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A Surprisingly Non-Academic Approach to Strong Academics

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Toilet Learning, not Potty Training

Potty training: Just mention this word, and many parents of toddler cringe. Numerous books have been written about the subject–including variations on potty training for boys and potty training for girls–and parents and educators hotly debate the right time and approach for children to transition out of diapers and learn to use the toilet.

At LePort, we apply Montessori principles to this important childhood task: toilet learning is an integral part of our Montessori toddler program, and, of course, included in the program at no additional charge. (We say toilet learning, not potty training, for a reason–read on, and you’ll find out why!)

- Toilet learning is a natural part of a child’s developing independence skill set. Being able to use the toilet without help by an adult is an important milestone to a child’s independence. In a Montessori toddler class, it’s just one natural step in all the other work on independence your child will engage in. In fact, many of the independence skills we teach him – hanging up his coat, putting on socks and shoes, learning to button and to close zippers, proper hand washing techniques – are skills that will make it much easier for him to successfully use the toilet by himself.
- A respectful focus on learning, not training. Much advice on “potty training” includes relying on rewards (stickers etc.) and punishments. These extrinsic incentives, in our view, are detrimental to any learning process, including learning how to use the toilet independently. In the Montessori toddler classrooms, your child will instead encounter the toilet as a natural part of growing up. He’ll see older peers using potty chairs or low, child-sized toilets. He’ll be invited to try sitting on the toilet, as a natural part of changing his diaper. The child’s wish to imitate his older peers, his burgeoning desire to be master of his own needs, and his interest in a consistent routine are our best allies here. And, of course, our 1:6 (or in limited cases 1:7) ratio up to age 3 enables us to spend more time teaching than in other programs, where the ratio of staff to children sometimes changes to 1:12 at age two, long before most children have completed the toilet learning process!

- An early start to learning. In a Montessori infant or toddler daycare setting, toilet learning starts early. When we diaper babies in our infant daycare rooms, we do so in the bathroom, to begin associating elimination processes with the appropriate location. We invite them to help: to lift up their legs, to climb up on the low changing table, to pull open diaper tabs. Once a child is able to stand up steadily, we start changing his diaper while he is standing up. We also invite him to sit on the potty, sometimes for children just barely over a year old. We never force a child to sit on the toilet or otherwise rush the process of toilet learning– but often, they become interested in these activities the same way they become interested in other things older children or adults do!
- An encouraging follow-the-child approach. Montessori teachers are careful observers, introducing activities to children whom they judge to be developmentally ready. The same is true for toilet learning: while we encourage participation in the process from day one, our teachers watch for signs of readiness to start a more intensive, “official” toilet learning phase. Readiness, in this context, does not mean a child who declares, “I want to use the toilet and wear diapers” (although some 2-year-olds have been known to say just that!) “Potty training” readiness means a child who has mastered prerequisite skills (e.g., who has a dry diaper for longer periods between changes, who can pull his own pants down and back up) and who shows an interest in becoming more independent and/or in using the toilet (observing other children, asking questions, being interested in flushing, talking about bodily functions.) Once we identify a child as ready, we begin to work together with you, the parents, and switch from diapers to cotton underpants.

A joint school-parent effort. In order to help your child be successful at toilet learning, we work closely with you to identify the right time, and to put in place a consistent approach at home and in the school. For example, once your child starts, we want him to be in cotton underpants (no pull-ups!) for all his waking hours, at school and at home. Since some “wet events” early in the process are unavoidable, we work with you to start the process at a time when you can dedicate your attention to it at home, too. We provide detailed, written tips that we encourage you to follow, from the language to use (e.g., saying “Let’s use the toilet now that you are awake”, rather than asking “Would you like to use the toilet”, which invites a reflexive no from many toddlers!), to advice on clothing to wear, and common mistakes to avoid in the process. Every year, we also host one or several Parent Info Evening dedicated to potty training, where you can get your questions answered by your child’s teachers.

We have found that toilet learning the Montessori way is often much easier than parents expect when they first approach the “potty training” process. When parents and school work closely together, a child can easily complete toilet learning well before the age of three, the time the child transitions to the primary classroom, which requires him to be fully independent in the use of the toilet.

When to start preschool: why earlier may be better

When is the right time to start your child in preschool?

Often, the answer depends on your personal circumstances: if you have the opportunity to stay home with your child; if you have the time, energy and knowledge to create a stimulating, orderly, Montessori-like environment in your home; and if you are able to enrich your child’s experience with regular excursions out into the world, it may well make sense to delay preschool until your child is around 3 years old.

On the other hand, if your child will be in someone else’s care, it might as well be a quality preschool, rather than merely a safe, fun daycare setting!

Here are a few questions to consider, as you make your daycare decision:

- Will your child be in an environment optimized to meet a toddler’s unique needs? Toddlers are at a prime age for learning, and everything in them is oriented towards this need. Yet all to often, a toddler’s needs for order and exploration are perceived not as natural opportunities for them to grow, but as challenging obstacles for parents and other adults (think tantrums, constant “no’s”, hyper-activity, and toilet training struggles!) Dr. Montessori observed that many of the allegedly abnormal behaviors toddlers exhibit occur because their needs aren’t being met. Toddlers want to be independent, yet our homes make it hard for them to be (think adult-sized sinks, toilets, shelves; adult-paced transitions like getting out of the house or rushing through a grocery store!)
  Toddlers’ brains are growing, and need mental stimulation just as urgently as nutritious food, yet often, parents, grandparents and daycare providers aren’t educators and don’t have the knowledge to consistently provide optimal mental nutrition for toddlers (think noisy plastic toys, too much stuff in overloaded boxes, TV time, and constant adult-led activity.)
  
  In contrast, an authentic Montessori toddler program is carefully designed around the child’s needs and offers much more than just daycare. The physical environment is child-sized, with low sinks and toilets, low open shelves with a few, carefully selected activities displayed so children can easily access them. The daily routine is slow-paced, which allows a toddler to do much more for himself: for example, snack time may well take 45 minutes, during which the children set the table, serve themselves, eat with their friends, and clean up afterwards. The activities selected have specific learning objectives. Usually, they are made from wood and other high-quality materials; there are no noisy plastic toys, nor is there ever any TV or video game screen time in a Montessori class! Trained Montessori teachers know just how to simplify the steps of a task so a toddler can understand it and, in fact, do it by himself.

- Who will be the adults your child will model? Toddlers learn by modeling after the adults they interact with. The adult’s approach to childrearing, and her ability to consistently, kindly implement it, matter a lot, especially at this tender age. In a Montessori toddler program, trained teachers consistently follow the Montessori approach. Their aim is to enable your child’s independence; they teach self-care skills (putting on shoes, pouring water, cleaning up spills) rather than merely taking care of your child’s needs (dressing your child, serving drinks in sippy cups, spoon-feeding your child to minimize meal-time messes.) They have a support system that enables them to be calm and patient all day: they have regular breaks to recharge their energy; coverage is available when they are out sick or for them to go on vacation; they have refresher courses and workshops to ensure continuous professional development; and they have colleagues and supervisors available to help them address any situation they encounter.
- Is there a clear educational plan to ensure your child maximizes his potential during a time of rapid brain growth? Toddlers have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn a tremendous amount, effortlessly. Dr. Montessori observed that during these early years, a child’s entire being is molded: his intelligence itself is being formed! A toddler has an urgent need to learn, and a Montessori environment enables him to do so in a deliberate, systematic manner that’s often not possible in a traditional daycare setting.

- - Supporting the sense of order. Young children need their environment to be predictable, orderly. Experience shows that if a child learns at age 2 to place his shoes on a mat upon coming in and to hang up his coat; if he learns to take out an activity, work with it, and replace it on its proper spot on the shelf; if he learns to sweep up crumbs he dropped and wipe clean a table—he will solidify his natural sense of order, and attain good habits that last a life time.
  - Developing an active mind and exploring with all senses. Toddlers love to explore: they are into everything, touching, smelling, tasting the objects around them. A Montessori toddler program enables your child to safely use all his senses to explore: there’s clay to be pounded, oranges to be squeezed and juice to be tasted, songs played together and mystery bags to be explored. We say our students work: their explorations are too important to be labeled as mere play!
  - Language development. Our trained Montessori teachers are deliberate about providing your child with rich language exposure, all day long. For example, we use full sentence, not short commands (“Let’s clean up, so we may come together for a story”, rather than “Clean up! Story time!”) We provide precise vocabulary through daily experiences (“Notice how sour this juice tastes!”, or “Look at how tall this tower is!”), as well as specific games to learn new words, such as matching objects/card games. We even start on phonemic awareness, with 2 ½ or 3-year-olds!

Does the toddler daycare you choose provide a good start for your child’s longer-term educational journey? Even if you aren’t convinced that the daycare choice at 18 months is critical, it’s worth thinking ahead. Quality Montessori preschool programs are in high demand. Often, children need to join as toddlers to be assured of admission to the preschool program! Additionally, Montessori preschool programs require children to be fully toilet independent by age three, and to be able to act independently (take off clothes, wash hands, follow directions…) If you want your child to join a quality preschool, it may well make sense to enroll him as a toddler, rather than opt for a different daycare setting that is closer or less expensive. In the case of LePort Montessori, access to the preschool program also means access to our elementary school Montessori program, which is generally filled from within, as Montessori preschool students seamlessly move up to the 1st grade. Plus, we offer several incentive programs to make it more affordable for families to stay for kindergarten and into elementary, so an early start can pay off financially, too!
What is the cost/value trade-off? There are many home-based daycare options cheaper than Montessori toddler programs: in many places, you can find in-home daycare providers that charge as little as $700 or $900 per month for 2-year-olds. Yet compared to a nanny, a Montessori toddler program can be a steal: one-on-one nanny care typically runs above $2,000 per month for full-time care; and even a 2-way nanny share is often around $1,400 per month, for 9 hours of childcare (with all the drawbacks of having only one childcare provider, who doesn’t get breaks, and may be out for illness or vacation time!) The question you should ask yourself is whether you believe that toddler daycare is a science, demanding a professional, nurturing approach. If you think the answer might be yes, we suggest you evaluate Montessori programs further.

If you need full-time daycare for your child, irrespective of whether or not you can afford a nanny, we believe your child will be best served by the benefits of Montessori toddler program. And even if you need less than full-time daycare, or have the luxury of staying home with your child, enrolling your toddler part-time in Montessori may well be worth it, to maximize his growth during these critical early years.

Montessori vs. daycare: what is the difference for your toddler?

Here’s a difference parents often ask when they come to tour at LePort: What are the main differences between a high-quality Montessori toddler program, and a traditional daycare center?

Our first answer is this: seeing is believing! Come in for a tour at LePort, then compare what you see to your observations at a traditional daycare. If you haven’t toured yet, please contact us to schedule a tour and observation.

When you come in for a tour, or if you reflect on a tour you may have recently gone on at a daycare center, here are some difference to note between Montessori for toddler and daycare:

A focus on child-led exploration, vs. adult-set group activities. Typical daycare centers have adult-set schedules in which children are shuffled into a new activity every 20-40 minutes: circle time, followed by art, followed by outside play etc. Typically, the whole group is required to move together from activity to activity, whether they’re engaged in the current activity or not. Instruction happens in a group setting, at a group pace, even if some children move more slowly or more quickly. In contrast, the Montessori toddler program supports a child’s budding independence and his self-discovery. Children have the luxury of time to choose their own activities, and to fully explore them at their own pace. Most instruction is one-on-one: teachers give short 5-minute presentations to individual children, after which they are given an opportunity to continue practicing until they’re satisfied.

A calm, orderly environment, vs. a messy, noisy place. Many daycare settings have a high noise level, and some seem proud to announce how messy they are! While there is a time for messes (we love for children to play in the mud, to finger paint, or explore foam), in general, the Montessori toddler environment is surprisingly calm and orderly. Since our goal is to enable children to learn to focus, to engage joyfully in a chosen activity, we need to provide them with an environment where they can do so without constant interruption and distraction!

A 1:6 ratio, vs. a 1:12 ratio. Most daycares in California switch to a 1:12 ratio at age 2, to save money. A 1:12 ratio, unfortunately, makes it all but impossible to provide a quality learning experience for toddlers. At age 2, a child can’t yet dress himself independently; he still needs help using the toilet; he isn’t able yet to clean up independently after play. By necessity, a 1:12 ratio means adult have to do these things for the children: there just isn’t the time to teach! In contrast, at LePort Montessori, we maintain a 1:6 ratio (or in limited cases a 1:7 ratio) all the way to age 3. This enables us to actually teach our students: to support them in toilet learning, show them how to dress themselves, and engage them in individual lessons with the many activities on the Montessori shelves.

Trained teachers, vs. revolving-door daycare providers. Most childcare staff have minimal training (often, just the 12 Early Childhood Education Units required by law.) Many daycare centers have high staff turnover as poorly trained and poorly paid daycare providers get burned out with the challenge of managing 12 toddlers. In contrast, at LePort Montessori, our lead teachers either join us with a Montessori teaching credential, often from an AMI training program, or complete their training while employed with LePort. The LePort head teacher turn-over is below 10%, a number unheard of in typical daycare settings!

