internalize these implicit ideas—community property, long turns, personal property—you’ll find that things work much more naturally. Now that my children are five and seven and we have lived these ideas for a few years, we aren’t as strict about the one toy at a time rule, for example, nor do they need the rugs to designate who is playing with what. They’ve just internalized the need to respect each other’s space and property. (I would, however, bring these rules back if fighting over toys became an issue!)

Often, children—especially when they get older, say four and up—like to play together with the same toys, and that’s totally fine: recently, at a playground, my four-year-old happily shared one of his trucks with a boy we didn’t know. My son explained to him, “You can have one of my two trucks because it’s more fun to play together with someone!” Just make sure that the playing together is voluntary: it should always be ok for one child to say no if another one wants to join her play and she isn’t ready to play together just then.

Some parents may be worried about children becoming self-absorbed and oblivious to the needs of others if they aren’t compelled to share early on. Experience in hundreds of Montessori schools, and from many families’ personal experience shows that precisely the opposite is true. Children whose right to play uninterrupted is protected, who don’t need to constantly defend themselves from others who threaten take their things, are better able to relate to other children, to learn true empathy and to practice kindness and respect towards each other.

In my family, we have been playing by these rules since my daughter was not quite three, and my son, not quite one: my children have never been compelled to surrender their toys on demand—not at home, not at the playground and not at their Montessori school. Yet they are both very caring, kind, friendly children—children who are quite adept at reading social clues, who can (usually) wait their turn, who speak up for their needs, and who have good relationships with their classmates and strong friendships for their age. Last summer, when we were on an extended play date with my daughter and four other six-year-old girls, one of my daughter’s friends hadn’t brought her bike along. This girl was walking alone as the other four girls were riding along happily on their bikes. After a short while, my daughter—who knew I would never ask her to share her bike—noticed her friend’s sad face and realized the friend felt left out. She got off her bike, took of her helmet, and invited her friend to take a turn.

This is true empathy and benevolence—it is voluntary sharing based on personal values rather a compulsory surrender of those same values. As Montessori educators, we are convinced it grows from respecting children’s right to uninterrupted play, not from adult-enforced or even adult-endorsed acts of sharing.

Why not give this approach a try with your child?

To Share or Not to Share? (Part 1 of 3)

Part One of Three: Sharing vs. Surrendering: What Are We Teaching?

We’ve all been there: our two- or four-year-old is at a playground, happily scooping sand into a bucket, when another child approaches and takes one of the sand toys he has been using. Our child is upset. He cries, “I was using it! He took it from me!” and tries to take the toy back. In such a case, what we you do?

Conventional wisdom tells us we should encourage our child to “be the bigger person” and give the toy to the other child.

But what then do we do in the reverse situation, if our child is the one who grabs another child’s toy? In that case, what constitutes being “the bigger person?”

Many conscientious parents I speak with recognize the need to teach their children not to grab toys being used by other children. They explain to their child that there’s something improper about expecting another child to give up his toy—they highlight, for instance, that the toy belongs to the other child, or in the case of communal toys at a park, that “he had it first, so you have to wait until he’s done before you can play with it.” The underlying principle is that you can’t just take something that rightfully belongs to someone else.

And yet, in the reverse situation, the same parents often don’t reinforce the “no taking” principle. Instead of protecting their child’s play, they encourage (and sometimes admonish) their child to give up the toy in question.

What underlies this difference between how parents approach other children and how they approach their own? Part of the issue may be that it can be hard to tell someone else’s child that they need to take a certain action. But I don’t think this practical challenge is all there is to it—I’ve seen the difference in many cases where it would be quite easy to gently encourage another child not to take a toy.

My impression is that the difference in approach often expresses a hidden belief that there is something noble in giving one’s possessions to someone else who wants it more—the “be the bigger person” sentiment I noted earlier. Parents don’t necessarily expect such nobility from other children, but they push their child to share because they believe they must hold their own child to a higher standard.

Is it really true that the noble, elevated response is to share—and if so, why, and in which context? In our culture today, the propriety of sharing on demand is taken for granted. Most parents I observe at playgrounds or at play dates expect their children to give up the toys they are playing with when another child becomes interested in them. This adult endorsement of sharing also is common in many daycare and preschool settings.

Sharing vs. Surrendering: Concepts and Moral Implications

Why is it important to teach our children to share? When I inquire, many conscientious parents I speak with cite two inter-related considerations. First is the fact that they want their children to grow up to be socially-adept, happy adults able to have healthy relationships. The willingness to share is, in effect, treated as an important marker of other good social skills, skills such as being able to sustain friendships, being kind, considerate and respectful, and generally having benevolent, positive interactions with others.

The second reason is the view that its important to teach their children to be altruistic—i.e. to be mindful of others who may have greater needs than they do, and to choose to subordinate their own needs to those others. If a child on a playground is having a temper tantrum, for instance, parents encourage their child to give up the toy because the other child is more upset and (by implication) want it more. In many cases, parents will force their child to give up the toy, but the general aim seems to be to develop in children the willingness to voluntarily embrace this practice.

While these two goals—to encourage benevolent, healthy social relationships, and to inculcate an altruistic impulse—seem superficially related, we don’t believe they really are. In our view, pushing sharing on demand may help achieve the second, but it actually undermines the first.

To understand why this is, it is helpful to clarify what we mean by “sharing,” as that term is often used as a “package-deal” that combines two very different ideas—voluntary sharing because one values another person and one’s relationship with them more than the possession one relinquishes, and surrendering under compulsion, because of either physical force or moral intimidation.

We take voluntary sharing to mean giving something one has to another person because one gains some benefit out of that immediate interaction (say, the ability to play with another child, rather than playing alone), or because one values the relationship with the other person (say, a friend or a spouse). Sharing, in that sense, is a trade of values, a win-win interaction: while the other person receives the physical good, the sharer receives an intangible benefit—a smile on the face of one’s spouse, a playmate to join in one’s games, the knowledge one has made friend’s day.

In contrast, in surrendering under compulsion, one sacrifices a value, either under the threat of physical force, or under the pressure to conform to societal norms or moral expectations, without getting a commensurate value in return.

Our children look up to us as their parents and teachers, and, generally, they want to please us. During the early years, we are their moral compass: they aspire to do as we do, to live up to our expectations. A strongly worded request by us that they share their toy or even a look or a sigh of disapproval if they don’t, can be very effective in getting them to comply to our wishes.

Rather than abusing that power to impel behavior, we should ask ourselves: in any given situation, are they sharing voluntarily, for the right reasons—or are they in fact surrendering under an implied compulsion, because the want to please us, because they don’t want to disappoint, because they dread our disapproval or other negative consequences imposed by us?

A young child who feels compelled by adults to surrender of his values, far from being empathetic to others, actually often comes to see others as a negative. Instead of viewing another child as a source of joy, a potential playmate or someone they can choose to collaborate with, they begin to view other children as threats, as intruders who may take their toys whenever they feel like it. To the child pressured to share, his toy is important: while it may not be his property in a legal sense, he certainly views it as his own while he plays with it.

If we make him surrender his toy mid-play, we unintentionally send the message that his needs don’t matter; that his play is unimportant; that anybody can take his things at will, and that adults morally expect him to surrender his things to anyone who demands them. He may react by being angry, maybe even becoming physically aggressive—or alternatively by learning to just give up and passively retreat whenever conflict arises. (This passivity is often mis-identified as being a “good little boy” or “good little girl”, but in fact it represents an arresting development of the child’s self.)

The damage is not limited to the child whose toy is taken. The child taking the toy, if that behavior is endorsed, also learns unintended lessons: she learns that it is ok to take things from others against their will, without asking for permission. She learns that she just needs to claim “he isn’t sharing”, and like magic, an adult will take her side and give her whatever she wants. She certainly doesn’t learn to respect the rights and personal space of the other child, to empathize with his feelings, or to control her impulses to grab things!

Our point here is not that sharing is bad, it is just that sharing isn’t an absolute, automatic good. We must assess sharing depending on the context and the underlying motivation—that is, must identify whether it is voluntary sharing for mutual benefit (whether physical or spiritual), or surrendering under compulsion. Here’s how one author puts the point:

The concept of sharing means choosing to let someone else use something you have or that is yours. It is a morally neutral concept… When it comes to values and moral values, the important factor in an act of sharing is with whom you share and why you share it. Should your daughter share her toys with her friends so they can play together? What about a bully at school to win his approval? I trust most parents who would rush to praise the sharing of toys between friends find it hard to tell their child, ‘You shared your homework with the class bully again! You’re such a good sharer!…’ Sharing is really about the personal connection and exchange of values (spiritual or otherwise) between two individuals. That is not something that can be forced or taught.

A child who knows his activities are cherished and protected by the adults around comes to view interactions with other children as an opportunity for voluntary cooperation and mutually enjoyable experiences—and as part of that, when he genuinely cares about another person, he naturally finds himself expressing that feeling in action (often including spontaneous sharing). In contrast, a child who is actively pressured to share comes to treat the resulting praise as an external reward that supplants his inner motives—a “moral sticker” of sorts, which he seeks to earn by doing something counter-intuitive to him in order to win the praise of adults. He comes to like the pat on the head, or to crave the sense of moral superiority, that being a sharer gives him. As a consequence, he may actually find it much harder to develop the voluntary impulse of goodwill that many parents love to see in their children.

Notice, when you think about it, that sharing on demand (“surrendering” in our terminology), the way it is typically encouraged in children, is in fact not at all well aligned with healthy, adult social interaction. When adults share, it’s usually with people (or causes) we value, and with objects we aren’t using right that moment. We may let a friend borrow a fancy dress, usually on a night we don’t need it. We may eagerly pass a book on to a friend to read, after we are done reading it. We may even share something in a situation where we do want or need it, generally because we care more about the person or cause we’re supporting than the possession we’re forgoing. We certainly would not just walk up to a stranger and grab the phone he is talking on; if we did, he’d probably call the police, rather than hand it over to us!