Oversight by a Montessori-trained Head of School, vs. administrative management. Each LePort Montessori campus is lead by a Montessori-trained Head of School. This experienced master teacher has the full time job of monitoring all the classes at campus and ensuring consistently high standards. The Head of School regularly observes in all classrooms, provides feedback to teachers to help them improve their practice, and actively works with parents to resolve any student issues. In contrast, most traditional daycare centers are run by administrators, not by educators. (In addition to the Head of School, LePort campuses have one or two additional administrative staff whose job is to meet parent needs and address operational tasks, so that the Head of School can truly focus on maintaining high classroom standards.)

A deliberate, educational program, vs. all-day play. We agree that free play is important to children, and encourage parents to provide imaginative play activities at home. At the same time, we know that in the right environment, toddlers are eager to learn through exploration and practice. Toddlers in a Montessori program are surrounded by exciting opportunities to develop their skills: they practice opening and closing containers; they learn to button shirts; they identify objects by touch, sort things by color, transfer items with spoons, learn to pour water, put together puzzles, learn to cut with scissors, sew with laces, string beads, and so much more! The activities we offer in the toddler class provide a welcome change from what children typically find at home. This is in contrast to many daycare settings, where shelves and boxes are full of the same things your child already has at home—Duplo legos, blocks, wooden trains, cars, dolls, dress-up cloths, noisy plastic toys, and the like.

Grace and courtesy, vs. group conformity. Many parents want their child to become socialized when they enroll her in a daycare or preschool program. But “socialization” can mean different things in different settings. In a Montessori toddler program, we guide children to develop what we call grace and courtesy. We establish some clear rules that support a peaceful classroom: for instance, children may only take activities from shelves, never from another child. We give children the language they need to express their needs (“I am working with this; you may have it when I am done,” “I don’t like it if you talk loudly,” or “I feel angry because you messed up my work.”) Teachers model benevolent and cooperative behavior, for example, by shaking hands while looking into a child’s eyes as the child comes to class, or demonstrating how we politely offer food to a friend at snack time. The Montessori focus on teaching individual, pro-social skills is different from the group conformity at many daycare programs, where developmentally inappropriate skills, such as sitting still for an extended circle time, or indiscriminate “sharing” of toys may be expected from toddlers, without regard for the actual cognitive and emotional needs of the child.

A focus on developing inner discipline, vs. obedience training. In Montessori, the goal is to help children acquire self-discipline: we want children to understand the right course of behavior, and to be internally motivated to behave well. Our teachers don’t expect immediate obedience from toddlers, nor do they offer rewards (praise, stickers etc.) for good behavior, and punishment (time outs, for example) for bad behavior. Instead, we believe that children naturally want to do and be good, and that by setting up the right environment, and modeling kind, respectful behavior, we can guide your child to develop inner discipline. When a child does misbehave, we emphasize positive alternatives. For example, when a child runs in class, we don’t chide him, “No running in class!”; instead, we calmly explain, “We walk in class. Let’s go back and walk to the sink together.” And because we have mixed aged classrooms, older returning students are able to model healthy behavior; younger children benefit from the example of their older peers, and older children benefit from the opportunity to mentor and guide their younger peers.

Does our Montessori approach work? We invite you to come and see for yourself! Most parents are astonished to see how calm, capable, confident and serenely happy the children in our Montessori toddler rooms are. If you doubt that your own rambunctious, active toddler could ever be like that, rest assured that the children you now observe calmly seated eating snack together came to us no different than your child. The Montessori toddler environment really is that different for other daycare settings, and that’s why Montessori children behave differently, too!

A Day in the Life: A Visual Tour of Your Child’s Montessori Toddler Experience

When your toddler joins his Montessori toddler class, he enters a beautiful environment, carefully prepared to meet his needs. Materials are arranged on low, open shelves. The high-quality wooden chairs and tables are just his size. Art is hung up at his eye level. Activities are color-coordinated and set out on trays or in baskets, which makes it easy for him to find what he needs. The environment is orderly, everything has its place. This empowers your child to become independent, to do things by himself, and supports his natural need for order.

There are so many enticing activities on the shelves! As soon as your child joins the class, one of our trained Montessori teachers will work with him or her one-on-one. She’ll give him brief demonstrations of the materials, showing him slowly, deliberately how to remove and replace little figures, how to pour beans, use a paintbrush, squeeze an orange. Over time, your child learns a wide range of lessons, each of which he or she practices until mastery.

Then your child is off to the races! During extended, uninterrupted work periods, she can freely choose from all the materials she has been introduced to, and work with them for as long as she needs. Having freedom to explore at length, to explore activities slowly and in depth, to master new skills: this is the luxury of time the Montessori toddler environment offers your child!

At some time during the morning, your child will be invited to join the teacher and a few friends for snack (provided by the school.) This too is a learning opportunity! Children learn how to set the table, how to serve themselves food, pour a drink, and clean up. Early in the year, we keep the routine simple, and teachers assist quite bit. But come back in May or June, and you’ll be just stunned to see how well-mannered and independent these 2- or 2 ½-year-olds are at snack time!

Language development is a key part of our Montessori curriculum. Your child receives vocabulary lessons. He is regularly invited to story time. He sings lots of songs! And, toward the end of the year, we even begin to introduce them to phonemic awareness (an important step in learning to read), by asking them to isolate and repeat back the beginning sounds of words.

Motor skills are also very important for toddlers. That’s why our classrooms include a lot of movement and all kinds of activities that involve working with your hands, from stacking blocks to unlocking things, from gluing to painting, from dancing to walking around the classroom carrying a tray. When repeated every day, these are the activities that will help your child achieve poise and precision of movement!

Toddlers love to and need to explore with all their senses! We encourage them to do that – to play with goo and to touch woodchips, to experiment with shaving cream and to discover themselves in the mirror. As Aristotle said, “There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses.”

Becoming independent is a big emphasis in the Montessori classroom. That’s why you’ll see students work on self-care skills like dressing and hand washing. You’ll see them learn to prepare food (cutting bananas and eggs, for example). They may even help in the garden, planting, harvesting and preparing vegetables!

Of course, outside time and physical activity are a key part of the day. Children may start their day outside, if they arrive early. They then have outside playtime in the morning, and again in the afternoon after nap, if they stay for extended care. When they get outside, choices abound. A variety of high quality play structures and slides beckon, tricycles await …

… running around is fun, as is chasing bubbles, or playing bunny with a teacher!

After outside time, students who stay for the afternoon have lunch together. We emphasize healthy eating: Dr. LePort, our founder, is an obesity surgeon, and he knows how important proper nutrition is. You can bring your child’s lunch from home (no sweets, please), or you can order a hot lunch from CaterTots, from a menu especially adapted to fit with LePort’s healthy eating policy. After lunch, the children turn in for a well-earned nap.

Want to see the toddler program in action? Click here to watch the LePort Montessori toddler program video.

Books Children Love – LePort 2012 Suggested Books

Colder days are upon us, and the outdoors are not quite as welcoming. But as the dark comes early, so does the opportunity to cuddle up with our children in a favorite spot and explore the timeless treasure of great books.

At LePort, we are big believers in the power of literature. Beautiful, inspiring literary works help children become voracious readers who look to books for enjoyment as well as education. Whether it’s a 3-year-old enraptured as a teacher reads to her, a 5-year-old reading to a younger child, or a group of 8-year olds engaged in animated discussion about a read-aloud character, we love seeing our students discover the joys that await them in the pages of a good book.

As a parent, you can help your child discover the joys of reading. In looking for that perfect gift this holiday season, we offer up the list below of favorite books, from simple picture books for toddlers and younger preschool children, to more elaborate stories for older primary students, and beginning chapter books that elementary students can read by themselves.

This is our third holiday book list, and we plan to make it a yearly tradition! You can help us by sharing your favorite books for this age group in the comments: maybe you’ll see them in next year’s list.

P.S. If you aren’t yet sold on reading out loud daily to your child, or want an even broader range of book recommendations, check out reading advocate Jim Trelease’s web site. He has free excerpts from his Read-Aloud Handbook with helpful advice, and lots of ammunition on why reading aloud is so important.

Picture books for younger primary children

Books with shorter text and generally simpler vocabulary, perfect for younger primary children. Some of these books are also accessible for older toddlers.

Gentle Giant Octopus—by Karen Wallace
This title in the Read and Wonder series follows a mother octopus on her journey to find a place to lay her eggs. Written in simple language and beautifully illustrated, this book will introduce a strange and different creature to a child’s life.

The Lotus Seed—by Sherry Garland
Ba, a young Vietnamese girl, witnesses the fall of the Vietnamese empire, and picks a lotus seed as a memory. Many years later, after Ba emigrates to the US, her grandson loses the treasured seed! Still, a happy ending awaits…

Little Elephant’s Trunk—by Hazel Lincoln
Follow a young elephant in his native African savannah as he discovers the many uses of his initially annoying trunk.

Apples to Oregon—by Deborah Hopkinson
How did apple trees come to the west? This silly story follows a farmer and his family on their adventures as they move with a wagon full of little trees across the entire US. Fun reading, esp. when taking a road trip across the country!

Library Lion—by Michelle Knudsen
There are rules we must obey. But are there reasons to occasionally violate rules, even in the library? What if a lion comes to the library, and is the only one to help the librarian in distress?

Christmas in the Big Woods—based on the book by Laura Ingalls Wilder
This series is a sweet picture book adaptation of the famous Little House books. It’s a good introduction to life in America in the 1800’s, and a great first step toward reading the Little House chapter books series with your child later on.

Zin! Zin! Zin! A Violin—by Lloyd Moss
This short, rhyming book cheerfully introduces the instruments of a classical orchestra, in a way even the youngest children can enjoy.

Goodnight, Goodnight, Construction Site—by Sherri Duskey Rinker
Sure to please all truck-obsessed boys (and girls), this beautifully illustrated story in rhyme follows the diggers, dump trucks and cranes as they finish up their fun work and settle down for the night.

Niccolini’s Song—by Chuck Wilcoxen
A night watchman at a rail yard discovers the power of his lullabies to help the trains sleep. When a strong wind wakes the town’s children, the trains help him in return. Great good night book for all train lovers!

Madeline—by Ludwig Bemelmans
This first book in the classic series, a Caldecott Honor book in 1940, takes children on an exploration of Paris, along with the spunky Madeline and her eleven friends.

Picture books for older primary children and young elementary children

These books have more advanced vocabulary, longer texts and more involved content.

A Street Through Time—by Anne Millard
In a series of fourteen intriguing illustrations, the award-winning A Street Through Time tells the story of human history by exploring a street as it evolves from 10,000 BCE to the present day. This book can be fascinating for 3-year-olds to use as an “I Spy” book – and children can come back to it in elementary to support their study of history and fundamental needs of man.

Pilgrim Cat—by Carol Antoinette Peacock
This picture books tells the story of the first Thanksgiving from the perspective of a young Pilgrim girl and the stray cat she adopts on her long, arduous journey to the new world.

The Gardener—by Sarah Stewart
Set during the Great Depression, this book follows a young country girl sent to live with her uncle in a time of need. It’s told through the letters the girl writes back to her family—a great opportunity to encourage older primary and lower elementary students to embark on letter writing on their own!

Mercedes and the Chocolate Pilot—by Margot Theis Raven
During the Russian blockade of Berlin, the children were close to starving, and candy was an unheard luxury. Then an American pilot flying one of the “raisin bombers” begins to shower chocolate bars on the waiting children. This retelling of a true story follows the relationship between one little girl and her Chocolate Pilot, from their letters during the blockade, to their reunion decades later.

Story of the Orchestra—by Robert Levine
This book-CD combo is a very accessible way to introduce older preschoolers and elementary children to the instruments of a classical orchestra. Load the CD onto your mp3 player, to make it easy to play a specific track as you browse through this book with your child!

Snowflake Bentley—by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
As winter comes, this is a great story of science to share. A young farm boy in Vermont falls in love with snowflakes, and pursues his passion to become a world-renown expert and snowflake photographer.

Because I Could Not Stop My Bike—by Karen Jo Shapiro
This collection of funny parodies of famous poems will delight children and adults alike. The poems explore day-to-day topics – such as a dawdling daughter, a messy room, and macaroni and cheese – all in whimsical rhyme. Great read-aloud!

Emma’s Rug—by Allen Say
A young girl is an inspired artist, drawing beautifully. But what happens when her mother accidentally washes her inspiration rug?

Chapter books for lower elementary children

These are books that 1st – 3rd graders can tackle on their own. Some are also good read-alouds to introduce younger children to chapter books.

A Dog on Barkham Street—by Mary Stolz
Edward is desperate for a dog of his own—and also desperate to be rid of the neighborhood bully. This is a much-beloved story with a satisfying ending.

Caddie Woodlawn—by Carol Ryrie Brink
Growing up in Wisconsin during the American Civil War, Caddie gets into all kinds of adventures with her brothers, befriends the local Indians, and would rather run free outside than learn to bake and sew indoors.