In summary, our view is that sharing is not in itself a virtue we should cultivate. Strong social skills are not something children learn by surrendering toys mid-play under direct or implied compulsion. Instead, we should extend to children the same respect for their belongings as we expect for our own. In so doing, far from making our children anti-social, we help them to view other children as potential playmates, as fellow human beings with something meaningful to offer, rather than unwanted sharers who may interrupt them at will and take their things, all with the adults’ blessing.

How does this approach work in practice, at school and at home? Click here to read Part 2, which discusses how to implement this approach at home, and Part 3, which describes how we handle sharing in the Montessori classroom.

A Visual Tour of the Parent & Child Montessori Infant Experience

When you enroll with your baby in LePort’s Infant Parent & Child class (programs typically known as Mommy & Me class–but we often say parent, so that moms and dads know they are welcome!), together, you enter a beautiful, peaceful environment we call a “Nido,” the Italian word for “nest”, with which Dr. Montessori described the infant classroom environment. Here, you will find a room carefully prepared just for babies. All activities are placed low to the floor on sturdy wooden furniture sized just right for babies. Very young babies will be offered mirrors, mobiles and rattles, while older babies can move about freely exploring the room, the materials and other babies.

During each Mommy and Me class, a mom, dad, grandparent or nanny and their baby jointly explore this exciting, new environment. Your baby can enjoy belly time on the padded floor. She can carry the fun, natural materials to a table or the floor to play with to her heart’s content. The babies love all the freedom and are encouraged to examine their classroom environment at their own pace, without being hurried along by adults. Sometimes infants will watch each other work, learning through observation, while parents, in turn, observe and wonder.

Because babies crave movement, our classrooms are equipped with durable, safe climbing structures, such as pull-up bars, a step bridge for crawling babies, and a carpeted stairs with railing for children already walking. Your infant can practice climbing up and down as long as he likes until he has satisfied his need to explore his body’s amazing powers–and you get to watch and enjoy with him or her!

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When slightly older babies (those able to sit up independently) become hungry in class, they come to our low “weaning tables” to feed themselves snack provided by parents. A low table (instead of a high chair) allows them to start on self-feeding at an early age. Together, we set up snack with placemats, small open glasses and plates or napkins. This is a great time for parents or other caregivers attending the Mommy and Me class to talk with the Montessori guide about independence skills for babies, and how to set up your home to foster independence!

Each Parent & Child class includes a short circle time, in which parents and babies may choose to participate (or not!). Circle time often includes a song or a few, depending on the group and the day. During circle, or during snack and free exploration, the Montessori guide will introduce a short topic of the week (e.g., self-feeding or responsive language development), and provide you with a handout full of ideas on how to implement Montessori at home.

In addition to indoor exploration, our Mommy and Me class offers outdoor time each day on our specially designed playgrounds made just for babies. Parents use this time to ask questions, get to know each other better, and enjoy watching their children move about outdoors before singing a “good-bye” song.

The Importance of a Five-Day School Program

Watching your young child grow up so quickly can be bittersweet—one minute you’re celebrating his first steps and his first words, then you blink and—gasp!—your child is ready for his first day of school!

When the time comes for a child to start preschool, parents often wonder: May it be best if I enrolled my child part-time? He’s still so young; there’s plenty of time for school! Does he really need to go five days a week? Isn’t it better to let him stay home a few days during the week? I’d love to still have him with me, too!

We understand that it may be hard to let your three- or four-year-old child go, especially if you have the luxury of being able to be home with her a day or two a week! Many of us at LePort are parents ourselves, and we totally get how precious it is to be able to enjoy time with your child. It would be much easier for us to offer three- and two-day schedules, like many of our competitors do, and avoid this questions altogether.

So why do we insist on a five-day schedule for three-year-olds? The answer is simple: In our experience, preschoolers need the consistency of attending school every day to benefit optimally from their Montessori experience.

Part-time students don’t derive the full benefit from the Montessori environment as they never really get settled down in a consistent routine. I once worked at a Montessori school where primary students were given the option of attending school part-time for just three days a week. After a while, I began to observe a great difference between the part-time students and the full-time students who came to school five days a week: The part-time students appeared to spend much of their time aimlessly wandering around the classroom, while the full-time students were actively engaged in lessons on the floor or at a table, working independently, working with a classmate, or working with a teacher.

In Montessori, we empower children to choose work on their own and to concentrate on their work. This voluntary choice, this child-initiated concentration is at the heart of the amazing academic achievements that astound adults, and one of the key aspects of motivation in Montessori. However, the part-time students I observed rarely had this drive; they didn’t seem to know what to do, or which lessons or materials to select. Their days often went by without even one episode of concentration.

Young children thrive when their daily lives are full of consistent routines. They do best when they can predict what is going to happen next. This kind of consistency happens when a child goes to school for five consecutive days in a row each week versus attending school for only two or three days a week. It is hard for a child to figure out their routine when they go to school every other day or for just a few days in a row!

Part-time students have a harder time transitioning to school, and often need to re-adjust after three or four days away. Part-time students, who attended for three consecutive days, then took four days off, often struggled at the beginning of each week—almost like being new to school again. And, of course, once they were finally settled after a few days, it was time again for them to have another long break before returning back to class. (Ask any teacher what the first days of school are like after a long break such as winter break or spring break. Chances are, teachers will tell you that those first days back to school the students have to be given time to get back into their classroom routine. Unfortunately, part-time students face that kind of transition every week.)

Part-time students feel left out of the full-timers close classroom communities. The part-time students in my class also appeared to be less likely to have strong bonds with their classmates. Why? They were missing out on important events or lessons that were given on the days they were off. Their full-time peers tended to gravitate toward other children who were there each day, children they could rely on to be there to play and work with. Disconnected from the rhythm of the classroom, and implicitly perceived as being less reliable (because often absent) playmates, the part-timers sadly lived at the edges of our solid classroom community—despite my best efforts to integrate them anew each week.

In contrast with these struggles faced by part-time students, after an initial adjustment period full-time students transition into their school routine every morning with no further separation anxiety. They are able to come into class confidently; they are more likely to be motivated and to be able to choose work on their own, and more prepared to work throughout the day independently. Because they felt at home at school, because they knew the routine, because they quickly became an integral part of the classroom community, full-time students usually are more self-sufficient and need less adult approval or assistance. They more actively socialize with friends during lunch and recess and move about their day with confidence and joy.

The worry and anxiety that sometimes occur when a young child starts attending school for the first time will dissipate once they are able to establish a routine and come to the realization that school is an enjoyable place where learning and friendships occur. The five-day-a-week schedule enables students to feel safe and relaxed in the classroom and aids them in forming strong bonds with their teachers and friends. We realize that it may be challenging for you to let your child attend school every day, yet we hope that you are willing support him in this new phase of his life by sending him at least five mornings a week, giving him the consistency and community he needs to flourish.

A sneak-peak into the Parent & Child Toddler Class

When you enroll with your child in LePort’s Toddler Parent & Child class, you enter a beautiful room where everything has a place and a purpose. It’s an environment carefully prepared to enable toddlers to fulfill their urgent need to act independently and to explore with all their senses. Everything is at the child’s level, on wooden furniture sized just right for toddlers. Your child will be excited to take the many interesting materials from the shelves and explore them with you. Parent & Child classes are held in the same Montessori toddler environments that our 18 to 36 month old students enjoy in our drop-off Montessori programs.

As you arrive to class with your child, your guide may invite you to a short get-to-know-you circle time. Then, your child and you are free to explore the many fun activities! Many children choose to walk around, or observe other children; others jump right in and pick materials from the shelves. Follow your child’s lead: as Montessori guides, we believe that children have a keen sense of what they need to learn, and that our role is to support their chosen explorations!

As your child begins to explore materials, from puzzles to arts and crafts and practical activities, like watering a flower, take the time to observe and wonder at your child’s curiosity and creativity. Your Montessori guide will circle around the room, give mini-lessons to children, and explain to you the relevance of what your child is doing: what she is learning and how you can support similar learning experiences at home.

Children get to choose anything that interests them, from a wide range of items accessible on low shelves. Try to step back, and let your child be the leader! The process is the purpose here, not perfect results and wall-worthy art: it’s ok if things get a little messy, if paint splatters. We have cleaning supplies in the room because toddlers delight in working with us to clean things up.

Since toddlers are sensorial learners, we offer a variety of mediums to explore, such as play dough, easel painting with tempera paint, water color paints and and water tubs, nature baskets to discover, plants to take care of, as well as many seasonal items to explore.

At some point during the Parent & Child class, either at the beginning or toward the end, your guide will invite you and your child to join her for a short circle time experience. She may quickly explain a Montessori idea, provide you with a weekly hand out that provides guidance on how to apply Montessori ideas at home, read a short story or sing a song or two . . . or more if the children wish. As in our full-day classes, circle time is voluntary: don’t worry if your child is deeply engaged in an activity and not ready to transition since it’s totally ok for him to complete his work and join circle time later or not at all!

After exploring the room and optional circle time, the children are, of course, hungry! The Montessori guide will invite your child to have a very social snack experience at one of our low tables. Just like in our drop-off Montessori program, we encourage the children to be active participants in getting the snack ready by putting plates on the table, serving food and pouring water. They delight in the feeling of competence and independence that this active participation gives them!

Outdoor play time is an important part of each class where children get to climb, swing, play house, dig in sand and ride on wheeled vehicles while parents get a chance to get to know each other better. Your Montessori guide is also available during outside time, as well as throughout the class, for you to ask questions. Use that time: whether you want to know about fostering independence in eating, or toilet learning, or how to prevent and manage tantrums or sibling rivalries, your guide is there to be your parenting resource, full of experience and Montessori-inspired ideas to add to your toolkit!

How to help your four-year-old transition into Montessori

Some parents who discover Montessori when their child is four years old are concerned about joining the mixed-age primary room mid-stream. “Will my child be playing catch-up? Some of the other four-year-olds are already reading ”, you might wonder. “I’ve just learned about Montessori, and I see how wonderful this environment could be for my child. She’s already four, though. Did we miss the boat?”

The short answer: Four is not too late! We’ve seen many four-year-olds blossom in our schools, just taking off in their personal development after joining our classrooms, and your child can, too.

It is true that younger is better when it comes to joining a Montessori program. Starting as a toddler or a young three-year-old gives children the best opportunity to benefit from the enriched, carefully prepared classroom environment. As Montessori educators, we understand that the time between birth and age six is the most critical in a human being’s development. During this stage of growth, children go through rapid changes and develop the most important aspects of their personality and intellect.

Dr. Maria Montessori discovered that much of this change occurs through active experiences children have with their environment — at home, outside, or at school. Children between the ages of three and six go through what Dr. Montessori called “sensitive periods,” periods where they are naturally primed to absorb skills and knowledge in a wide range of areas. During these sensitive periods children can, for example, effortlessly acquire language skills, develop what is now called “executive function skills”(such as sustaining concentration, learning self-control, and strengthen their working memory), learn to interact graciously with others, and refine all their senses.

While some of these sensitive periods begin at birth, four-year-old children are still in the midst of this amazing time. We regularly see four-year-olds join our class and become drawn to the materials on our shelves; they quickly begin “working” and become acclimated to their new environment. With the right support at home and at school, you’ll be surprised by how much joy both you and your child will get from his Montessori experience!

How to help your four-year-old transition joyfully into the Montessori environment

1. Enroll your child for five full days per week

By the time your child reaches four and is no longer napping, she is ready to attend school for five full days per week. A child who attends school for five days each week has the greatest opportunity for consistent spontaneous learning and will feel safe and relaxed in the classroom. The full day schedule (8:30 am to 3:00 pm) also allows the child to have more time to work through the materials during the morning and afternoon work cycles, and to receive many lessons from her teacher.

This consistent time is especially important for your four-year-old who is new to Montessori. Dr. Montessori observed that many issues that children struggle with, from temper tantrums to uncoordinated movement, from disobedience to physical aggression, disappeared when children are allowed freedom in an environment suited to their needs. Often, a child would find some activity that spoke to him, become immersed in it, and repeat it over and over again. Once a child connected to an engaging activity, he became happier, more curious to explore more learning materials in class, and even became kinder and more benevolent to his peers.

For an older child, this process may take some time; he may need to wander, try different activities, and observe his peers, before he discovers something that would like to work with. By enrolling your child for five full days, you can give him that luxury of time, and help him get the most out of his two Montessori primary years.

2. Be open to keeping your child in Montessori through the 3rd year of Primary

The third year in Montessori Primary (the equivalent of traditional kindergarten) is the year when much of the foundational skill development solidifies, and many children suddenly experience huge growth spurts in writing, reading, math and overall confidence.

Since your child would be joining during the second year of Montessori Primary, it is even more important for him to get to experience the third year. From age four to five, he’ll be working hard on many foundational skills, from fine motor control to concentration, from learning to observe carefully to mastering multi-step processes. If you keep him in Montessori for only one year, he’ll never get to experience the astounding mastery he will attain from his hard work. He’ll likely be just at the cusp of reading, just about ready to tackle the fun advanced math materials, and eager to move from being the rookie to becoming a classroom leader.

Parents are often amazed at what they see during the kindergarten year. Please do consider giving your child this experience! While we do not, of course, require you to sign on for two years now, we do want to caution you against viewing Montessori as a one-year, pre-k experience aimed at getting your child ready for traditional kindergarten. That’s not how Montessori works, and we wouldn’t want you to sign on with wrong expectations!

3. Learn about Montessori

The best way to help your child thrive in a Montessori environment is to better understand Montessori yourself. We make this easy for you: When your child joins our program, you’ll receive eight short, one-page handouts explaining key aspects of Montessori, and suggesting simple ways you can align what you do at home with what your child experiences at school. Throughout the school year, we offer Parent Education Events, where we discuss a wide range of topics: from how to support independence to learning math in preschool. Our blog also offers plenty of helpful articles. Your child’s teacher is also a great resource: Our trained head teachers are available via email or in person after school to answer all kinds of Montessori-related questions you may have and to help you understand how you can best support your child.

4. Support independence at home

“Never help the child do something that he thinks he can do for himself” — this is one of Dr. Montessori’s most famous quotes! Our classrooms and activities are set up so your four-year-old child will quickly learn to take care of his own needs such as getting dressed without help, pouring his own drink, and preparing snacks. Children love this new-found independence, and you can help your child feel just as empowered at home. Here is a blog post that describes some simple changes you can make to support your child’s budding independence at home.

5. Don’t compare your child with other children in the classroom

One of the beauties of Montessori is the profound respect for the individuality we give each child. Montessori teachers do not compare their students with each other. We know that your four-year-old may need some time to get used to his new school, and that it would not help at all to compare him to other four-year-olds who had started before him. Each Montessori teacher allows her students to develop at their own pace, and she trusts that the Montessori classroom will enable her students to reach their individual potential at their own unique pace.

We encourage you to take the same long-term perspective: Be patient and do not rush your child. Don’t put performance pressure on her by comparing her, even subtly, to the other children in the class. Yes, it can be hard to see other four-year-olds reading, while your new Montessori child may be preparing snack or working with the color tablets instead. Just know that by stepping back and letting her discover and explore her surroundings, you are enabling her to do very important foundational work. Once she’s ready, she may just surprise you with how quickly she “explodes” into writing and reading!

6. Do not introduce other academics at home

With today’s competitive environment, it’s easy to feel that your four-year-old needs to learn her letters or start to work on addition facts. Some parents become anxious and to want to accelerate their child’s learning by providing extra academics. Often, well-meaning, conscientious parents buy workbooks for their children to complete or enroll their preschoolers in structured academic programs, such as Kumon. We strongly advise against this!

Trust that your child’s teacher is introducing your child to academic skills that are developmentally appropriate for her. Support what your child is doing at school and do not introduce other academics at home that are contrary to what your child is learning at school. Enrolling in Kumon, making children complete worksheets, teaching letter names, writing letters and counting on fingers will only confuse your child! If you want to do more to foster literacy, this blog post provides some Montessori-consistent ideas you can follow at home.

7. Read, read, read at home

If you want to support your child’s academic development, the best way to do this is to read with your child. Read a lot! Read a variety of books, discuss what you read, ask her questions about what you’ve read, follow along with your finger under text as you read, and explain vocabulary. That way, when she does finally master her letter sounds, she’ll be able to move along much faster. Find suggestions for setting up an environment that fosters literacy here, and view our thoughts on selecting books (and actual book lists), in this blog post.

We hope these points helped you understand how giving your child a Montessori education is a true gift that will last her a lifetime, and that with your enthusiastic support, your four-year-old will thrive in her new Montessori environment.

Five Montessori Secrets for Literacy

“The child’s explosion into writing is closely connected with his special sensitivity for language, and this was operative at the time when he began to speak. By the age of five and a half or six, this sensitivity has ceased to exist; so it is clear that writing can be learned with joy and enthusiasm only before that age. Children older than this have lost the special opportunity which nature grants them of learning to write without making special and conscious efforts of application and will.”—Dr. Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind, p. 173

Parents today are bombarded with educational toys and resources intended to help children learn to read. There are toy computers that talk about letters and let children trace letters; letters to put on the fridge that say their names; pull-along toys with a toe for each letter. There are workbooks for preschoolers, early readers, and, of course, the trusted alphabet song. Many agencies, from NAEYC to not-for-profits like Ready-to-Read, offer in-depth advice on early reading.

I bought some of these types of toys, and received others as gifts when my children were young. I was eager to help my children learn to read: I am a passionate reader myself, and write frequently as part of my work at LePort. Yet now that my children have been in a Montessori environment for several years, and have benefited from the Montessori way of teaching writing and reading, I’ve come to doubt the approach embodied in the popular approaches to literacy, and see that there’s a lot of added baggage that can sometimes even delay reading and writing development. If I could go back, I’d approach toys in particular very differently (and save a lot of money in the process!)

The Montessori literacy program is carefully designed to help children acquire the component skills of writing and reading. While the program is intended for a classroom environment, the underlying principles apply equally to nurturing literacy at home. (Note: if your child already attends our Montessori program, he’ll be learning most of this at school. Your time at home may be better spend on other activities that lay the groundwork for reading and writing—such as excursions, cooking and story-time together! In fact, we recommend against buying Montessori language materials for your home, if your child is in our Montessori program.)

Focus literacy games on sounds, not letter names. What does a child need to learn to be able to write or read: that the letter “a” has a name, pronounced “aye”, or that it makes a sound, “æ” in the international phonetic alphabet, like in “apple” or “cat”?From a literacy perspective, the answer is obvious: to write and read, children need to learn the sounds letters make, not their names. Cee-aye-tee”, no matter how fast you say it, never blends together to make the sound “cat”. Yet most commercial products focus on teaching letter names. At best, they introduce sounds and names simultaneously, with emphasis on the name of the letters.In Montessori, in contrast, we start literacy by teaching sounds exclusively. ecause we don’t focus on letter names, the process is much less confusing for children, and it enables them to more quickly begin to write and read.Here’s a great way to start on letter sounds, suitable for children of about 2 ½ years or older: Play a sound “I spy” game. Collect a few items with different beginning sounds (a fork, a cup, a napkin, for example). Place each item in your hand, and focus your child’s interest on the sound at the beginning of the word: “I spy something in my hand that starts with fffff: a f f f fork.” Once your child has mastered the sounds, you can advance to playing real “I spy”, asking them to look around and find items in their environment that start with the letter sound you mention. This activity is great, because it teaches phonemic awareness in a playful way—and you can do it anywhere, not toys required!
Teach lower-case letters—and engage hand and mind at the same time. Most commercial materials and much public school instruction starts with capital print letters. This is contrary to what a child actually needs: most print children will encounter is in lower case, as is most of the writing they’ll do (just look at this blog post!) That’s why, in our preschool program, we introduce lower-case letters first, and transition to capitals only later.Children in Montessori learn to associate letter sounds with letter shapes using a material called the Montessori Sandpaper Letters. Here’s how this lesson works: a teacher takes three letters with varying shapes – like a, t, and s – and introduces them with what’s called a Montessori Three-Period Lesson.
1. Naming Period: “This is ‘a’.” The teacher slowly traces the letter as she says the sound. She then gives the child the chance to do the same: he traces the letter with his two writing fingers, as he says the sound. By tracing, looking and saying the sound, we engage all senses in learning—and in addition to visually recognizing the letter, his hand learns the movement to form it, something he won’t get from just manipulating magnetic letters or even cutting out newsprint.
2. Recognition and Association: “Give me ‘a’.” To check the child’s understanding, the teacher will play a game of asking for a letter by its sound, guiding the child to hand it to her, place it on his head, put it at the edge of the table, and so on.
3. Recall: “What sound is this?” Only after the child has shown he can identify the letter, does the teacher ask her to say its sound.
If your child cannot attend Montessori school, then buying a set of Montessori Sandpaper Letters may be a great investment. I know of no better way of integrating the learning of sounds with letters symbol, through multiple sense modalities in unison (touch, sight, sound).