A Lion to Guard Us—by Clyde Robert Bulla
What’s it like for three siblings to travel across the Atlantic by themselves in search of their father, in 1609? Clyde Bulla has a talent for communicating engaging stories with simple narratives – perfect for the beginner reader.

The Sword in the Tree—by Clyde Robert Bulla
This is another straightforward Bulla story, set during the time of King Arthur’s England. This is a page-turner whether you’re 7 or 47!

Thimble Summer—by Elizabeth Enright
This book is written with warmth and simplicity that is reminiscent of simpler times. After 9-year-old Garnet Linden discovers a silver thimble, things start to happen: the local draught finally ends, an orphan boy comes to live with her family, and her pig wins a ribbon at the county fair.

Mimmy and Sophie All Around the Town—by Miriam Cohen
Mimmy and Sophie are two sisters who are always there for each other as they find treasure, play in mud puddles, or otherwise explore their neighborhood in Brooklyn, NY, during the Great Depression.

The Wonderful Wizard of Oz—by L. Frank Baum
A classic of American literature, this imaginative tale is accessible to a strong young elementary reader. Join Dorothy and Toto as they make their way to the Emerald City in the land called Oz.

Socks—by Beverly Cleary
Socks is one happy cat until his owners, the nice young Bricker couple, bring home their new baby. Beverly Cleary at her best!

The Family Under the Bridge—by Natalie Savage Carlson
This is an unusual story about a crabby homeless man in Paris who acquires a ready-made family when three young children befriend him.

Follow My Leader—by James B. Garfield
After Jimmy is blinded by an accident with a firecracker, he has to relearn all the things he used to know. With the help of a therapist, he learns to read Braille and to use a cane. Then he’s given the chance to have a guide dog. Learning to work with Leader is not easy, but Jimmy tries harder than he ever has before.

The Sensorial Area in Montessori Preschool: Where Young Scientists Are Born

A preschool child is fascinated by the world around him: eager to explore it, always asking questions, constantly getting his fingers into everything. As he does so, he acquires a tremendous amount of information – about animals, people, plants, common household objects, etc. He makes observations at home, in the park, at the store, on vacation.

In the Montessori preschool environment, we help him organize his wealth of information into an orderly store of knowledge. We guide him to observe carefully and provide him with a systematic way of conceptualizing the world around him.

The Sensorialareaof a Primary (preschool/kindergarten) classroom is where this training happens. Children work with a range of materials, each of which varies in a single attribute; for example, the length of the Red Rods, the shade of each Color Tablet, the texture of the Fabrics, or the pitch of the Montessori Bells. In using these materials, children learn to observe carefully and to order, match, or sort objects by their attributes.

Each Sensorial material presents to the preschool child one special key to the world. Dr. Montessori conceptualized the idea of keys as a way of introducing significant aspects of this vibrant world we live in to the young child. Keys serve as jumping-off points for learning more about the world.

Work with the Sensorial materials also broadens a child’s vocabulary. Once a child has experience with a material, the Montessori teacher introduces the appropriate words to fix the new idea in the child’s mind: “This rod is the longest”, “Feel how smooth this silk is”, or “Listen how these two bells have exactly the same pitch.”

Preschool children spontaneously apply what they learn from the Sensorial materials. For example, a child who has practiced matching and grading the Color Tablets will naturally begin to notice things about color in his surroundings that he previously didn’t. It is not uncommon for Montessori preschool teachers to hear a 4-year-old remark things like, “That’s dark blue”, “This green is lighter than that green”, or “This grey matches that grey.” A child who has explored shapes from the Geometric Cabinet and has learned their names will start to identify shapes in objects around him (“That stop sign is an octagon!”), buildings (“Those windows are squares!”), even food (“The yolk is a circle!”).

If a child is unsuccessful with a Sensorial material, we do not correct him directly. Rather, we observe and note any errors, and re-present a lesson from start to finish at another time. We might offer a point of interest, a detail that is important for the child to grasp in order to get full benefit from a material. E.g. “Watch how I line up the Red Rods neatly along the edge of the rug as I order them.” As always, we then invite him to continue working with the material independently. The preschool child eventually learns to correct himself, as the control of error is often a combination of his own developing discrimination and the materials themselves. For example, with the Brown Stair, the child will experience visual disharmony if he sees that the stair is out of order.

There are formal games and extensions that are connected with every Sensorial material. With the Botany Cabinet, for example, the child learns not only to trace and recognize a variety of leaf shapes, but also to connect these to actual leaves he might collect on a nature walk. Once he is writing, he might enjoy creating booklets about the different kinds of leaves or, more broadly, other parts of a plant. The Puzzle Maps are a great example of work that extends throughout the Primary (preschool/kindergarten) years. For instance, initially the child simply learns how to put the United States puzzle pieces back properly in the frame. By his second year, he learns the names and locations of each state. By his third year in Primary, he might begin to create his own beautiful map of the United States, carefully tracing and cutting out each state, pasting them accurately on a large poster-sized paper, and proudly labeling each of them. A child is also welcome to make his own discoveries and variations. Perhaps he might recognize the similarity between the Pink Tower and Brown Stair, and build them side by side!

Beyond all of this, the Sensorial materials are significant in that they indirectly prepare the preschool child for later work in language and math.

Early Sensorial work, such as the Cylinder Blocks, indirectly prepares the child for writing and reading. As he uses his pincer, or three-finger, grip to grasp the knob of each cylinder, he strengthens and prepares his hand for holding a pencil. Touching rough sandpaper on the Rough and Smooth Boards will feel familiar to him when he traces his first Sandpaper Letter, the key Montessori preschool material for introducing the sounds and letters of our alphabet. Tracing geometric shapes as well as puzzle map pieces increase his fine motor control and precision of movement.

The Sensorial materials also prepare the child for math work in a variety of ways. Many Sensorial materials (just a few examples are the Pink Tower, Brown Stair, and Knobless Cylinders) are designed in series of ten, which reflects our base 10 number system. Several others provide a thorough introduction to geometric shapes, solids, and the unique, constructive properties of triangles. The Binomial and Trinomial Cubes are three-dimensional puzzles based on the binomial and trinomial equations, respectively. The Red Rods, of course, are a prerequisite for the red and blue Number Rods, which solidify a child’s grasp of quantity and his ability to count to ten with one-to-one correspondence.

Through sight, touch, taste, smell, and sound, the Montessori Sensorial materials provide opportunities for the child to classify and clarify the world around him. If you are a LePort Montessori preschool parent, we invite you to enjoy getting a closer look at these materials and to see them in action during your next Watch Me Work Wednesday visit!

The Dual Purpose of Montessori Preschool Practical Life Activities

The first essential for the child’s development is concentration. The child who concentrates is immensely happy. Dr. Maria Montessori

Students new to Montessori preschool spend much time in the Practical Life area of the classroom, where shelves are filled with activities for dressing, food preparation, sweeping, polishing, and so on. In a variety of ways, Practical Life activities provide the preschool child with skills for self-care, caring for the classroom environment, and all-around independence.

This independence is a critical aspect of a Montessori preschool education. As Dr. Montessori wrote:

If teaching is to be effective with young children, it must assist them to advance on the way to independence. It must initiate them into those kinds of activities which they can perform themselves and which keep them from being a burden to others because of their inabilities. We must help them to learn how to walk without assistance, to run, to go up and down stairs, to pick up fallen objects, to dress and undress, to wash themselves, to express their needs in a way that is clearly understood, and to attempt to satisfy their desires through their own efforts. All this is part of an education for independence.

Dr. Maria Montessori

A 3-year-old preschooler, with proper instruction, is able to do many things for himself and can start to contribute meaningfully within the classroom or family community, too. It is in the Practical Life area of the Montessori preschool classroom that your child learns these skills – and you can help him by encouraging him to be independent and helpful at home as well:

Preparing food. 3-year-old preschool children love to do real work they see us do. In class, they often prepare snack for friends: peeling and cutting carrots, cutting and serving bananas, preparing apple and cheese trays.
At home, your preschool child can become a true helper in the kitchen and participate in real cooking activities. Invest in some good tools, like the ones available from For Small Hands, and you’ll be rewarded as your preschooler begins to peel vegetables, measure ingredients, and clean up small messes. By a child’s 3rd year (age 5 – 6) she might be capable of taking over much of the meal prep: My 5½ year old daughter recently prepared most of a taco dinner for us, cutting tomatoes, helping sauté the chicken, putting condiments into bowls, and setting the table for the family. She even surprised me by heating the tortillas in the oven, taking the oven mitt out of a drawer before she put the baking tray into the oven. I had never taught her that—I didn’t even realize she knew where the oven mitt was stored! If you welcome your children into the kitchen while you work and narrate what you do and why, you’ll be surprised by how much they pick up, and how eager to participate they become!

Cleaning up. Washing a table is a favorite Practical Life activity. It involves many steps and materials, and we build up to it slowly, teaching each component skill: students learn to squeeze sponges by transferring water between small containers; they learn to pour water by first pouring beans, then lentils, then rice, then water with small pitchers; they learn how to operate a faucet, making sure to turn off the water when done; they learn to put on an apron; they learn to fold a cloth; they learn to put materials away after completing their work. The table washing activity puts together all these skills: It’s amazing to see a 3½- or 4-year-old complete this rather complex, multi-step process.
At home, you can encourage your child to participate in cleanup after a meal—from bringing dishes into the kitchen, scraping food into the trash, and placing them in the dishwasher, to wiping down the table and sweeping up food crumbs from under it.

Taking care of plants. All of our Montessori preschool classrooms have plants, and taking care of them is a great Practical Life activity. Students learn to dust leaves, cut off and dispose of dead leaves, and water the plants. They also learn how to arrange flowers to help beautify their classrooms!
Your child can enjoy similar tasks at home by selecting a few small plants at a garden store with you and then being entrusted with their care. Observe her pride and attentiveness as she thinks to water her plants and keep them healthy. And, of course, if you have a garden, by all means invest in some child-sized tools so your preschooler can help you. Planting vegetables and fruits and harvesting them is not only a great Practical Life experience, it’s a great opportunity to awaken an interest in science, too.

Getting dressed and taking care clothes. The Dressing Frames are a set of Practical Life materials that enable children to learn how to manage common fasteners, such as zippers, buttons, snaps, belt buckles and shoelaces. Within his first year in the Montessori preschool class, your child will round out his dressing skill set. He’ll also refine other skills, such as folding cloths, sorting things by color, and placing things into their proper spots on shelves.
With these skills, your preschool child will soon be ready to take care of much of his daily clothing needs. A 3½ or 4-year-old is usually able to dress himself from head to toe—if he’s given enough time. He’s also able to place dirty clothes in a hamper, even sorting them by lights and darks, and can put folded clothes back into drawers and shelves. Older preschool children can contribute more to the family’s laundry: try teaching your 5-year-old to load the washing machine, measure pour detergent, and get the load started! She’ll also be able to fold many of her own clothes, and hang up dresses and pants on hangers in her closet.

As we wrote elsewhere, a child who feels capable because he can act in the world, without needing to rely on Mom or Dad for every little thing, is a child who is developing self-confidence. Writes psychologist Madeline Levine:“Self-esteem doesn’t contribute much to success. But success contributes mightily to self-esteem. Kids have to ‘do’ something, and do it well, to get a self-esteem boost.”

Helping the child learn to do things for himself, however important, is just one of the goals of Practical Life. Like all aspects of a Montessori preschool classroom, Practical Life has many learning objectives. Here are a few:

To facilitate a smooth transition to school by providing familiar activities. Practical life is the part of the classroom where new students feel comfortable because they reflect similar activities to what they see at home. Peeling a banana, pouring water, cutting with scissors, and cleaning spills are all familiar activities the young child finds comfort in.
To develop concentration. Practical Life is usually where a child first connects with a material and immerses himself fully in a chosen, repeated activity. A child who previously darted around the room, unable to pause long enough to connect with any particular material, might become fascinated with pouring water back and forth or with drying a table. In doing so he learns to focus his mind for the purpose of mastering a new skill. This is the start of a child’s attachment to the many Montessori materials, which build in complexity to help build concentration.
To develop fine- and gross-motor skills. Practical Life tasks are excellent motor skills activities. Carrying heavy objects such as classroom chairs or buckets of water builds gross motor strength; pouring from a small pitcher or scrubbing a table increases precision of movement; peeling an egg, using a dropper, or picking up dropped beans all strengthen the three fingers needed for writing with a pencil.
To develop problem-solving skills. Like most Montessori materials, Practical Life activities have a built-in control of error: They enable the child himself to judge whether an activity has been done satisfactorily or not (water has spilled; a button is left without a whole; the loosely rolled rug won’t stand up in the bin). With positive guidance from his teacher, the child learns to pay attention to these cues and acquires a habit of self-correction.
To develop logical work habits. Practical Life activities progress in complexity and, in doing so, increase a child’s ability to work through a series of steps in a logical way from beginning to end. This is vital for success with more abstract language or math work later on.

While many parents are eager to see their child progress to academic lessons in the preschool classroom, we hope you’ll see the hidden value in Practical Life, and wholeheartedly support your child as he explores the many fun and educational activities found in this unique part of the Montessori Primary class.