If your child is in our Montessori primary program, we strongly recommend against having materials like the Sandpaper Letters at home: our teachers are trained to give the lessons at optimal stages of development, and by keeping the materials exclusive to school, we keep them special and help heighten your child’s motivation. What you can do at home, though, is provide materials for them to practice writing—such as an unlined chalkboard where they can practice writing letters, and lots of paper to draw and write on, including, for older children, story writing paper.
Separate handwriting from word-building. For a child to write a word, he needs to combine two separate skills: he needs to segment the word into sounds, represented by letters—and he needs to have the motor skills to write these letters on a piece of paper.Often, children can associate sounds with letters long before they can easily form the letters: their conceptual understanding of language is more advanced than their motor skills.That’s why in the Montessori program, children first “write” by building words with the Montessori Moveable Alphabet, a set of wooden letters that a child can arrange in different orders. They make words by placing the letters on a rug. This enables them to practice putting sounds together to make words—separated from the more challenging task of forming the letters with a pencil.If your child will not attend a Montessori program (e.g., if you are planning on homeschooling, or if he attends a play-based preschool program), a Moveable Alphabet may also be a good investment for home. You can also buy pdf versions of a number of good Montessori language materials at Montessori for Everyone.
Prepare the hand for writing with physical exercises. Often, children who enter kindergarten struggle with handwriting because they lack the fine motor skills needed to properly control a pencil. That’s why, in Montessori, we are so passionate about all the motor activities in our Practical Life and Sensorial areas: Children need to cut with scissors; they need to paint, to sew, to peel eggs, to wash tables; they need to build towers, hold puzzles by little knobs and carry big materials. These indirect preparatory materials strengthen shoulder, arm, wrist and finger muscles! The Montessori Metal Insets then help children joyfully master full pencil control: as they trace the inside and outside of the shapes, and color them in with careful, parallel lines, they have fun creating art, and are imperceptibly and steadily improving their pencil control.At home, you can help by making sure your child spends a lot of time physically active. Limit screen time (or eliminate it entirely!) Instead, have your child work with you in the kitchen, in the garden or in the garage. Offer free-form art materials; Mandalas are also a good proxy for metal insets for slightly older children, as they offer a creative way to trace and then color shapes. Invest in unstructured building materials (Legos, Citiblocs, Zoobs) that require finger dexterity.
Select appealing, phonetic reading materials, not sight-word books. Most commercially available reading programs are sight-word based: they include many words with phonograms—multi-letter combinations to represent sounds such as “oo”, “ea”, “igh” or “ch”. hildren who have just learned to read phonetically are stumped by these words, unless they are “pre-taught” as memorized sight words. In Montessori, we don’t use such books, and neither should you at home! Instead, start reading by making it a game to read and act out what we call “command cards”: write small action instructions on a piece of paper, and have your child do the action—such as “hop”, “jump”, “run”, “skip” and so on. e careful to use only words that are phonetic—i.e., words you can sound out with just short vowel and regular consonant sounds. When your child is ready to progress to books, invest in early readers that are phonetic. The best series we have found is published by Flyleaf Publishing. It includes very short, purely phonetic books for emergent readers, as well as the decodable literature library, which deliberately introduce one or two phonograms at a time. In our Montessori programs, we introduce children to these books when they demonstrate readiness—usually by about age five, sometimes even sooner. We practice phonograms with the Montessori materials (such as phonogram Sandpaper Letters, the phonogram Moveable Alphabets, and the Phonogram Object Box), then provide children with the matching Books to Remember book.

With this careful approach, most of our Montessori students are strong readers by the time they graduate from the third year of our Montessori program (the equivalent of traditional kindergarten.) They read real stories; they write multi-sentence compositions in cursive; most importantly, they see themselves as readers and writers, and love to learn.

If you are working with your child at home, you may find more details on these and similar ideas in Montessori Read and Write, a well-written book about Montessori-inspired language activities for children from toddler age to early elementary; it is out of print, but you can usually find used copies on Amazon.

The Value of Unstructured Time (Or: What to Do Instead of TV)

I recently wrote a blog post about the potential harm to young children from excessive screen time. The post led to a lot of online discussion, and I noticed that two comments came up frequently: What would I do to keep my children entertained without a screen? And: What if there is nothing more productive for them to do than use an iPad—wouldn’t it better to have a quality app than boredom and whining?

For some well-meaning, busy parents, screens allow children to pass time without demanding attention, and serve as a helpful way to fill time where parents can’t be 100% focused on their children. Our focus at LePort is primarily on what is best for the child, but we’re always sympathetic to the reality that we as parents also have needs (including down time, opportunities to rejuvenate ourselves, and long lists of practical tasks that must be completed).

There are also families for whom screen time isn’t an issue because the children are simply too busy! They are enrolled in an ambitious number of after-school activities: soccer, dance or gymnastics, choir classes or instrument lessons, art workshops or theater groups, or after-school academic programs, such as preschool Kumon or language classes.

We believe that in both family situations, the children miss out on a centrally important value: unstructured time. To put the point in a deliberately strong way, children need boredom. The self-initiated effort to solve boredom leads to creative thinking. Children benefit from having to find a way to entertain themselves, to just hang out with siblings and friends and make up games, time to play, to build, to draw, time to think and dream.

Why unstructured time is important

A lot has written about the importance of unstructured time; just google “the value of unstructured time for children” to read many articles. A good, rather detailed article is The Play Deficit, by Peter Gray, one of the most fervent advocates of free play learning. (We don’t agree with everything Dr. Gray advocates; as Montessorians, we believe there needs to be more thought given to preparing the environment that children interact in and the ultimate content of what they learn, as against Dr. Gray’s advocacy of unschooling, but we do agree with his assessment of the importance of child-led activity and the need for unstructured time.)

There are many reasons to ensure children have unstructured time, ideally in the company of other children in a mixed-age setting. Here are a few to consider:

Acquiring a sense of self. Many adults are disappointed at the lack of passion and drive many teenagers and even young adults exhibit. They go to college, yet don’t know what to do with their lives. But how could they, if their “self” never had room to blossom? All too often, adults set the agenda for most of a child’s waking hours, from a tightly-scheduled preschool or school schedule, to adult-led youth sports and after-school enrichment classes. To individualize themselves and find their own identity, children need regular practice in making choices, and unstructured time within the right type of environment offers just this practice.
Learning to interact with other people and develop social skills. In adult-led settings, whether school or organized after-school activities, children rarely have the opportunity to freely interact with each other. Yet this type of child-to-child interaction, free from adult direction, is exactly what they need to figure out how to make friends, to learn how their behaviors (being bossy, pushing others, sulking) affects others and their ability to play with them. Of course, adults should be there to help the child interpret and process the experience—but the key is that the child actually gets to have the experience of unmoderated (or lightly moderated) interaction. Unstructured time, especially in mixed-age groups of other children, provides an optimal environment for children to try out different behaviors and to learn social interaction through doing.
Learning self-discipline and building sustained attention. To successfully acquire knowledge today, and to flourish as adults tomorrow, children need to learn to control their impulses, to organize themselves, to manage their time. Learning presupposes the ability to sustain attention, to preserve with a cognitive or physical task until one succeeds. These foundational skills require space and time to practice: there is a huge difference between the Montessori ideal—a second or third grader who makes a weekly work plan, figures out when to do what task, and learns that work doesn’t just go away when ignored, and the ideal traditional school environment, where adults dictate to children in 30 or 45-minute increments what they need to do, when, in which order, and secure smooth transitions to training and prompts. Children need time to really immerse themselves in an activity. They need practice to sustain attention, to tackle large projects. They need space to learn self-discipline and organization skills.
Effective skill practice. All young mammals play. Why? Because as mammals, the capacity to adapt is inherent in successful living. There are many skills that are not inborn, but need development, whether it’s chasing a mouse or climbing a tree. The same holds true for human children, only significantly more so: because we aren’t dominated by innate instincts of self-preservation, we need to learn every skill we need in life! Children need to learn to control their bodies—to develop balance, to swim, ride a bike, to pour water without spilling, to cut vegetables, to hold a pencil well. They need to practice intellectual skills—from writing to reading, from arithmetic to grammar, from spatial perception to building logical arguments. While preschool play is usually focused more on physical skills, older children often learn many intellectual skills during free play. I recently spoke with a successful engineer who credits his hours of Lego free-play as a child with his tremendous ability to visualize complex three-dimensional structures!

In our Montessori classrooms, we provide children with extended periods of unstructured time for child-led activity within a carefully prepared environment: each day, for about three hours in the morning, and two hours in the afternoon, children can choose what they want to do. They have access to a wide range of Montessori materials, which have been culled based on whether children repeatedly found them enticing and engaging: Dr. Montessori tried many different activities, in scores of schools, across the world, and retained only those that children freely chose to interact with, on a repetitive basis (in addition to serving a specific function in a defined learning sequence). Children can choose to work with any activity they’ve received a brief lesson on; they can work with it alone or with a freely-chosen friend or two; they decide how long they want to use the activity and where they want to take it. The result is the self-initiated acquisition of an important, life-serving body of skills and content.

What children can do during unstructured time at home

If you agree with these arguments on the importance of open-ended, unstructured activities, you can bring them into your child’s life at home, not just at preschool or elementary school. Start by setting a strict limit on TV time (which otherwise can crowd out unstructured, active play), and ensure that your child isn’t over-scheduled with after-school activities (in our family, the limit is two scheduled activities per child per week).

Once you have reclaimed unstructured time, here are some ideas on how to help your child use it actively, without whining about boredom:

Provide plenty of unstructured, multi-purpose play materials. The best playthings can be used in many different ways: often, an empty box is all children need (although it helps to also have scissors, paper, string and sticks). Other great items are all kinds of building materials, such as Legos, Citiblocs, Zoobs, Magformers, Zometools, Lincoln Logs and Tinker Toys. At my daughter’s Montessori school, they take building to a different level with Builder Boards, a full-size version of Lincoln Logs that children build elaborate play forts with! A variety of stuffed animals, trains and trucks can also come in handy, as can your permission to repurpose household items, from couch cushions to old sheets, from your clothes for dress-up, to kitchen utensils. The more open-ended, the better: children are much more creative if you buy boxes of Lego parts to freely build with, rather than elaborate sets that need to be built a specific way. (In our house, all but one of these sets has been disassembled and put into the box of bricks, and I’ve given up any effort to keep the pieces of even elaborate, gifted items like a fire truck together.)
Give access to different types of art materials (not project-specific crafts kits). In her excellent book, Renegade Rules, Heather Shumaker makes a helpful differentiation between arts and crafts: art, for children, is often all about free exploration of different materials—whereas crafts tend to be adult-led projects (the type you often see exhibited on the walls of preschools!). In our Montessori classrooms, children are free to work with a wide range of art materials; the goal is to let them explore creatively, rather than make them complete beautiful projects. Often, art for preschoolers is all about the medium, the process, not the result! You can do the same at home by providing materials without much instruction: Get an easel with a chalk board and roll of paper; buy large-sized sheets of cheap drawing paper; have jars of pencils and crayons easily accessible; show preschoolers how to draw with washable paints and clean up afterwards. Give them access to colored paper, scissors, string, foam, pipe cleaners, beads, Perler beads, play dough or craft clay, and leave them free to create. (You can and should expect them to clean up their own messes; it helps if craft materials are readily accessible, in a clear place in the house, and if the children have access to child-sized buckets, sponges and brooms to clean up their own mess.)
Get your children outside, ideally together with a gaggle of friends. Lenore Skenazy, author of Free Range Kids, Richard Louv, author of Last Child in the Woods, and many others argue that children today are missing out on the type of childhood baby boomers took for granted—one where your parents sent you outside with the neighborhood children to play until dusk came or until a dinner bell rang. While just sending the children outside has become harder today, it’s still possible to protect free-play time outside. If you have a yard, your preschooler can easily play outside; invite a friend over if he’s bored and has no siblings to play with. Go to a local park at a regular time each week—and soon your child will find playmates to make up games with. Or organize a few parents from your child’s school for unstructured after-school, weekend or summer camp play experiences at local parks. This summer, families at my daughter’s school did this with a group of five- and six-year-old girls, and it was a blast! Not only did the children enjoy it tremendously, it was a great way for the parents to see their children interact with each other freely. I, for one, felt I got to know my daughter better by spending a day observing her interact freely with her little friends.
Create inviting reading corners and equip them with great picture books. For ideas on how to do this, read our previous blog posts on setting up a prepared environment for reading, and building a great home library.
Train concentration. If your child has a hard time remaining engaged in an activity without repeated adult intervention, don’t try to do too much at once. Recognize that concentration itself is a learned skill, and look for opportunities to develop that skill. It might require an additional investment of time upfront. You may have to be prepared to be interrupted the first few times your child plays with Legos and experiences the frustration of not having you sit beside him, but if you gradually wean him off your constant attention, he’ll eventually be able to function for long stretches without your active involvement.

As a conscientious parent, it is very easy to get drawn into the maelstrom of an overly-structured schedule: after all, we want the best for our child, and there are so many enticing activities out there! It’s also easy to turn on an iPad or TV when you are busy and a child starts whining. Yet there is so much to gain from protecting unstructured time: isn’t it worth giving it a try?

Encouraging the Scientist in Your Preschooler

If you follow the discussions about education reform and improvement, you will have heard much about the deplorable performance of U.S. students in the STEM fields—Science, Technology, Engineering & Math—at the high school and college level. Effort to improve this performance usually centers on tougher standards and more testing, often for middle school and up.

We think that’s the wrong approach. The scientist in each child is born (or not born) in preschool.

In a Montessori classroom, the Sensorial Exercises are designed to foster an interest in the natural world. Here, during the formative years of their lives, children develop many key attributes of the successful scientist:

Observing carefully, with all senses. In contrast to computer screens, which are two-dimensional and primarily visual, the sensorial activities heighten observation skills by training all of a child’s senses. Children listen to differences in sound made by shaking cylinders to match, or tones in the scale made by the Montessori Musical Bells. Blindfolded, they match wooden tablets by their weight; other tablets by their heat conductivity or roughness of texture. They match taste and smell bottles; they arrange rods by lengths and cubes by volume. They put together complex, three-dimensional puzzles by using multiple sense modalities in conjunction. Why does this matter? In addition to the fact that many professions, from cooks to research scientists, need finely-tuned senses, deliberate, sequenced observational training helps children become active observers of their environment. And of course, the world is a much more enjoyable place when we have the tools to notice and appreciate the beauty around us!
Categorizing things by their attributes. One of the key skills possessed by a scientific mind is the ability to ascertain similarities and differences, and to group things accordingly. In the Sensorial area of the Montessori preschool classroom, children learn precisely this skill. They identify attributes—length, width, height, color in wide gradations, taste, texture and so on. They acquire the vocabulary to accurately capture and describe what they see (mauve, magenta, crimson—instead of just “reddish”). They learn to sort and arrange things by their characteristics.
Developing a scientific vocabulary. Dr. Montessori observed that preschool-age children operate with an “absorbent mind”, that is, they can learn big words in an effortless way, just by being exposed to them:

We have to conclude that scientific words are best taught to children between the ages of three and six; not in a mechanical way, of course, but in conjunction with the objects concerned, or in the course of their explorations, so that their vocabulary keeps pace with their experiences. For example, we show the actual parts of a leaf or flower, or point out the geographical units (cape, bay, island, etc.), on the globe. (The Absorbent Mind, p. 175)

As part of the sensorial exercises, we expose children to a range of scientific vocabulary: they are introduced to the names of different forms of leafs (palmate, acicular) as they trace and match them; they identify land and water forms (peninsula, archipelago) as they work with water and clay to make these features in miniature; they make maps of the world, and learn the names of countries and states; they learn the names of two-dimensional geometric shapes and three-dimensional geometric solids (triangular pyramid, rectangular prism). The primary value here is not even the specific terms that the child retains, but the fact that she develops an inner norm for what it feels like to use vocabulary to heighten and capture one’s observations. Language itself becomes a precision tool to classify and categorize the world one perceives, rather than just a series of vague impressions.

The preschool-aged child, given his proclivity for observation and retention, is naturally inclined to develop a passion for science. So whether your child attends a Montessori school or not, there’s a lot you can do at that age to support your child’s budding scientist within:

Spend at least half a day outside, exploring nature, on as many weekends as you can. In California, we are blessed with amazing nature, and a warm climate that enables us to be outside year-round. By taking your child out to explore the great outdoors, you naturally foster her interest in scientific inquiry. Whether she’s a toddler going on a short walk in a local park, picking up pine cones, rocks and flowers, or a five-year-old exploring the tide pools, unhurried outdoor experiences with you as a companion, engender an underlying fascination with the observable, natural world. The goal is not to make these instructional events: you’re not there to teach her about science so much as to let her use all her senses, let her explore at her pace, let her become enamored with the world around her, and curious about what makes it work. For ten fun things to do outdoors in OC, click here; this blog about OC parks is also full of great ideas; I refer to it often when I visit OC with my children.
Express enthusiasm for technology as well as nature. While it’s particularly important to explore nature, we sometimes forget that for our children, everything is new and unfamiliar, whether natural or man-made. If your toddler is drawn to the garbage truck every time it passes, or really likes the shininess of a railing’s metallic surface, or notices every time an airplane passes overhead, treat these moments as instances of scientific exploration. An early fascination with technological innovation is a common characteristic of great scientists.
Point out and name what you observe in the world about you. Just like we give children words in the classroom—for leaf shapes, for rocks, for land and water forms—you can provide much vocabulary in response to your child’s gaze and interests. Don’t worry if you don’t know all the scientific terms yourself: often, it’s helpful to just describe what you see—the bright red color of a maple leaf in autumn; the warmth of the sun on your skin; the fact that the sand is wet on the beach where the high tide covered it. If you can, and if your child is interested, do provide short explanations, of course—and use questions you can’t answer as a jumping-off point for joint research at home!
Ask and answer questions about how things work. Recently, I was getting ready to go out to a park with my six-year-old daughter, when she, out of the blue, hit me with this series of questions: “Mama, there are some things in life that I don’t quite understand. Why does the light turn on up on the ceiling, when I flick the switch in the wall? Were there always bananas—and if not, where did they come from? What pushes the water up in a straw when I drink? How come the water in the toilet stops by itself after I flush?” Welcome questions like this—and do your best to answer them. We took off the top of the toilet tank, and watched what happened. I didn’t know the vocabulary for all the parts either—but you can always look it up! “Let’s find out together” are great words to use often!
Include good, well-illustrated non-fiction books in your home library, and re-read them often. Picture books are a great way to introduce the fascinating world around us to young children. You can create many tie-ins to your excursions, for example, reading about constellations or moon phases as you spend time outside on a winter evening, or about marine creatures before you visit tide pools. Books are also a great way to bring new vocabulary terms to life: make reading interactive, as you name the things you see on the pages, and, on the second or third read, ask your child to find animals or plants or tools on the pages. Click here for a convenient Amazon list of some of our favorite non-fiction picture books for ages three to nine.