A True Learning Community: the Mixed-Age Montessori Preschool Classroom

In addition to the unique Montessori materials, one of the first things you notice when you observe a Montessori preschool classroom is the wide range of ages in the class: 3-year-olds work alongside and sometimes with 5- and 6-year olds. Children stay in the same classroom community for a full three years: the traditional kindergarten year is integrated into the 3-year Montessori Primary program.

Often, parents new to Montessori preschool wonder: how will this 3-year-cycle work out for my child? Will my 3-year-old be intimidated by the much larger 6-year-olds? Will my kindergarten-aged child revert back to babyish behavior because she is around younger preschool children? And, maybe most importantly, how can one trained Montessori teacher possibly ensure that 20 or 30 students in her classroom are challenged and engaged, when she has such a wide range of abilities to accommodate?

The Montessori materials are one key factor that enables the 3-year cycle to work. But, in amazing ways, it is the 3-year, mixed-age environment itself that provides an optimal learning environment for all students!

In contrast to most other preschool or school settings, in Montessori preschool, your child will typically stay with the same teacher for three years. This has many benefits:

No annual “getting to know you period.” In most other preschools and elementary schools, a teacher has to get to know a whole new group of 20+ children, each September. She has to assess their academic, motor and social skills. She has to get to know their strengths and weaknesses, discover their temperaments, learn about their home environments, and build relationships, with 20+ children. In contrast, in a Montessori preschool class, only about 1/3 of students are new each September!
The teacher can really get to know each child. Because Montessori teachers have each preschooler for about three years, they can get to know this child well: Is she shy and needs time to warm up? Is he a strong-willed little person who needs very firm limits and immediate consequences? Does she love flowers—or machines? Does he love to tell and write stories, or would he rather work quietly with puzzles? Every detail that a Montessori teacher knows about a child is an insight that helps her to tailor the curriculum to that child.
Teachers as partners to parents. Over a three-year period, you can build a relationship with your child’s teacher. This means you have a knowledgeable adult at your service who knows your child really well. She is also a professional who spends significant amounts of time with many children of your child’s age, and can be a valuable resource if concerns arise regarding learning or behavior.

And while parents may initially be skeptical of the mixed-age preschool classroom, there are benefits that are not immediately evident:

Older children—and their advanced work—inspire the younger ones. Children who are new to a Montessori preschool class often learn much from the older students. A 3-year-old may observe carefully as a 4-year-old works with the Sandpaper Letters, for example—and he will learn a lot in the process. One of our teachers reports being stunned when a little friend of 3½ years knew all the letters on the initial presentation: she had observed her older friend’s lessons and work, and absorbed all that knowledge! Just as importantly, the younger students desperately want to be as capable as the older students they adore. This is a great motivation for them to master the early materials: they know that there is a progression of lessons, and that in order to do the exciting Golden Bead work, for example, they have to first master their numbers to 10!
An ability to be the youngest and the oldest child, in turn. Most children have a fixed role in life: the big sister, the little brother, etc. In a Montessori environment, each gets a chance to have all roles: big sisters suddenly are the youngest when they arrive, and are able to find older friends as role models and mentors. Little brothers who complete the three-year-cycle finally get to be the leaders, to be admired by and to mentor their younger peers. This exposure to different roles fosters the astounding kindness and nurturing nature about which parents and others so frequently remark when they observe our classrooms or encounter Montessori children in the world!
A benevolent, non-competitive, growth-focused community. In a typical single-age setting, where all children do the same thing at the same time, it’s easy for children to start comparing themselves to others, rather than to focus on getting better themselves. They think, “I can read more than Susi,” instead of “now I can read books with phonograms: I’ve learned a lot since the summer.” In the Montessori preschool class, in contrast, each child works independently, at his level. The result? A benevolent community of young learners, each focused on growing, and none jealous of the others’ achievements nor frustrated by an inability to keep up with more advanced peers.

A tremendous opportunity to develop real confidence and leadership for those children who stay for the entire 3-year-cycle. Click here to read more about the significant non-cognitive benefits earned by those children who stay for the critical 3rd year of the 3-year-cycle.

Montessori Materials and the 3-Year Cycle of Montessori Preschool

The hidden benefits of your child’s third year in Montessori preschool

The third year in Montessori preschool has sometimes been called the cashing in year or the leap year. It’s the time when students put together all the different skills they have indirectly and directly prepared for throughout their Montessori toddler and preschool years.

Academically, the third year is often a flurry of activity. If you are the parent of a 3rd year student, you may already have noticed some of the interesting new work your child brings home: booklets of math facts practice; Books to Remember books to read to you; sentences cut into little pieces for analysis, and map shapes traced and labeled.

Students also tackle progressively longer tasks: they might spend multiple days creating booklets of different leaf shapes carefully colored and labeled; they might illustrate and author multi-sentence stories, or complete math problems using more abstract materials such as the Small Bead Frame.

In the third year of Primary, a typical Montessori preschool student achieves cognitive growth far above grade level. He goes from walking to leaping, as a Montessori mother put it. And yet, as impressive as this academic achievement is, the most important benefits of the third year in Montessori preschool may well lie elsewhere.

Over the past decade, researchers have come to question the role that cognitive skills by themselves play in a child’s success in school and life. While academics matter greatly, some researchers now say that

[w]hat matters most in a child’s development … is not how much information we can stuff into her brain in the first few years of life. What matters, instead, is whether we are able to help her develop a very different set of qualities, a list that includes persistence, self-control, curiosity, conscientiousness, grit and self-confidence. Economists refer to these as noncognitive skills, psychologists call them personality traits, and the rest of us often think of them as character. Wall Street Journal

The third year in Montessori preschool is a time when children mature in their personality traits or character. It’s the time when students become self-possessed learners, confident in their abilities. It’s where they emerge as leaders, benevolently sharing their skills with their younger peers.

After two full years, the Montessori preschool class is a familiar environment to these 5-year-olds. They know the daily routines inside and out; their teachers know them well and can readily work with their strengths and encourage them to take on challenges. They are conscious of being the oldest students in the room, having traveled the road from 3-year-old to 5-year-old.

When my daughter had just started her third year in Montessori preschool, I remember asking her what lessons she had gotten in the past week. She looked at me as though I were out of my mind. “Of course, I didn’t get any lesson this past week. Mom, it’s the first week of school, and my teachers are helping our new friends. I don’t need the teachers to tell me what to do. I just walk around class, pick my work, and do it.”

Third year students may indeed start the year by walking around the room, picking work independently but somewhat impulsively. Over time, their teacher works with them on bigger, more ambitious work, sometimes setting multi-day goals, in preparation for the increased independence and responsibility of Montessori Elementary.

But within this Montessori preschool classroom, when a child struggles a bit with these challenging tasks, she can take a step back, look around the classroom, contemplate the activities on the shelves, and observe the work that younger friends do. She can realize that I know how to do all that!

No, a 6-year-old does not explicitly think this thought. But she knows that at some point, for example, it was challenging for her to form a letter, just like it is now for this 4-year-old friend—and that with hard work, she mastered it. She has come to expect that the tasks she tackles in her Montessori preschool classroom may require persistence and repetition to master. She knows that she’ll make mistakes—spill water or even break a beautiful ceramic bowl—but that these mistakes are okay, and that we can learn from them, move on, and still have fun in the process.

During the second week of school this year, one of our Heads of School shared this story: In one of her larger Montessori preschool classrooms, a 3-year-old girl was working on a Practical Life activity that involved spooning lentils from one bowl into another. Lentils had spilled all over the table, and the little girl looked as though she were about to cry. A 5-year-old boy who had been watching her from nearby then came to her side and helped her. He showed her how to pick up the spilled lentils. He showed her how to hold the spoon level when transferring the lentils, moving slowly, just like his teacher had shown him, two years ago. He stayed by the girl’s side, encouraging her in her work. Then, when she was done, he helped her put the activity away, demonstrating how to roll up the little mat and how to put the whole tray with the materials back properly in its spot on the shelf.

3rd year students in Montessori preschool naturally have many opportunities to become classroom leaders, and usually take them on eagerly. A teacher might ask a 3rd year to help welcome new friends to class or to give lessons to a younger peer. A 6-year-old might spontaneously read to a few younger preschool classmates, or even be asked by the teacher whether he’d like to read a book to the class at group time. Younger Montessori preschoolers naturally search out the 3rd years for help: when a teacher is busy with a lesson, it’s just as easy to ask your friend to help you with a tricky word on a command card or to assist you in tying a bow! And because the 3rd year student is so familiar with his classroom and has learned to value its beauty and order, he’s often the one who takes the initiative to tidy up or water a plant with limp leaves.

While accelerated academics are a great benefit of the third year of the Montessori preschool cycle, realize that your child is acquiring potentially far more powerful assets, whether you call them noncognitive skills, personality traits or character.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

For example:

Prepare the environment.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Rituals and routines: the home/school connection

Dropping a baby off at daycare for the first time can be a very sad event for a mom or dad. After all, it’s a transition from being able to observe, experience and guide every aspect of your child’s life, to one where she’ll now regularly be away from you for hours at a time.

We know this separation is hard—probably harder for parents than for babies!

But we also know one thing that makes it easier: when we engage in frequent, detailed, two-way communication with parents, and see work with them as a partner rather than treating you as a mere client. To put it differently, our goal is to work with you to build a community around your child. At LePort Montessori, we simply have too much respect for the bond between parent and child to approach it any other way.

We are experienced experts in helping children thrive. We encourage you to see us as more than just a daycare, as as a resource to make sure your child has the best possible start. We want to be there to help you, not merely by offering daycare, but by being your partner. We want to keep you informed, to answer child-rearing questions you have, and to offer suggestions how to help your child at home, too.

Because we offer a Montessori infant program, our focus is on your child’s overall growth and well being as a developing individual, not just some delimited metric of growth in some specific area. This means that the home/school connection, and building a community on that basis, is central to what we do. Here’s the many ways we interact and communicate with parents who enroll their baby with us:

Free home visits prior to the first day.
One of our trained teachers will come to your home for an (optional) home visit, before your baby starts his Montessori daycare experience with us. We want to understand your infant’s environment, so we can ensure a smooth transition. We also want to spend quality one-on-one time with you, so we can build a relationship, and answer questions you have in the privacy of your home. While we are with you, we may offer up ideas on how to align your home environments with the Montessori approach your child will experience in his class—and we’ll provide you with a free copy of a great little book, In A Montessori Home, so you can read up on simple changes you can make at home, too.
A carefully coordinated transition to school.
At some daycare centers, on the first day, you may come to the facility, drop your baby off, and depart for the day. Not so at LePort. We invite you and your baby to visit for an hour or so together. Then we’ll have him come for a partial day, and finally, for a full day when he’s ready. This transition allows all of us to get comfortable with each other. Throughout, we’ll communicate regularly – with quick phone updates, chats at pick-up, and photos we’ll email to you.
A daily written update.
Babies change so quickly, and so do their routines. Each morning, you’ll complete a quick report updating your child’s primary caregiver about his activities (sleep, eating, health.) Each evening, you’ll receive a form back with similar details, as well as with information on the supplies your child may need (diapers, underwear, sunscreen.)
An open-door policy and frequent informal communication.
As a parent, you are always welcome to visit your infant at our schools. We especially welcome breastfeeding moms on breaks, too. You can also have a quick chat with your child’s teacher at drop-off or pick-up, or schedule an after-school meeting with her at any time.
A weekly logistical email.
Every Tuesday, you’ll get a detailed email with updates about all upcoming events, deadlines and activities relevant to you child’s daycare experience at LePort Montessori. It’s a great way to stay on top of things like photo days, parent education events, holiday parties and re-enrollment deadlines.
Frequent educational information.
You’ll receive email updates, handouts, and blog links about infant development regularly, on topics from sleep training to toileting, from feeding to language development. You’ll also receive frequent emails with photos of your child in class through our Transparent Classroom parent communication system; often, emails will contain links to a description of what your baby does, so you can learn how he/she is, in fact, learning and not just spending the day in traditional daycare. Finally, we offer parent education nights at school four times a year: please join, as these are great opportunities to learn more about Montessori, and to see your child’s classroom from the inside.
Regular conferences and written progress reports.
Because we offer an education from the start, not just daycare, our infant teachers get together with parents twice a year for a formal conference. We also provide you with a written progress report that summarized your child’s development over the past year.
Parent-only school Facebook group.
Each LePort school has a private, parent/teacher Facebook group. This is where we regularly post photos from school, and where you can interact and form a community with other parents at your child’s school.

Think about LePort not just as a daycare option, but as a dedicated partner in your child’s early years. Together, in regular communication, we can help your child take his first steps towards growing into that happy, healthy, flourishing adult you will someday have the pleasure of knowing.

The four key attributes of a great infant teacher

The training of the teacher who is to help life is something far more than the learning of ideas. It includes the training of character; it is a preparation of the spirit.
Dr. Maria Montessori

The most significant relationship in your child’s life is his or her relationship with you. Your connection with your baby is uniquely special, and at some level your child is aware of that irreplaceable bond.