The preschool years are a wonderful time for making shared memories with your child. Going out into the world together, slowing down, noticing the sights, smells, sounds around us are wonderful ways to enrich your child’s preschool education—and to enjoy these precious years, when your child is so immensely curious, so aware and still so excited to be together with you.

Starting preschool in a foreign language: How the Montessori environment helps children transition when they don’t speak the classroom language.

Every year in our toddler and preschool rooms, we welcome children who do not speak the classroom language. Mostly, we’ve welcomed non-English speakers into our English-language rooms. Now, with our new Spanish and Mandarin immersion programs, we are also helping English-speakers to transition into classrooms with a new language for them—a very similar transition, as both teachers speak only Spanish/Mandarin, all day long!

Parents often ask how children who do not speak the classroom language handle the transition. After all, it’s already a new environment—and now they need to enter it without understanding the language the teachers and many of their peers speak!

To help you address these concerns for your child, this blog post discusses how the Montessori environment is optimally set up to support the learning of a second language, how we help children transition, and what you, as the parent, can do to help your child make a successful start in his new environment.

How the Montessori environment supports learning a new language

An environment that is largely accessible without language. The Montessori classroom is a very hands-on environment. Most materials are readily usable without any language skills: children can take a puzzle, blocks or play dough, and enjoy themselves even if they cannot speak the language. There are few all-group, language-heavy activities. What group activities there are—read-aloud, song time, small-group lessons—tend to be voluntary, so that a child who doesn’t have the language skills (or just isn’t interested!) has the option of doing something else.
Individual demonstrations, with materials, not purely verbal lessons. In Montessori for toddlers and preschoolers, most of the instruction is one-on-one. A child sits down with a teacher who demonstrates, in slow, careful movement, how a certain activity works. The child can follow along and learn how to do it, even if he initially doesn’t understand the words the teacher offers.
A multitude of materials and experiences to support language acquisition in response to a child’s interests. Research has shown that language learning happens optimally when the words provided tie to an activity in which the child is engaged. In his Montessori classroom, your child will work with a wide range of activities, which enable the teachers to provide never-ending responsive language. Here are just a few examples:
- Practical Life activities lend themselves for teaching the names of common things, as well as lots of verbs and adverbs. A teacher may show your child how to paint at an easel. There are all the words for the material in use (easel, brush, color, water cup, apron, sponge and so on); all the words for the activity (hang up the paper, paint, clean, dry); and, of course, the words to describe the end product (clear, colorful, bright).
- Sensorial materials are great for teaching adjectives of all kinds. Many activities in the sensorial area are designed to isolate a certain attribute—the sound something makes (loud, quiet, high tone/low tone), the color (dark blue, light pink), the texture (coarse, fine, soft, hard), the smell, the taste, the shape, the size, and so on. All of these are wonderful activities for teaching language skills!
- Grace and Courtesy lessons help the child learn to express his needs and feelings with words. A key skill all children need to learn—even in their native language—is to use words to communicate needs and emotions. We actively model respectful, kind interactions: “May I please have this block back? Jack is working with it!” We describe what we see, calling children’s attention to the emotions of others: “Sam’s face shows me he is sad. See the tears in his eyes? See his eyebrows: they’re in a frown!”
An explicit language curriculum. Montessori guides are experts at giving children new words. We use a very simple but effective approach called the Three Period Lesson:
- Naming Period: “This is a cow.” The teacher may show an object, or a picture, and provide the child with the name, then pause to allow the child to repeat the name.
- Recognition and Association: “Point to the cow.” To check the child’s understanding, the teacher will play a game of asking for an object or a picture, guiding the child to hand it to her, put it at the edge of the table, back in the basket, and so on.
- Recall: “What is this?” Only after the child has shown he can identify the object, does the teacher ask her to name it un-aided.
This Three Period Lesson gets used all over the classroom: we have many language cards with common objects, such as things from around the house to clothing, from vehicles to animals and so on. We also use this approach to, later, teach more advanced concepts—such as the names of countries, the parts of animals, or types of rocks.
A clear, repetitive structure to support independence. Consistency and predictability are a great help to a child who enters any new setting. This is especially true when a child enters a classroom without speaking its language. Our Montessori toddler and preschool rooms combine freedom for individual activities with a very clear structure and routine. Children learn that they can choose any activity from the shelves, and work with it for as long as they want. They learn that the teacher rings a bell when it is clean-up time, and that they may either put their activity away, or, for older children, mark them as theirs to come back to after lunch.
An ability to observe and learn from peer modeling. Much learning in our classroom happens when children observe other children do activities. A child who joins at age three without language skills can watch as another child builds the Pink Tower, or punches out the shape of a continent, or uses scissors to cut along lines. She can see how children return activities to the shelf, how they clean an easel after using it, or how they sit down at the snack table when a spot is free. Because much of the learning happens at a perceptual, non-verbal level, even children who do not speak the language can easily model after others.
A community where older children are eager to help. Our Montessori classrooms are mixed-age, family-like environments. Just like younger children in a family learn much language from the older children, younger students who enter a Montessori environment learn much language from their older peers. Older students often naturally act as translators for younger peers who speak their language!
A focus on polite, gracious interactions between children. Some parents fear that children who do not speak the language may suffer socially. We don’t see that happening in our classrooms! Instead, our students all receive lessons in “Grace and Courtesy”: they learn how to greet a child, how to offer help, how to express their feelings and needs using words. As a result, our students tend to be quite empathetic, and willing to help a new child find her way around class.

Special support for those new to the classroom language

Teachers add gestures and hand signals to spoken language. Our teachers are experts at using gestures and body movements to help children understand them and, in short order, learn to recognize key words and phrases in their new language. We may point to a jacket and pantomime taking it off. We may pull out a chair and point to the child, then the chair, to show the child where to sit down. We may point to the toilet to suggest it’s time for a child to use it. Basically, we do what you did when your child first learned to speak: we slow down, we point, we repeat—so your child can learn his second language by absorbing it from his surroundings, just like he did with his first.
Pairing up of new students with language-skilled peers. Since we have mixed-age classrooms, we are often able to pair a new child with an older child who speaks her language. This is especially true in places like Irvine, where we have a many children who come to us speaking Chinese, Korean or Japanese. Feel free to ask your Head of School if there are classrooms with other children who speak your native language; while we can’t guarantee a match-up all the time, we will do our best to accommodate your child’s language needs. (In our immersion classrooms, we may pair-up English-speaking students with those who already know Mandarin or Spanish.)
Frequent updates and check-ins with parents. While we encourage all parents of new students to check in with us regularly, we place a special emphasis on frequent updates for those children who come to us without speaking English. Please do share any concerns you have, and help us by letting us know any needs your child may have that he cannot yet reliably communicate in English or the immersion language.

What parents can do to help

Explain school routines to your child. Before your child starts, review the flow of the school day with him. You can also access your campus’ photo gallery, and use the photos as prompts to talk about school with your child. Feel free to ask your teacher or Head of School for a detailed schedule of your child’s classroom, so you can share all the details with her. Finally, it will be helpful if you can explain a few basic classroom rules to your child before she starts—such as having only one activity out at a time, putting it back on the shelves when done, and not stepping on the rugs children place on the floor to delineate work areas. We can help you with explaining these rules when you come in for your Meet and Greet with your child’s teacher.
Teach your child a few key words in English. It’s very helpful if your child comes to school knowing a few key words in English to make his needs known. Some words to consider teaching: (I’m) hungry, thirsty, tired, hurt; pee, poop; (I need) help, water, food, bathroom. (We don’t need children to learn these words in Spanish or Mandarin Chinese in our immersion classrooms, as our immersion teachers speak English in addition to Spanish or Chinese.)
Provide the teacher with a few words in your language. We’d love it if you provided us with the same list of words in your language, so we could better meet your child’s needs during the initial transition.
Help your child toward independence (especially if he’s three and above). Our Montessori curriculum places a strong emphasis on helping children become functionally independent—on learning to dress themselves, eating by themselves, using the toilet independently, completing a work cycle on their own. If you, a relative or a nanny have been helping your child with many of these everyday tasks, you can help with the transition to school by slowly introducing more independence at home as well. This article offers some good ideas on how to get started.

One more thing: if you speak a language other than English at home, and are enrolling your child in one of our English-speaking classrooms, we’d encourage you to continue speaking your native language at home. Living in America, and being in an English-speaking setting all day long, your child will learn English well—so well that, unless you consistently speak your native language at home, it will disappear from his life. Growing up bilingual is such a gift, it’s worth the hard work that goes into making it happen!

Temper Tantrum Prevention

Do You Know How Excessive Screen Time May Harm Your Child’s Brain?

I recently talked with two well-meaning mothers who proudly explained how they use electronic toys and tools to give their children the “best start on learning.” “I make sure my son watches educational TV shows”, one mother reported, adding eagerly that “we even use dinner time as learning time, by watching shows like Blues Clues and Dora while we eat.” Another mother proudly told me that she bought her 20-month-old “only educational toys, like children’s computers that teach colors, sounds and letter names. He loves my iPad, and can already use some of the apps I uploaded for him!”

It was clear to me that both of these mothers wanted the absolute best for their children: They spoke of them lovingly, were articulate about the importance of education, and either had selected or were researching quality Montessori preschool programs.

At the same time, it surprised me that they were largely unfamiliar with the idea that screen experiences—even so-called educational apps—might in fact harm children. They didn’t seem to be considering the possibility that the very technology-based activities they embraced could make their children susceptible to cognitive challenges in later life.