But after you (and your child’s other parent/guardian), the next most significant impact on your baby’s development will come from the childcare provider you choose. They will be a major role model for your baby, and will contribute to their developing view of the world. They will impact the use of language, social bonds with other children, and other areas of growth. When you’re not there, it is your child care provider your child will rely on for understanding and nurturing. When looking at childcare centers, this means that the type of people the center chooses as caregivers will determine how joyful and educational your baby’s time away from you will be.

In contrast to most childcare facilities, who look for caregivers, LePort specifically hires infant teachers. We believe the time we spend with your baby is too important to be viewed as mere childcare: we look for teachers who can nurture your child and help him mature cognitively and behaviorally, in addition to comforting him and keeping him safe.

All of our teachers meet the base standards required at childcare centers: every teacher has completed her early childhood education units; teachers are CPR trained, and undergo a complete background check and health exam. What makes LePort different is that we go beyond this minimum standard.

We look for four key attributes in our infant teachers, both when we initially hire them, and as we develop them while they work with us:

A passion and love for working with babies.
At LePort, we strongly believe that you have to be passionate to do a good job: we want students to be passionate about learning, and we only hire teachers for whom being with children is a passion, not just a job. This is especially important for our infant teachers. In contrast to the typical childcare center, which often hires low-skilled caregivers, and as a result experiences high staff turn-over, we hire people who are excited to be guides in a young child’s development; who view their role not as a temporary job, but as a career requiring thought, reflection, and professional growth. We believe this passion is visible in their day-to-day interactions with the babies in our care: come and see for yourself!

Infinite patience and a calm, centered personality.
Providing childcare to an infant is hard work, with many emotional challenges (and, of course, immense joys!). We have found that patience—infinite patience—is essential to working well with babies. Because our infant teachers love this age group, they delight in observing each baby, discovering his unique temperament, and in responding to his individual needs. This focus on observation, and the knowledge of the importance of the early years, help our teachers be unfailingly patient (and admirably more calm and centered than many of us are with our own children at home!)

An explicit, thoughtful approach to nurturing and guiding young children.
Our Montessori-trained lead teachers love working at LePort because we offer an authentic Montessori infant program. In many childcare settings, there isn’t an explicit approach to guide the day-to-day life with infants. What happens in one childcare room may be different from another one next door; and as childcare providers are often short-time employees, it often changes from week to week, or month to month. This can be very confusing for babies, who urgently need consistency to bring order to their world. In contrast, our program consistently applies Montessori ideas, such as following the child, encouraging independence, observing and individualizing instruction, and using positive approaches to discipline. Our Montessori-trained lead teachers guide those staff members new to the program, and help them to consistently implement this positive, respectful and loving approach to caring for babies and young toddlers.

A thoughtful, educated and intelligent individual.
In her book, The Good School, author Peg Tyre quotes a preschool teacher who explains why intelligence really matters for teachers of young children:

The best preschool teachers turn out to be ones who are very smart. “There’s a lot of things that you have to figure out. Preschool can be more difficult than the other grades because a lot of your teaching has to be embedded in other things. Understand that when you are playing with one child you’re working on their vocabulary, and with another child that you’re facilitating social skills and you’re teaching it through indirect ways.” Peg Tyre
That’s one of the reasons we look to hire smart, university-educated individuals to become teachers, even in our infant classrooms. Yes, childcare providers for babies don’t have to demonstrate mastery in algebra—but they have to be able to think on their feet, be creative, and be able to observe and respond to each baby’s needs and personality. They also are one of baby’s key role models, which means they need to speak in simple, yet rich and grammatically correct sentences.

Hiring the most talented and dedicated teachers, and maintaining a 1:4 ratio isn’t the cheapest way to run a childcare center. To the contrary, it’s expensive. But our goal at LePort Montessori isn’t just to run a childcare facility. Our aim is to offer an enriched, Montessori educational environment as your baby’s home away from home.

This means only intelligent, high-energy, passionate yet patient individuals can qualify to work in our program. Hard to find? Yes—we review scores of resumes and conduct dozens of multiple-round interviews. But then that’s our responsibility: finding the best possible individuals to guide your child during these critical early years. Luckily, with our reputation as a high-quality, authentic Montessori school, and for providing an excellent, supportive work environment for teachers, we usually have our pick of applicants!

Montessori infant care or nanny? How to choose which childcare option is right for you.

Finding the right childcare for your baby is one of the most important decisions you’ll make as the parent of a young infant. Often, the choice is between childcare in your own home—a nanny or an Au Pair—or care in a childcare center or home-based childcare setting. Here is a list of pros and cons, as you consider whether to opt for LePort’s Montessori infant program, or a childcare arrangement with a dedicated provider coming to your home.

Advantages of the LePort program over a nanny or Au Pair:

A trained professional to guide and nurture your child. Most in-home childcare providers have little if any formal training in guiding young children. They may have completed a few courses, and taken CPR training, in the case of younger sitters or au pairs. Or in the case of some nannies, they may have had years of on-the-job childcare experience. But few full-time nannies are college graduates, and even fewer have completed a rigorous course of study in child development. LePort’s lead infant teachers, in contrast, are college-educated, intelligent professionals, who have completed a year-long, advanced program in Montessori education for children ages 0 months – 3 years. They have studied child development, practiced working with infants under the careful supervision of experienced AMI teacher-trainers, and have completed teaching internships in a Montessori infant or toddler program. In some cases, a teacher may not have completed all of the above but has been promoted from an assistant position, where they were carefully evaluated on a range of criteria, from expressive vocabulary to genuine warmth and caring for children, and they are participating in a Montessori training program. As a result, our infant teachers are not mere childcare providers: they are trained guides and teachers for babies.

An environment that is optimized around a baby. A home is a beautiful place, but unless you are able to set aside an entire room for your baby and equip it with special furniture and a wide range of materials, it remains a space designed primarily around the needs of adults. There will be many things baby can’t touch; many things baby can’t reach; many objects that are hard to child-proof perfectly and still be useful for adult purposes. In contrast, LePort’s Montessori infant environment is designed entirely around the needs of babies. Mirrors go to the floor. Special small stairs with rails invite babies to crawl and climb. Soft floor mats cushion falls. Low shelves abound, and on them are placed materials carefully selected to help babies explore safely with all their senses. Miniature tables and chairs allow children to have a meal together; and even the toilet is baby-sized.

A valid, consistently implemented, transparent approach to child rearing. Most new parents don’t have a well-formulated approach to all the many challenges of raising a newborn. When a nanny or other childcare provider comes in the house, her approach often becomes the de-facto standard for handling the baby. Unfortunately, what the nanny does may not be in line with best practices: for example, few childcare providers understand all the many ways in which an infant’s independence needs to be developed, and do things to the child (feeding, dressing, diapering), rather than helping the child do for himself as soon as he’s capable. Of course, a parent who knows exactly how she wants to bring up her baby, and who has a lot of time, can select and guide a childcare provider (nanny, au pair) to follow the right approach. But unless you have that knowledge and the willingness (and time!) to provide this coaching, you may be better off finding a program like LePort, where you understand and agree with the fundamental approach.

Socialization & community building. When your child is home alone with a nanny, his opportunities to observe and interact with other children are limited to excursions to the park or an occasional baby class with the nanny or with you. In contrast, in the Montessori infant program, young toddlers learn how to interact with each other in a civilized way. If socialization is one of your goals for your child, a nanny as childcare is probably not the best option.

A reliable childcare solution, independent of one person’s health or family issues. If you work full time, and your nanny calls in sick, you may have to take time off. In contrast, with LePort’s program, we guarantee childcare for your child: when one of our teachers is sick or has to leave on a family emergency, we have floaters on staff, so you don’t need to stay home from work to cover your childcare provider’s absences. Plus, our floaters give your child’s primary childcare provider regular breaks, so she can be cheerful and patient all day long, instead of getting tired by being on duty for 9+ hours without breaks.

A guaranteed spot in LePort’s highly sought after preschool program. LePort’s preschool programs are in high demand and usually have long waiting lists. At some of our locations, the only way to get into the preschool program is by starting early. Enroll your baby now for childcare, and you’ll have priority enrollment, for preschool and beyond!

Much lower cost than a nanny, for 5 full days of care. LePort’s infant program pricing reflects the quality and care that have gone into the program design, the 1:4 ratio, and the highly qualified teachers who guide our youngest students. Still, for 9+ hours of childcare per day, five days a week, the LePort program is often less expensive than an experienced nanny or other in-home childcare provider.

When a nanny or Au Pair may be the better childcare solution:

If you work from home and can see your child regularly throughout the day. If you work from home, and have a flexible schedule, a nanny gives you the ability to see your child during the day. Those breastfeeding breaks together, a quick stroll in the neighborhood or the opportunity to read a book together are great daily joys that a childcare center setting just cannot provide.

If the lack of a commute is more convenient given your particular situation. For instance, if your home and work are far from one of LePort’s infant program locations, it may just be more convenient to have a childcare provider come to your house, rather than having to drive to our schools to drop-off and pick up your baby every day.

If you don’t share LePort’s approach to early childhood education, and want a nanny with a different style of childcare.

If you want your child’s primary caregiver to speak a language other than English with your child. (In this case, you may also want to look into LePort’s language immersion programs, which begin at 18 months old.)

If you have two children to care for, a nanny may be a significantly cheaper childcare option. This is especially a factor for families with twins—although LePort does offer a sibling discount!

Five differences between LePort’s Montessori infant program and traditional daycare

If teaching is to be effective with young children, it must assist them to advance on the way to independence. It must initiate them into those kinds of activities that they can perform themselves and which keep them from being a burden to others because of their inabilities. We must help them to learn how to walk without assistance, to run, to go up and down the stairs, to pick up fallen objects, to dress and undress, to wash themselves, to express their needs in a way that is clearly understood, and to attempt to satisfy their desires through their own efforts. All this is part of an education for independence.

Dr. Maria Montessori

Although Montessori schools serve a daycare market, we do not think of our Montessori infant program as a type of daycare. The difference is just too significant.

If you visit any mass-market daycare chain and then spend 20 minutes observing in our Montessori infant rooms, you’ll vividly see and feel the difference between the two. If you can’t make that comparison to daycare yourself right now (or are just struggling to find words to capture the difference you experienced!) here are five things that set the LePort Montessori infant program apart from typical daycare:

infant-montessori-classroom-day-care

A carefully prepared Montessori home-like environment, not a daycare center. At most daycare centers, plastic materials dominate, from toys to furniture, because they happen to be easy and quick to clean. We want more for your child: our infant environments are beautiful by design. They are open, bright spaces, with high-quality, wooden furniture and comfortable chairs for teachers to snuggle with babies. You’ll see soft floor mats, lots of pillows of different shapes and sizes, and soft sheepskins to rest on. There’s art on the walls, at baby’s eye level, and mirrors along the floor. On first sight, this room may look more like your living room than a daycare center. And shouldn’t it? LePort’s Montessori program will be your baby’s home way from home, after all!
Love and respect for each individual child and family. Often, daycare centers feel too regimented: strict sleep schedules, mass-feedings in high chair line-ups, and parents not welcome at school. At LePort, we treasure each baby as a unique individual and do everything we can to tailor the routine of feeding, active time, and nap to his needs. We never confine your child to a high chair; instead, we cuddle with him in comfortable seats with a bottle, until he’s ready and excited to transition him to a low table and chair, where he can participate in eating with his own spoon. And, of course, moms are always welcome to join their child for a mid-day breastfeeding break!
Freedom to explore at their own pace: a follow-the-child approach. Walkers, cribs, play pens: in many daycare settings, children spend much time in these and other containers. At LePort, in contrast, our mission is to liberate your child. We recognize that being encouraged to move is critical for infant development. Soft floor mats in front of mirrors encourage tummy time and self-discovery. Low bars mounted to the wall and soft furniture entice children to pull up. Stairs with low steps, a railing and a slide just call for practice climbing up and down. Because of our individualized approach, each child progresses through the stages of movement—rolling over, crawling, cruising, walking—at his or her own pace. In contrast to most typical daycare centers, we never force 12 infants to conform to a group, not for feeding, not for sleeping, and not for anything else. As part of our overall follow-the-child approach, we customize your child’s activities to his or her unique needs. Socialization, in our environment, happens naturally; being with other little people thus is a joyful experience for your baby, rather than something that becomes associated with forced group activities for which babies just aren’t developmentally ready.
Nurturing guidance for growing brains. A baby’s brain grows more during the first two years of life than any other subsequent two-year period. Our trained teachers recognize that education starts at birth, and work to provide an environment that will foster the child’s natural process of exploration. From beautiful, captivating mobiles for babies to observe, to immaculate materials on low shelves demonstrating simple cause-effect relationships, our environment and activities are carefully designed to facilitate and encourage self-initiated learning, exploration, and growth.The first two years of life are also a “sensitive period” for order. Babies have a natural need to follow routines, to understand sequences, to know where things in their environment belong. As Montessori educators, we actively support your baby’s need for order: there is a special place for each material, and even children as young as 14 months delight in being able to put things back where they belong on the low, open shelves (something they rarely can do in other daycare settings, which often are cluttered, and have toys stored by staff in boxes or out of babies’ reach.) Our teachers are also masters at stimulating your baby’s language development. As Montessori educators, we know that the “sensitive period” for language acquisition starts at birth. Our teachers provide vocabulary at timely opportunities in response to their emerging interests: we observe and identify what your child focuses on (a blue mobile, a wooden chair, a soft, green, furry ball), and give her the language that goes with her interest. This responsive, individualized approach to fostering language skills has been shown to advance toddlers’ language development by up to an astounding six months!
Highly trained teachers, and a ratio that supports lots of individualized attention. We offer a 1:4 ratio of daycare staff to our babies. In our mixed-age (3 month to around 18-24 months) infant rooms, children nap on their own schedule, and typically a few are asleep at any given time. Regulations also require daycare staff to have 12 ECUs (early childhood education units.) Often, that’s the extent of the education and training you’ll find at daycare facilities. We again do not think that’s enough! Research shows that the education level and intelligence of your baby’s primary care provider have a huge impact on his intellectual, social and physical development. You know from your experience as a parent that you often need to think on your feet; that parenting is easier if you have a clear idea of your goals, and the approaches to childrearing you want to follow. That’s why each LePort infant room is led by a university-educated teacher who has also completed the rigorous one-year, Assistant to Infancy training at an AMI training center, or an equivalent MACTE-accredited training program. (In some cases, your child’s teacher may not have completed a degree and/or Montessori training program, but instead has been promoted from an assistant position, where they were carefully evaluated on a range of criteria, from expressive vocabulary to genuine warmth and caring for children. As part of their role, they are enrolled in and completing a training program.) Read more about the attributes we look for when hiring your baby’s first teacher.

Your top 6 questions about infant childcare, answered

The decision to leave your baby in someone else’s care is probably about as anxiety-provoking as any decision you’ll have to face as a parent. At LePort we speak with many new parents who struggle with the thought even once they’ve made the choice to enroll. It’s not until their baby is actually settled and happy in the program for a few weeks that the stress fully goes away.

But that said, we’ve also noticed that it really helps to put your concerns in words. Doing your research won’t entirely eliminate the emotions, but it will help to know that you’ve asked a lot of questions and are (intellectually at least) comfortable with the answers.

In our experience, we’ve found there are a series of recurring questions from parents of young babies. To help you ferret out what matters as you discuss your options, we thought we’d summarize the six top questions about childcare for babies we hear all the time, and provide our answers.

If I put my baby in a childcare environment, will he be safe from physical harm and illnesses? LePort’s Montessori infant program offers an environment that is optimally aligned around the needs of babies. Every piece of furniture has rounded edges. Areas where children pull up (and thus may fall down!) are padded with soft floor mats. There are no small objects in the room that could be choking hazards, nor any loose electrical cords. A 1:4 ratio, with three adults in each room, ensures that babies are carefully supervised all the time. When a primary teacher needs a break, a floater will come in to cover, ensuring uninterrupted coverage.

Obviously, when a group of babies are together in a childcare setting, minimizing the risk of contagious illnesses is important. That’s why our infant areas are professionally cleaned every day. Teachers and parents must wear covers over shoes to enter (or switch into inside shoes.) Food is kept strictly separated, surfaces are wiped down regularly, and teachers engage in and teach proper hand washing practices.

That said, you should expect your child to have more common colds, flus, etc. in childcare than if she were at home alone.

Will my baby feel loved? Or will she miss her mom and dad terribly while at childcare? We’ll be the first to admit it: no one can love your baby the way you do! Your special relationship with your child is irreplaceable. That said, we think our teachers are as good a substitute to your presences as possible. We select our teachers not only on their knowledge and expertise, but also on how much they love being with infants. But, of course, seeing is believing: we invite you to contact us to schedule a tour, so you can see for yourself how our teachers interact and nurture the babies in their care. From years of experience, we know that it is often easier to transition a child to childcare early, as a baby, than it is to do so later, during the toddler years. Separation anxiety peaks around 12-18 months. By starting your child in the infant program, you can help her to become familiar with her teacher and new environment prior to that critical phase, making things easier for her and for you.
My work commitments require me to leave my child for up to nine hours a day, five days a week. Can your program accommodate my work schedule, and offer quality care to my baby for that much time? No question about it: working full time, while you have an infant, is one of the most difficult things you’ll ever do as a parent. You want to be with your baby as much as possible, and rightly so: strong parent-child attachment early on is one key factor to baby’s health.Many parents, though, manage to juggle full-time work and being a great parent. One key factor to being able to attend to work full-time is finding an optimal childcare environment for your baby. We believe LePort does offer such an environment.The reason is that we know how critical these early years are, so emphatically offer not just childcare, but a Montessori educational program right from the beginning. We replicate many of the things a parent can offer at home, but that often get short-shrift in a typical childcare center.
We invite you to read more about what makes our Montessori infant program unique:
- Learn about what Montessori for infants means, and how it compares to typical childcare.
- Research trade-offs between hiring a nanny and enrolling your bay in LePort’s Montessori infant program.
- Understand how we select our infant teachers.
With the right program, you can leave your child with confidence. We encourage you to do your research!

1. My baby has a hard time sleeping. How do you manage naps with so many children in one childcare room? Will he get enough sleep to thrive?We’ve come to believe that parents have this concern in part because of the actual practices of daycare facilities. In many infant program settings, there is a strictly enforced group schedule: all babies eat together, assembly-line style. All babies nap together, at the same time. All babies play together.We do not take this approach at LePort. Instead, we work with you to replicate techniques that work best at home for your child’s sleep patterns, while sharing tips from our experts for optimizing your child’s sleep. Our nap rooms provide a dedicated crib or low floor bed for your child in a peaceful place where noise is minimized and tranquility is heightened. While pacifiers are permitted in younger infant environments, to promote independence and oral health we assist children as quickly as possible to wean from any pacifier use. We also help prevent tooth decay by refraining from placing bottles in cribs, or having children fall asleep while drinking a bottle.
  We will rock or hold a young infant who needs such comforting to fall asleep, while working with the child and parents to encourage self-regulation in sleep habits. Our goal is for your child to recognize sleep as a peaceful opportunity to self-soothe and rest because he or she is tired, just as a child will eat when hungry. If your child arrives asleep in a car seat, he or she will be gently placed in a crib or on a floor bed. Children will have the opportunity to awaken from sleep naturally, rather than being awakened by an adult.
2. Don’t babies need lots of one-on-one attention during the first year? Will my baby miss out, if he is one of ten or twelve children in a childcare room? Babies absolutely need a lot of attention. That’s one of the reasons why we maintain a 1:3 ratio in our infant program. (When several children are asleep at once, we may flex to the 1:4 ratio typical in other childcare settings.) Still, three babies can seem like a lot for one teacher to love, nurture and cuddle with all day long.We believe a 1:3 ratio is sufficient to allow one-on-one love and nurturing because our whole environment is set up to support our staff and make individualized attention possible. Here are a few things you may want to consider as you decide whether a 1:3 ratio is something you can be comfortable with:
  - Our individualized program means not all children have the same needs at the same time. Your child’s primary care provider in many cases will not be feeding three children at once. One of her babies may be asleep, while another one is happily playing with one of our many fun activities, leaving her free to focus on your child.
  - Children benefit from some independence, even as babies. Many parents of multiple children will tell you that child #2 has a longer attention span and is more independent. Why? Because she’s never gotten used to having an adult with her, entertaining her every minute of her waking life! Babies actually benefit from the opportunity to explore their environment, to touch things, and to observe, without being actively stimulated by an adult 24/7.
  - Older infants often engage in parallel play with peers. While being left to their own devices at home can leave babies bored, in our rooms, there is so much to look at: other infants playing, care-takers feeding children, older babies crawling around. And once baby can sit up, she’ll often be happy playing alongside another little person: it’s socialization in action!
  - Additional help is always available. We have a trained Head of School, an administrative team, and “floater” teachers onsite who can be called upon for support any time there are needed.
  “It is necessary for the teacher to guide the child without letting him feel her presence too much, so that she may always be ready to supply the desired help, but may never be the obstacle between the child and his experience.”–Dr. Maria Montessori

I’m breastfeeding. How can I keep that up when my baby is in childcare? We support breastfeeding moms to continue breastfeeding as long as is right for you and your baby:
- Moms are encouraged to bring expressed breast milk to school. We’ll store your milk in our refrigerator, and happily feed it to your child while you are at work.
- We will adjust your baby’s feeding schedule to support your breastfeeding. Please let us know when you’ll be picking your baby up: that way, we can make sure he’s not just been fed a bottle when you come and are ready to nurse!
- Moms are always welcome to nurse baby onsite. Our infant rooms all provide comfortable nursing chairs. If you work close by, please feel free to visit during a break, and nurse your baby mid-day.

Five differences that enable Montessori elementary students to thrive

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

Trevor EisslerMontessori Madness

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

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

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

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

montessori preschool palos verdes

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

montessori preschool palos verdes

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

montessori preschool palos verdes

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

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

Creating a Connection Between School and Home

Informing yourself about school events and important dates is vital for you and your child to get the most out of your time at our school, and to feel connected with the school community. Building a relationship and partnership with your child’s teacher and with other school staff and families provides a foundation on which your child can build their social, emotional, and academic skills in school.

We are constantly working to communicate with families in a variety of ways, and want to do all we can to keep you informed about the progress your child is making with us. Here are some tips to staying connected:

Make sure you have the most up-to-date school calendar easily accessible. Calendars are available in a one-page pdf summary (sent out via email, and included in your enrollment documents).
Read your emails and newsletters. Every week, important information is included in your campus’s email, especially regarding minimum Days, holiday care, and field trips.
Sign up for and get updates via Transparent Classroom. Transparent Classroom is our online record-keeping system, where our Montessori Head Teachers keep track of all of the individualized lessons each child receives. This system allows us to ensure that each child progresses through the entire Montessori curriculum, at their own pace. It also allows your child’s teacher to communicate with you: he/she can easily share photos of your child with you and let you know of specific lessons she wants you to be aware of.
Be on the lookout for Watch Me Work Wednesdays. Each year, starting around January, you’ll be invited to sign up to observe in your child’s Montessori classroom (for preschool, kindergarten, and elementary school). Come see first-hand how your child spends his/her time in class!
Touch base with your child’s teacher at drop-off or pick-up. Teachers are happy to share anecdotes about your child’s day at drop-off or pick-up, as time permits, but it’s not possible to have in-depth conversations at these times of day. If your child’s teacher isn’t available to talk for long, leave a message with front office staff and she’ll get back to you as soon as possible, or email him/her to coordinate a time for a meeting.
You’re always welcome to ask front office staff to look in on your child or update you if you’ve had a tearful goodbye. They are there to help and answer any questions you might have.
Parent-teacher conferences happen twice a yea
r, with a back-to-school conference typically in September/October, and a mid-year conference around February. Some teachers and schools may send out a get-to-know-you questionnaire before conferences for new parents so your child’s teacher can better understand the goals you have for your child.
You’ll receive comprehensive progress reports of your child’s Montessori experience in February and June. These detailed reports are available online, in the Transparent Classroom system, and contain information both on the progress your child has made in the Montessori curriculum, as well as commentary about your child’s life in the classroom.
Finally, be sure to attend parent info events throughout the year. These will help you better understand what your child is doing at school. Parent info events can take a variety of forms–everything from casual morning coffee chats with a school leader, to hour-long late afternoon or evening virtual meetings, and even weekend multi-hour long workshops.

Thank you for staying connected!

A sneak-peek into the nido, your baby’s home away from home

Education is a natural process carried out by the child and is not acquired by listening to words but by experiences in the environment.
Dr. Maria Montessori

Your baby’s most common waking activity is exploring the wondrous world around him. In this exploration he uses all his senses—touching, tasting, smelling, hearing, and above all, seeing. That’s why we take such care to create the ideal home away from home. In this post, we share some features of this environment, and invite you to learn more about the LePort Montessori infant program.

Babies are visual beings. A child’s environment should a tranquil, beautiful place, full of natural, appealing materials. If you visit, you’ll notice that our infant rooms seem more like a comfortable home than a typical daycare center! Nowhere at LePort will you find noisy plastic toys or flashing TV screens.

One of the major goals of a baby’s first year is mobility. Through exploration, children learn to roll over, crawl, pull themselves up, and eventually walk. Our infant environments encourage such movement: mirrors make tummy time fun; pull-up bars over soft floors just call for children to stand up, over and over again; stairs invite climbing. We believe infants need to be free to move, and that containers such as jumpers, highchairs, playpens or walkers, which are very common in many daycare settings, have no place in a high-quality infant environment.

When it comes to feeding, daycare centers often feel like assembly lines: we’ve seen some with six highchair seats around a table, with six infants strapped to their seats while their caretaker feeds them one by one! We think that’s a horrible mistake: eating is a individually paced activity. Babies need to enjoy the eating process, and move at their own pace as they learn to self-feed. The right start to eating habits can help prevent many food issues later on. That’s why our older infants steadily transition from cuddling with a teacher and bottle to sitting at a low table and chair and enjoying eating with a spoon.