My conversations with these mothers got me thinking in general about attitudes towards screen time for young children. Most parents encounter the idea that TV and computer games are bad for young children. Many are even familiar with the recommendation by the American Academy of Pediatrics that children under the age of two not spend any time with screens, and that older children spend no more than one or two hours a day with any type of screen-based entertainment.

But encountering an idea is not the same thing as understanding it. The lack of a clear understanding of the underlying why behind limiting screen time may be one factor leading to well-meaning, thoughtful parents falling for the lure of “edu-tainment” apps and toys.

Why is excessive screen time so bad? Why might educational apps actually harm rather than help a child’s developing mind? What is the precise impact on a child’s cognitive growth?

Two Underlying Premises

In exploring the “why” behind the argument to limit screen time, we start with two underlying premises. The first is simple: a child’s environment impacts the development of his mind. If we put a child in a language-rich environment, in general he’ll acquire greater verbal skills; if a child plays sports earlier, he’ll acquire gross motor skills more quickly. The mind’s development occurs in an environmental framework, and the nature of the environment impacts the nature of that development.

The second key premise is that the differences in cognitive development manifest as physical differences in the brain. If we blindfold a child’s eyes for an extended period, his brain will show the effects of that deprivation; if we instead provide rich visual stimulation, his brain will show the results of that enrichment.

Recent neurological studies on human beings, using sophisticated methods like fMRIs, as well as numerous animal studies, have demonstrated this “plasticity” of the brain, evincing that the specific environmental experiences a developing child encounters can dramatically impact the way his brain develops. Dr. Marian Diamond, a professor of neuroanatomy at the University of California at Berkeley, puts the point this way: “There is absolutely no doubt that culture changes brains, and there’s no doubt in my mind that children’s brains are changing. Whatever they’re learning, as those nerve cells are getting input, they are sending out dendritic branches. As long as stimuli come in to a certain area, you get more branching; if you lose the stimuli, they stop branching.”

These two straightforward ideas—that environment impacts cognitive development, and that the cognitive impact manifests itself in the wiring of the brain—are the basis of evaluating the effect of TV and video on young minds. But the question remains: what is the specific impact of excessive screen time?

The Impact of Screen Time on Cognitive Development

In her book Endangered Minds, Dr. Jane Healy argues that the problem with excessive screen time is that undermines a child’s ability to think conceptually. According to Healy, the extensive use of TV and video games by ever-younger children is making harder for children to excel at the slow, deliberate, focused tasks necessary for success in school and in many 21st century careers, and this deficit is evident in the impact on a child’s brain development.

Young children who spend significant time in front of screens risk being negatively impacted in two fundamental ways:

Children acquire bad “habits” in response to the screen experiences—especially shortened attention spans and a need for highly-stimulating content. Watch any current children’s TV shows or video games today, and you’ll notice their fast-paced, attention-grabbing nature: shows are dominated by sudden close-ups, pans and zoom; there are lots of bright colors, quick movements and sudden noises, which, as Dr. Healy points out, are no accident: these features arrest the brain’s attention, and keep children literally glued to the screen.Just as a terrible food diet will have a structural impact on the body, this over-stimulating cognitive diet has a structural effect on the brain, and decreases the all-critical capacity to sustain attention on a task. Dr. Jennings Bryant of the University of Alabama, who served on the advisory panel for Sesame Street’s sibling, The Electric Company, now believes that it was a mistake to choose such a fast-paced format for these shows: “It reduces what we call vigilance [the ability to remain actively focused on a task]. If they watch lots of fast-paced programs, and then we give them things to do afterward, such as reading or solving complex puzzles, their stick-to-it-iveness is diminished; they’re not willing to stay with the tasks. Over time, with lots of viewing, you’re going to have less vigilant children. This is especially critical with very young children—about three to five years seem to be particularly vulnerable times.”
As real-life, enriching experiences are crowded out by screen time, young children miss out on opportunities to form important neural connections—such as those underlying motor and language skills—during key sensitive periods.Research shows that brain areas mature and become ready to learn at different times. If the appropriate stimuli are not received during these sensitive periods, learning becomes much harder. Especially early in a child’s life, the learning experiences must be active and self-directed to lead to lasting, beneficial brain changes. Dr. William Greenough, in a seminal experiment with rats, found that those rats acting within an enriched environment increased their synapses by 20-25%, but rats who merely observed other rats in the same environment received no benefit: “It appears that active interaction with the environment is necessary for the animal to extract very much appropriate information. Merely making visual experience of a complex environment available to animals unable to interact with it has little behavioral effect.”
Screen time, especially watching any type of TV, no matter how educational, is merely visual. To the extent that the study on rats extends to human beings (and there many reasons to believe it does), then every hour of passive screen time is an hour lost to the all-important, active, self-driven exploration of the world that produces actual learning. For the average three- to five-year-old in the US, who consumes twenty-eight hours of screen time per week, that’s a lot of active learning not happening!

Even in the case of more active video games and apps, the screen time is still crowding out other types of self-initiated engagement with the world. For instance, it reduces the amount of high-quality language experiences—conversations with adults, who use elaborate, detailed language, time to listen to stories, or to read books. Spoken and written language is largely symbolic: children need to actively engage to make meaning; they need to visualize, to re-create a scene in their minds as they listen to a story; they need to concentrate to interpret and connect words in a sequence as the action unfolds. In short, they need to use higher-order, integrative brain processes. TV watching in particular is primarily visual, immediate, holistic activity. Time spent watching TV crowds out both the direct ability to learn more sophisticated grammatical structures and vocabulary (which are largely absent on screens), and the very higher-order thinking processes children will need to succeed in school and in life!

Screen Time and Montessori

Long before fMRIs and modern neuroscience, Dr. Montessori observed that children have sensitive periods—for language, for fine motor skills, for order. She designed an educational environment that enables children to freely choose from a range of active, multi-sensorial materials that correspond to the sensitive periods—and with which students engage for extended periods of time, exhibiting astounding attention spans, and rapid progression in skills heretofore thought impossible.

Excessive screen time is anathema to the careful, sequential, active learning a toddler or preschooler experiences in a good Montessori environment. Children who are fed a daily diet of hours of TV shows and video games at home, who miss out on reading time and meaningful conversations with adults, are at a clear disadvantage when they enter their Montessori environments: they find it harder to concentrate, because their brains have become addicted to the artificially fast-paced world of TV; they are behind in oral language skills, as they have never learned to listen carefully, and thus find it harder to learn to read and write; they lack creativity and imagination, as their brains have been conditioned to passively consume visual content, rather than to actively play with ideas and engaging in what-if scenarios.

Often, parents ask us how they can best support their children’s Montessori education at home. A great place to start is by turning off all screens (or at least limiting them to a few hours per week, preferable as shared parent-child watching experience). Instead, speak with your children, read stories, and engage them in real-world experiences.

Sometimes, what is best for children isn’t obvious, and even well-meaning, educated parents, like the mothers I spoke with, can fall prey to the seemingly innovative appeal of modern gadgets and screen-based edu-tainment. It may be counter-intuitive, and at odds with our love for gadgets as adults (I like my Kindle and iPhone as much as the next person!), but if this research is right, our children gain more from shopping for and preparing dinner with us, from talking with us while eating, and from jointly cleaning up afterwards, than they could from any TV show or gadget, no matter how well-regarded, entertaining or “educational” it may be.

Key photo: child with iPad. By Intel Free Press [CC-BY-SA-2.0 (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.0)], via Wikimedia Commons

Selecting Read-Aloud Books, the Montessori Way

Part three of four of our reading aloud blog post series

Great books are essential if reading with your child is to be a joyful, replenishing experience, a highlight of the day.

When I first set out to find books for my two children, I quickly discovered that choosing outstanding children’s books is a challenging task. Our local library has an extensive picture book collection. I headed there, and asked a few of the librarians for advice. One handed me a somewhat helpful trifold booklet of 25 favorite books; another one suggested some well-known classics (The Hungry Caterpillar, Goodnight Moon, The Big Red Barn.) It was a start, but few of the books really got me excited, and much of what was suggested just didn’t seem right for my vision of reading.

Over the past five years, as my children have grown older, I’ve discovered many good resources, approached Montessori-inspired friend and LePort teachers for ideas, and built a library for our family that we treasure, filled with picture books all of us love to re-read many times, along with an ever-growing list of books we put on hold and pick up at the library.

If you want some guidance on selecting books that are in line with your child’s Montessori education, books that you might enjoy reading as well, here are some principles to keep in mind on your library trips:

Find books that “are real or could be real” for your younger reader. To a toddler or young preschool child, the real world is full of mysteries. A three-year old is fascinated by how different animals live, how things work, what the world looks like, why people act the way they do. Because young children do not yet have a clear conception of the difference between reality and fantasy, they are best served by books that either are about real things (non-fiction books) or stories that could be real (events that could actually happen, even if they are fictional). So when you select books for children younger than 5 or 6 years old, make sure you pick a preponderance of books about the real world. If you choose to share some occasional fantastic stories (of which there are some great ones, e.g. of the type that includes talking, anthropomorphized animals), make sure you help your child to understand what is real, and what is just pretend. (“Do animals talk? No, they don’t: this book is a fantasy book.”)
Read up to your child, not down. Toddlers and preschoolers are in what Montessori calls the sensitive period for language: like little sponges, they absorb effortlessly the language around them. Preschool children can readily learn big vocabulary words, when the words are introduced in an accessible way. By selecting books with appealing and appropriately complex language models, you greatly aid your child’s language acquisition. Many children’s books unfortunately use very short, choppy language, and are overly simplistic. My rule of thumb is to buy up, not down: I’ve always picked books that had bigger words, longer sentences, more elaborate constructions, than most people would think appropriate for a 2- or 4-year old. In most cases, my children were engaged—and I was surprised and delighted to hear them pick up and use the language of the books. (“East sky purples, sun is coming”, my then 3-year-old daughter echoed after Bats on the Beach. “Mama, we don’t need to dread this knight: he’s extinct, like the dinosaurs”, explained my 3-year-old son as we read Cowardly Clyde.)
Search for beauty and don’t settle for less. In Montessori, we surround our students with beauty, from the clean lines of our natural wood furniture, to the delicate porcelain bowls in the Practical Life area, to the art work hung at child’s height in class. Let the same sense of beauty be your guide as you choose books: look for illustrations that are realistic and detailed, not cartoonish and simplified. For a 2- or 3-year old, much of the learning from picture books comes from the pictures. Real art illustrations or beautiful photography will add to your enjoyment of the books you read, and, over time, will elevate your child’s taste, too. We’ve put together a collage of favorite picture book pages here, so you can get a feeling for how visually pleasing these carefully chosen books can be.
Broaden your horizon. While I select individual books based on their unique appeal, over the years I also strive to expose my children to the world via books. We read about different settings (cities, beaches, forests, mountains, space, the US, China, Japan…), times (pre-history, ancient times, the past century, today), different beings (animals, plants, human beings in different societies and of different ages), different types of stories (historical fiction, non-fiction, poetry). These virtual journeys around the world give us a lot to talk about—and, without an explicit effort on their part, provide children with a wonderful bounty of vocabulary and background knowledge they will draw on later in their lives.
Make sure you enjoy the books you buy. I saved the best for last: when you preview a book in the store, via Amazon or in the library, make sure it appeals to you! If you don’t enjoy it, you won’t like reading it over and over again. I’ve made the mistake to buy books I didn’t like (usually books that violated one of the first three points above!), and found myself reluctant to read them. And, yes, I’ve even hidden away some of these books, to avoid feeling reluctant when my children bring them to me to read!