Diapering is too often something done to a child at daycare, long after he’s capable of participating in the process. In contrast, at LePort we foster early toilet learning and independence. When possible, our changing table is low to the ground, so the child can climb up on it. As soon as a child is able to stand, we change his diaper standing up, in the bathroom area. Low benches help children learn to undress and dress. And we even begin actual toilet training in the infant room!

During the first two years of life, a baby’s brain will grow dramatically. Our Montessori environment is designed to offer your baby an array of stimulating materials that support his natural cognitive growth. We offer beautiful, captivating mobiles to observe and admire. Low shelves are filled with wooden and fabric materials that encourage fine-motor coordination and cause/effect experimentation: puzzles, balls, rings on a post, containers to open and close, and more.

Research shows that one of the most important predictors of a baby’s language development is the frequency and quality of their communication with teachers. Our highly educated, engaging teachers are masters at providing high-quality language models for your child—they love talking to and with your child. And they know the importance of offering a lot of vocabulary in the right way—tailored to your child’s interest of the moment, to capture his interest and optimally support his language development.

Sleep schedules can be a nightmare if not managed thoughtfully. We believe in following the child: we customize a consistent routine of eating, activity and naps to each child’s rhythm. None of the enforced group naps that are all too common in other daycare settings! Typically, the sleep on floor beds or low cots, so they can learn to search out a quiet place when tired, and acquire the self-soothing skills they need to be good sleepers, well-rested for all the exploring going on in our infant rooms.

We’ve created an environment we’d love to see our own babies in every day—one where an infant will find warmth, stimulation, and safety, and where a parent will be informed and respected. We hope you agree, and that you’ll allow us to invite you to tour one of our schools, and see a Montessori infant classroom at its best, in action.

The rules haven’t changed.

In a recent NYT article, Thomas Friedman argues that globalization and the internet have changed the ingredients of successful living. Whereas in the past you were able to achieve success simply by working hard and abiding by the rules, argues Friedman, nowadays that’s just not enough. In today’s hi-tech world, success requires constantly reinventing yourself. You have to learn and re-learn, innovate, adapt, acquire new skills. It’s no longer enough just to work harder than others.

Friedman’s right that these are the skills needed in the modern world. But was anything less ever enough? Is it really the case that “working hard and sticking to the rules” were once a winning prescription?

Not if by working hard, Friedman means putting in lots of mindless time and energy. Success has never been about merely the number of hours one puts in. It’s the application of productive thought that is the winning prescription, not merely putting in the hours and following set rules.

That’s true not just for globally mobile high-tech jobs, but for all ambitious work—even in professions consisting mostly of manual labor.

A great handyman is not merely putting in time and following rules: he’s constantly observing the homes he works in, noticing and anticipating things like doors that don’t close well, or dripping faucets. He follows his industry, and is aware of new developments (wireless alarm systems; LED lights; sales on that safe that the homeowner has been considering.) He integrates all these facts, and suggests improvements to his clients. Then he has the knowledge and practical skills to implement his suggestions in an efficient, high quality manner. And if he doesn’t, his career atrophies, his life stalls, and he does not achieve major success.

What are the ingredients of success? What is it that makes a great handyman, or hi-tech journalist?

A successful individual is a conceptual thinker. He understands the facts and principles of his chosen field, and is able to apply his knowledge in the real world, to improve his customers’ lives.
A successful individual is an action-oriented doer. Instead of just thinking about things (or excelling at taking standardized tests about them), he’s able to do something with his knowledge, in this world. He’s got the practical skills to excel at his work, including organization, time management, customer service follow up, work ethic and professionalism.
A successful individual finds his niche, his passion in life. If you only go through the motions, you’ll never be great at anything. The best handymen, just like the best theoretical physicists, LOVE what they do. That’s how you get to be great and successful, and enjoy every minute of getting there.

Friedman is right that today’s schools fail miserable at equipping students with all three to develop these attributes for success. But he’s wrong to think this is because times have changed. Schools are failing children not because there’s something new in the air, but because they don’t respect the timeless value of knowledge properly taught. (And the value applies equally whether their students have the IQ to be theoretical physicists, or the practical aptitudes to be great mechanics.)

Our motto at LePort Schools, Knowledge for Life, integrates these three key attributes needed for success in any career and in life. We are convinced that if children are able to think conceptually, apply their thoughts in action, and pursue goals they are personally excited about, the sky’s their limit, and the American Dream of a fulfilling life is just as open to them today, as it was to their parents decades ago.

Selecting Early Readers For Your Child

As a parent of a new reader (my daughter is 5½ and will start the 3rd year of Primary this fall), I recently browsed the “early reader” shelves of my local bookstore. As much as I love bookstores—and browsing Amazon after the children are asleep—this particular excursion was not a pleasant experience.

Too many of the early readers available are plainly not suited for children who are just starting to read!

In Montessori Primary, children usually learn to read phonetically quite early. They become proficient at sounding out phonetic words, that is, words that can be decoded using the basic sounds individual letters make. They also learn 2-3 dozen puzzle words or sight words (such as the, was, one, they, to, do, he),words that appear frequently and can’t be decoded.

Following this work, students are introduced to English phonograms: those tricky letter combinations (such as <ch>, <ir>, and <aw>) that make English such a challenging language to read and write. There are more than 40 phonograms in English!

This is a big task for a new reader. It can take many months for a child to master enough phonograms to give her the fluency to tackle regular books. Within the Montessori prepared environment, a child has a variety of materials that help her to practice phonograms.

But where does that leave parents—who naturally want to provide their child with things to read outside of school?

If you turn to the commercially available early readers, such as the Ready-to-Read series or the I-Can-Read series, you’ll find that your Montessori emergent reader will struggle. Why?

These books define themselves as “early readers”, not by introducing a carefully sequenced progression of phonetic skills, but by using short sentences, 1- or 2-syllable words, and big print. The biggest problem is that a child cannot sound out many words in these books using basic letter sounds—and the phonograms that they do use are so frequent and mixed, that your Montessori child will flounder. (The idea behind these books is that children are supposed to learn to recognize words by sight through repetition. This sets a dangerous example to a young child that reading means memorizing whole words.)

Here are a few random example sentences, with the non-decodable letter combinations highlighted:

“Class, don’t forget!”, Ms. Glass says. “Tomorrow is…” “Pajama Day” we shout in unison. (That’s a fancy word for all together.) –from Fancy Nancy: Pajama Day, a Level 1 I-Can-Read book.

He could ride him in a circle without knocking over the chair or the dresser. –from The Horse in Harry’s Room, a Level 1 I-Can-Read book

It was almost school picture day at Robin Hill School. “There will be many empty spaces in our picture,” said Mrs. Connor. “Look at the Tooth Chart.”—from A Tooth Story, Ready-to-Read, Level 1

Ironically, almost every one of these highlighted sounds are standard English phonograms. They are predictable letter-sound patterns that should become a central part of a child’s arsenal of decoding skills—if they’re presented to him in a sequential manner that provides sufficient repetition and review.

But don’t despair: there is an alternative available: Flyleaf Publishing’s Decodable Literature Library. These books, written by former Montessori teacher Laura Appleton-Smith, are a treasure of decodable literature for Montessori preschool students who are becoming fluent readers. That’s why we’ve invested in a full set of these books for each of our Montessori Primary and Lower Elementary classrooms.

Flyleaf Publishing’s books outshine the alternatives. It’s the one series we have found that enables our students to read independently and joyfully, and to acquire fluency and phonogram knowledge in the process. Here are just a few reasons why this series is the best early reader library that we have found in years of perusing offerings:

A focus on offering decodable text. Reading Series 1 is over 95% phonetically decodable!
A careful progression through phonograms, providing lots of practice along the way. Take a look at this excerpt from Frank the Fish Gets His Wish, with the phonogram highlighted:

Frank would sit in his pink shell and wish his wish, “I wish that I had a pal to swim with; to splash and swish and jump with. I would swim the rest of my swims in a dish if I just had a pal to be with.”

What’s more, Ms. Smith is a master at introducing many words with these phonograms, without sacrificing the quality of the prose!

A slow build on length and complexity of stories. Children move gradually from short, simple sentences to longer sentences with more on the page, and more complex stories to follow.
Great, engaging, fun stories. While many early readers are contrived constructions that are of low interest, this series offers wonderful stories children can relate to, and which are fun to discuss with our young readers.
Elaborate, beautiful language. In place of the choppy, repetitive sentences found in other early readers, these books have interesting vocabulary. This list of words is just a random selection from Pearl Learns a Lesson, the book focused on the /ûr/ sound and its different spellings: flabbergasted, hurled, alert, respect, blurted, disturb, smirked, fungus, damsel, goblet, velvet, perplexed, dismissed, lavender, yearned…
Beautiful illustrations. While many early readers’ illustrations are cartoonish, these books feature beautiful art that wonderfully complements the story, bringing it alive and supplying context clues to help readers make sense of the stories they read.

If your child is enrolled in LePort’s Montessori program, once he or she reaches the stage of reading the Flyleaf series, you’ll notice that she’ll bring them home to read with you as part of our 3rd year Primary and early Lower Elementary programs. (If you aren’t a LePort family (yet!), you may want to search out these books for your emergent reader; they are sold directly from Flyleaf Publishing via their web site.)

We hope you enjoy listening to your child—and rejoicing in her achievement—as she reads to you from this special series!

Transitioning to Montessori: The Prepared Environment (Part 5 of 5)

Every fall, children transition to our Montessori programs from other preschools or elementary schools. What can parents do to help with this transition? In this series of blog posts, we lay out a few Montessori principles that apply at the later preschool and early elementary school level. Our focus is on children who transition into Montessori during their kindergarten through 2nd grade years, but many of the ideas suggested here are helpful for preschool children, too.

“Education is a natural process carried out by the child and is not acquired by listening to words but by experiences in the environment.”

“The environment itself will teach the child, if every error he makes is manifest to him, without the intervention of a parent or teacher, who should remain a quiet observer of all that happens.”

–Dr. Maria Montessori

A Montessori elementary classroom looks very different from traditional elementary school. Visit, and you’ll see children working alone or in small groups all around the room. They sit at small tables or work on mats: not a desk in sight. The teacher wanders between them, sitting with a child here and there for a few minutes, or bringing five children together around her desk now for a 10 minute small group lesson.

Parents often ask how the individualization of Montessori works: how can a teacher tailor his lessons to each child? How can there be order, when each child works on something different? How can children master the same fundamentals, if they have so much choice?

A key element to solving this apparent puzzle is what we call the prepared environment. Dr. Montessori observed that young children learn more from interacting with materials, then from listening to the words of teachers. That’s why the activity in a Montessori elementary classroom centers not on lectures and assignments, but on short lessons on how to use the activities spread out around the classroom on low shelves. These activities, plus the set of definite classroom rules that are essential to making freedom within limits work, are an essential part of the prepared environment.

In his Montessori elementary school class, a child receives lessons on how to use different materials. Once a material has been shown to him, he is free to use it to master the skills embodied in the material. A 2nd grader, for example, may receive a lesson setting up a multiplication problem on the Montessori checkerboard. Thereafter, he can spend many productive hours practicing this new skill, self-checking his results without adult intervention, as the problem cards have solutions on their back. The children understand and accept that they are free to practice and explore any material in which they’ve been given a lesson—and the teacher performs the ongoing responsibility of nurturing them towards materials that optimally engage and challenge them. The whole system works beautifully—if you don’t believe it, you can get a glimpse of it here!

In preparation for your child’s entry into Montessori elementary school this fall, you can implement some aspects of the prepared environment in your home. This will make it easier for him to feel at home, once he comes back to school in September. It will also enable him to share his experiences with you during the school year: while there is very little homework assigned in a Montessori lower elementary class, it’s not unusual for our enthusiastic students to want to share their work at home anyway!

Set up a work area in your home. Invest in a few low bookshelves (Ikea works just fine), a child-sized table (not a desk), some child-sized chairs, and a few work rugs. Equip them with materials your child can work with – a set of high-quality colored and regular pencils, pencil sharpeners, scissors, glue, blank and story writing paper. Put your child’s books on the shelves so he can access them. You may also want to put other activities your child enjoys there – such as puzzles, arts & crafts activities or building materials. Finally, provide him with a place to put his completed work, such as a drawer or a file folder he can easily access.
Provide guidance on how to work in this space. In a Montessori environment, each child is only permitted to have one activity out at a time. He takes it from the shelf and carries it to his work space (table or rug on the floor.) Once he is done, he replaces it on the shelf, and tidies up his work space (sweeping pencil droppings, carefully rolling up the rug and replacing it in his bin.) He can then choose something else to explore. You can establish similar rules at your home, and guide your child to complete the process. A nice side benefit: there will be less clean-up needed at the end of each day!
Give him time and space to explore. Often, we over-schedule our children, taking them from one activity to another. 5- and 7-year-olds, just as younger children, benefit from some unstructured time. Now that you have set up his work space, you may suggest some ideas to get him started (see the follow the child post for details), then let him run with it!

The prepared environment in a Montessori elementary classroom is essential to helping a group of 20+ individual children work productively. Once your child is settled into his routine this fall, we invite you to come and observe him. We bet you’ll be surprised at what you see!