Following these guidelines, I’ve put together two starter book lists, one for toddlers and younger preschoolers, and one for older preschoolers and younger elementary children. These books are personal favorites in our family, collected over time and based on recommendations of many knowledgeable teachers and parents: they are books we treasure and couldn’t imagine not having read to our children.

Enjoy!

LePort Blog: A Prepared Reading Environment

Part two of four of our reading aloud blog post series

Just as a piece of land has to be prepared beforehand if it is to nourish the seed, so the mind of the pupil has to be prepared in its habits if it is to enjoy and dislike the right things. Aristotle

In Montessori classroom, much of the magic happens because children act within a carefully prepared environment. Activities are displayed beautifully, always in their proper spots, always ready to use. The children’s time and space to explore is respected for several hours each day. The Montessori guide is an expert at observing, and only stepping in when she finds a child ready for a new lesson, or in need of someone to make a point of interest with a material.

The Montessori prepared environment makes it possible for three- or four-year-olds to enter a classroom, take off their outside clothes, choose an activity and work with focus. It’s an environment that instills a lot of good habits: respecting other’s space, developing a pro-work attitude, using inside voices and walking, not running, in the classroom. If you’ve seen your super-active, noisy, goofy 4-year-old enter his Montessori classroom and be transformed into a serenely joyous, responsible, focused Montessori child, you’ve experienced the power of the prepared environment at work!

In the book The Power of Habits, Charle Duhigg explains that much of what we do happens on auto-pilot: we receive a cue (entering the classroom), which triggers a routine (calming down and picking an activity from a shelf and working on it), which in turn leads to a reward (the feeling of accomplishment of having mastered a new skill.) To instill any habit, Duhigg argues, we need to put in place a cue-routine-reward system that supports the change we want to make in our life. The prepared environment, in Montessori, functions as such a system, and supports what we call the childhood choice to learn. Duhigg’s idea of a cue-routine-reward framework is something we can also apply at home to enable our children to develop good habits.

Take, for instance, reading aloud. As we discussed elsewhere, reading can and should be a joyous, daily experience shared by a parent and a child—but for it to be so, certain conditions must be met. If you are already experiencing your own Bed Time Book Club, congratulations! If not, read on for some ideas on how to prepare your home environment to facilitate a habit of reading together.

- Create cues for reading. Cues can be certain times of day: right after you come home from picking up from school, first thing in the morning before getting out of bed, right before bed at night. Cues can also be certain areas of the house that invite reading: you can place a book basket by the sofa, out books on the nightstand next to your bed, or upon a low shelf or magazine rack next to your child’s bed. Finally, cues can be certain other activities: why not put a few books in the car, and make it a habit for one parent to read, while the other is driving? Or place a book in your purse—as a reminder to take it out and read when you are waiting anywhere with your children! (iPads and Kindles are great for this: just make sure you always have a book to read to your children at the top of your favorites section—another cue to think about reading, whenever you turn on your device!)

- Make it a routine. Your toddler or preschooler is your best ally here: 2- or 4-year-old children love consistency, so if you want to instill the habit of reading, start by making reading at certain times and places an expected, recurring event. In our house, we always read at bedtime—and there is no way our children would ever let us get away without doing it: even when we come home late from a trip, or an evening out, we still have to read at least for a few minutes, or risk the major drama that is a preschooler whose favorite routine has been interrupted!

Ensure reading is a rewarding experience. By this, we emphatically don’t mean offer rewards: research shows that extrinsic rewards, such as stickers, sweets or even praise, devalue the activities associated with them. Instead, make the reading itself a time you and your children treasure. Cuddle up somewhere comfortable. Have the books close by, so you don’t need to walk to another room to get them. Shut off all electronic distractors, from phones to TV. Be fully present—and really engage in the wonderful worlds you encounter together in the books you read. Importantly, the pleasure of reading needs to be felt by both the children and by you, the parent: the goal is to make you crave reading time just as much as your children do, so you won’t want to miss it, ever! For me, no matter how tumultuous a busy evening is, no matter how many limits my 4-year-old tested that night, reading has become a healing factor: when we cuddle up with our books, we feel a comforting bond, a calm and connection that brings us back together as a family at the end of every day.

A reading habit is a powerful habit to instill in our children—and a rewarding way to feel connected to them, every day. Do you have a favorite way of fostering reading with your children? Please share with us in the comments!

Beauty in Words and Pictures: A Visual Tour of Favorite Picture Books

Note that each photo is linked to the book on Amazon.com, to make it easy for you to buy books that appeal to you.

LePort Blog: Reading for Happiness

Part one of four of our reading aloud blog post series

Much has been said about the benefits of reading with your child. Reading together regularly helps your child develop basic literacy skills, such as the left-right progression of words and the connection of print to the spoken word; it enriches his vocabulary; it offers her the background knowledge essential to understanding written content, once the progress beyond decoding simple books. Perhaps most importantly, by reading with your child you model the practice of turning to books for information and entertainment, rather than defaulting to TV and video games. Children who acquire a habit of reading for fun consistently show higher academic achievement, both in school and in college.

All these are valid reasons for reading with a child. And they are certainly true: in our classrooms, we can readily tell which children have a strong literacy environment at home. They are the ones who listen attentively when we read aloud, the ones who ask the best questions, draw the most creative pictures, and can’t wait for both silent reading time and the opportunity to write their own stories.

As a parent, however, these concrete educational benefits are not why I read to my two children every day.

I read with my children because sharing great books brings joy to us. We devour books because reading is a personal value, because I love doing it, and because sharing this value with my children, and seeing the pleasure they derive, is a highlight of every day.

My children, in turn, can’t wait to cuddle up next to me with a good book. They are excited when we go on our bi-weekly library trips, which usually end with us sitting amidst a pile of book when we get home, forgetting all about making dinner or cleaning up the family room, losing ourselves in story after story. When I come home from work, they often greet me excitedly holding up an Amazon package that arrived in the mail, eager to open it and discover a new favorite book.

In Montessori, we distinguish between the direct and the indirect lessons a child learns from an activity. The direct lesson—tying laces, preparing and serving snack, creating art with the Metal Insets—is often what interests and motivates the child. The indirect lesson—finger dexterity, following multi-step processes, impulse control, pencil grip—are inherent in the design of the activity, and a key pedagogical reason for offering it to the child. Yet they usually hold no motivational value to the child.

A 4-year-old does not draw dozens of Metal Inset in order to improve his pencil grip, so that he’s ready for handwriting later on. No, he is drawn to the Metal Insets because of the pleasure of working with it, and the pride he takes in seeing the picture he has created. The power of a Montessori environment is that a child’s direct, inner motivation and joy is what fuels the motor driving his development forward.

Similarly, when we read with our sons and daughters, our direct motivation should not, and cannot, be the academic benefits that result, no matter how important and real they are. To the extent we view read aloud as a mere educational tool, a “should do” rather than a “want to”, we’ll find it hard to fit it into our busy days, where another “to do” is the last thing we need. We’ll feel guilty if we don’t read, because we know its good for our children, but it just won’t happen as often as it “should”. When we do squeeze reading in, we are tempted to make it a lesson. Our children will notice, balk at being made a means to an end (even if the end happens to be their own future), and resist engaging fully.

If, instead, we manage to make reading a want, something both we and our children crave, if favorite picture books become, as one dad reminisces, “evocative of some of life’s best things — wet hair, clean pajamas, the end of working days”, then reading with our children will not be yet another imposition on our time, but instead a treasured moment we will protect jealously.

At LePort we believe that education and parenting is all about facilitating a child’s quest for his personal happiness. For us, this means not just helping a child become a successful, fulfilled adult many years down the road, but just as importantly, making childhood and the process of learning a joyous experience. At the deepest level, we reject any dichotomy between these two profound needs.

If you find it challenging to fit reading into your daily routine, if you’d like to read more, but can’t seem to find the time, if reading seems like a “should do” rather than a “want to” at the end of a busy day, I’d encourage you to reframe your purpose: think less about how reading will help your child succeed in the future, and focus instead on how fun it will be to share a story with your child today in the here and now. Approach reading a book with the same attitude that you would approach going out for ice cream or throwing a football or playing a board game—not a necessary means to a future end, but a treasured and cherished end in itself.

Happy reading!

﻿Part Two of Two— Lack of Skill or Unmet Needs, not Badness: How We Handle Discipline Problems in Montessori

﻿Part One of Two— The Theory: What is Discipline and How Do Children Achieve It