Read more in our Transitioning to Montessori blog series:

Transitioning to Montessori: The Follow the Child Principle (Part 4 of 5)

“It is true that we cannot make a genius. We can only give to each child the chance to fulfill his potential.”

“Free choice is one of the highest of all the mental processes.”

“The prize and punishments are incentives are incentives toward unnatural or forced effort, and, therefore we certainly cannot speak of the natural development of the child in connection with them.”

“It is not in human nature for all men to tread the same path of development, as animals do of a single species.”
— Dr. Maria Montessori

Visit many academically rigorous elementary school programs, and you’ll see ice cream party charts on the walls, treasure chests in the corner, and behavior points tallies next to the white board. Ask a teacher at such a school how she motivates a child, and these extrinsic rewards figure highly in her plan, as do punishments, such as loss of recess, notices to parents, poor grades, and visits to the principal’s office. To an observer, it may seem like rewards and punishments are indispensible to getting children engaged in learning.

Yet watch these same children—who, at school, have to be corralled into attention—outside of school, and you may find them focused intently on reading a book they have chosen for themselves, successfully playing a video game that even you can’t figure out, engrossed in making cookies with mom in the kitchen, or practicing for hours with their soccer ball.

If children can and will focus and work hard outside of school, without extrinsic motivators, why can’t they be similarly engaged at school?

Our answer, it may not surprise you, is that they can!

In Montessori elementary school, we motivate children by their natural interest, not by stickers and rewards. We trust that they want to learn, if only we capture their attention by providing them with the right “points of interest” and offering work they find engaging.

We recognize that children are individuals. What motivates one may be dull for another; while one 6-year-old may be working on forming words, another one may be ready for writing stories; one child may need a quiet space to work alone, whereas another one thrives by working through math problems with a friend.

We aspire to help each child achieve the highest potential, and in fact, our academics are accelerated when compared to traditional elementary school (think 1st graders who write multi-story sentences in cursive; 2nd graders who do arithmetic into the millions!) What is different at our school is how each child meets these demanding academic standards. Rather than a one size fits all process, each finds his or her own path to success.

For example, a Montessori elementary school teacher who observes a boy’s interest in cars may give such a boy a very different writing assignment than another one who happens to be fascinated by the tide pool animals he saw on a recent trip to the beach. The universal need to practice writing is true for every child—but there is no similar need for every child needs to complete the same standardized work sheets!

We call this the follow the child principle—help each child maximize his or her potential by first understanding his or her needs. As teachers, it is one of our most important responsibilities to observe each child, to get to know her as an individual, and to tailor our teaching to her interests, strengths, and weaknesses.

As your child prepares for the start of Montessori kindergarten or elementary this fall, you may want to try following his interests. As a parent, you’re probably doing a lot of this already (after all, you know your child!), but paying conscious attention to guiding your child by respecting and nurturing his uniqueness can pay huge dividends.

If you want to work on academics with your child over the summer, please don’t rely on workbooks. Instead, think about what your child loves, and tailor academic activities around that. Does he love art and animals, and can do some writing? Get him a digital camera (or let him borrow yours), and some story writing paper. Then set out to explore some of your local animal habitats and zoos. Armed with the camera and notebook, he’ll have plenty to write about on his return! We bet he’ll do more writing, more willingly, then if you had asked him to complete worksheets! Similar ideas can apply to math: engage your numbers-minded daughter in some cooking: have her figure out how to double or half a recipe; have her help you total up a rough estimate of the cost of the items in your shopping cart. For more ideas on supporting scientific exploration, read Encourage the Scientist in Your Preschooler.
Have your child make more meaningful choices, and own the process of learning. Let your child choose some of the outings you take. And then put him in charge of more of the process: what do we need to pack for the pool? (He packs. No towel? He’ll remember next time!) How do we get there? (A map reading lesson!) Have her pick the books she’d like to borrow from the library (you can have some discussions afterwards on which ones she liked and disliked, and how to make better choices next time.)
Go out and explore the world together! Much motivation to learn comes from “teachable moments”, and being out and about together on little adventures during summer time can offer plenty of these. Visit the tide pools (then read about them, research animals online, get books about ocean animals, write down the things you learn.) Do some theme-based reading: the Magic Tree House series provides a great jumping-off point for exploring different times and places. For example, if your son gets fascinated by the knights of the middle ages, follow his lead: Street Through Time is a great, child-friendly history book to explore. Then head out to Medieval Times to experience an (admittedly over-the-top) take on a medieval feast.

Following the child—getting to know each child as an individual and allowing that individuality to guide his learning—is a great principle for tailoring instruction in such a way that ensures that every’s child potential is actualized. It’s a great way to get children to enthusiastically tackle tough work assignments, and to help them rise to their potential.

Read more in our Transitioning to Montessori blog series:

Transitioning to Montessori: Motor Skills and Indirect Preparation (Part 3 of 5)

“Watching a child makes it obvious that the development of his mind comes through his movements.”

“Since it is through movement that the will realizes itself, we should assist a child in his attempts to put his will into act.”

— Dr. Maria Montessori

In a Montessori preschool program, we emphasize motor development as an essential component of education. The hand is the tool of the mind, said Dr. Montessori, so any activity that is to hold the child’s attention has to be one where his whole personality, mind and body, are engaged harmoniously. The child has a need to integrate thought with action, observation with movement, mind with body.

Montessori preschool children have many opportunities to work on activities that make this integration possible. Indeed, the entire Montessori preschool class abounds with examples of “hand-mind” engagement—activities so deeply satisfying to students that they will do them quietly, focused, for up to an hour at a time.

Observe in a Montessori preschool class, and you may find a 3-year-old pouring water from one container to another for 20 minutes, or a 4-year-old carefully using the metal insets to create art work, or a 5-year-old writing elaborate stories with the moveable alphabet. The environment is a vista of different children engaged in different explorations, acquiring knowledge by acting purposefully in their environment.

These children are accomplishing something very important. They are extending their attention span. They are refining their gross and fine motor skills. They are following logical sequences of events. They are problem solving. This inner cognitive growth occurs in leaps and bounds because it is connected with the child’s need to move and engage in self-generated action. The opportunity to repeatedly use the mind to guide the hand is what prepares them to jump in and fully explore the exciting materials in the Montessori elementary classroom.

For children who join Montessori for kindergarten or elementary school, parents can help by providing similar mind-body integrated activities at home.

Get your child involved in kitchen activities. Dicing vegetables fosters motor control and can easily take 20-30 minutes. Peeling eggs strengthen muscles. Scooping flour and measuring sugar to just a level table spoon require concentration and motor control. Now is a good time, too, to teach children how to make their own school lunches!
Provide him with crafts activities that help with fine motor skills. Mandela drawing tools or stencils can replicate some of the skills practiced with Metal Insets in a Montessori primary class. Stringing small beads can help with the three-finger grip and concentration skills. Tracing and coloring in figures (like animals in this book) are also wonderful activities, as are crafts tasks that require a child to use scissors carefully or glue small pieces of paper or other things to make art work.
Get outside and work on gross motor skills. Learning to ride a bike without training wheels fosters both self-confidence and balance (a balance bike is a great tool – read more here.) Find a balance beam. Join a gymnastics or dance class. Throw balls with each other. These may not sound like academic activities, but children who can’t confidently control their bodies are at a clear disadvantage in class!

These mind-body activities, rather than a focus on academic work, is a better use of the summer months leading up to your child’s start in the Montessori kindergarten or elementary class!

Read more in our Transitioning to Montessori blog series:

Transitioning to Montessori: Freedom within Limits (Part 2 of 5)

Every fall, children transition to our Montessori kindergarten or elementary program from other preschools or elementary schools. What can parents do to help with this transition? In this series of blog posts, we lay out a few Montessori principles that apply at the later preschool and early elementary school level. Our focus is on children who transition into Montessori during their kindergarten through 2nd grade years, but many of the ideas suggested here are helpful for preschool children, too.

“Respect all reasonable forms of activity in which the child engages and try to understand them.”

“To let the child do as he likes when he has not yet developed any powers of control is to betray the idea of freedom.”

— Dr. Maria Montessori

In a traditional elementary school, much activity is adult-led. There’s a schedule of subjects (40 minutes of writing, then 30 minutes of math, followed by 15 minutes of recess/snack, and 30 minutes of quiet reading time, and so on.) The teacher leads a lesson, often for the whole class or a sub-group of children. Children have little say on what they work on, where they work and when they work on certain things.

In contrast, in a Montessori preschool/kindergarten or elementary school, children have what we call freedom within limits. We like to give children space to work things out on their own, with the teacher acting as their guide, rather than telling them what to do.

Throughout the day in the Montessori preschool, kindergarten or elementary schools, there are uninterrupted work periods of 2-3 hours each. During this time, the children receive individual or small-group lessons. But lessons typically take only 10-20 minutes each. Much of the time is not tightly scheduled by adults. Rather, it is an opportunity for a child to choose certain activities (guided, of course, by the teacher, who has observed the child and tailored his curriculum to his needs.) A child may choose to start with the challenging math problem while she’s fresh in the morning. Another one may ease into the day by doing some independent reading.

As long as children are engaged in purposeful activities, the teacher will not actively interrupt. Instead, he may step back and observe the child, and only get involved when an activity is complete, for example, to sit down with a child and provide guidance on a piece of writing. (In contrast to traditional elementary schools, where teachers do a lot of correcting of work, in Montessori, children often have access to control cards and eagerly correct their own work.)

This type of freedom, however, is not an unlimited free-for-all. It is the result of careful preparation, and of a profound invisible structure provided by the teacher and the materials. A child earns independence over time. For instance, a new child may be asked to check in with a teacher several time throughout the day, or be given a detailed daily work plan. A child who has a hard time focusing on work when seated next to a friend may be redirected to a separate table to work on alone. An experienced 3rd grader, on the other hand, may have whole days where he works largely independently, or may have the freedom to pursue joint projects with a classroom friend. Purposeful, self-managed work becomes the ideal to which all of the children aspire.

Most students who come to Montessori kindergarten or elementary school from a play-based preschool or traditional elementary school program aren’t used to this level of freedom. We recognize that there’s some adjustment needed for such students, and so we slowly build up their capabilities so they can take on more responsibility.

As a parent, you can help by simultaneously ceding control at home, and handing more responsibility to your child.

For example, if you find yourself managing her morning routine, urging her to get dressed or to have breakfast or to brush teeth, you may want to consider transitioning that responsibility to your child. Do so in a careful, slow, step-by-step process, so she experience success:

Sit down and talk. Let her know that you trust her to become more independent, and that you’ll work with her.
Make a plan and write it down. Identify the tasks your child will do on her own (get dressed, make the bed, fix breakfast, prepare her lunch.) Make sure she can do the tasks (see the post on independence), and coach her where needed. Then create a routine chart together, listing each key step (add photos for younger children who still struggle with reading.)
Hand over responsibility. Put the chart somewhere accessible. Instead of reminding your child to do a task (‘it’s time to brush your teeth now’), point her to the task (‘we’re done with breakfast. What’s next on your chart?’)
Discuss progress. Rather than having the child get in trouble if she doesn’t meet expectations, ask her what went wrong? Does she not want to do it on her own anymore? Is there some other task she’d rather try first? Make it clear to your child that you are there to support her pursuit of independence—but also that you will hold her to her own commitments.

Other easy areas for handing over control could be getting ready for an outing (e.g., packing the things needed to go to the pool), or getting ready for bed.

Entrusting your child with more responsibility at home will help ease the transition into the freedom within limits environment of Montessori kindergarten and elementary school. And as a nice side benefit, it may also allow you to nag less and have more fun with your child!

Read more in our Transitioning to Montessori blog series:

Transitioning to Montessori: Independence (Part 1 of 5)

“Little children, from the moment they are weaned, are making their way toward independence”

“Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.”

— Dr. Maria Montessori

If your child will be transitioning into a Montessori school late into the preschool/kindergarten program, or straight into Montessori elementary school, it is helpful for you as a parent to understand what your child would have experienced had he been in the program in earlier years.

The goal of the Montessori preschool experience is to help children help themselves. “All by myself” is and ought to be the theme of a toddler’s life, and in the right environment, this motivation to be independent becomes the basis of tremendous learning. Montessori preschools, by satisfying the child’s need to be independent, help him acquire skills of daily living in a careful, step-by-step sequence that sets them up for success and earned self-esteem.

It starts with something as simple as enabling toddlers to manage their own snack routine. They start out by learning to lay out a napkin and a small cup. Before long, they are able to set the full table, serve themselves by scooping raisins and pouring water, and clean up the table, put away dishes and sweep up crumbs. Rather than being a passive recipient of snacks, a child learns to satisfy his own needs.

Preschool children in Montessori have the opportunity to do many tasks that other children are not entrusted with until much later. For example, they peel and cut fruits and vegetables, using real knives. They prepare and serve snack to their peers. They cut and arrange flowers and are in charge of taking care of classroom plants and pets.

As these preschoolers become more capable, they relish taking on more responsibility. At school, they take ownership of cleaning up classroom shelves, without being asked, and also teach these same skills and habits to younger friends. At home, they may be entrusted with preparing their own lunches, or being real contributors to family chores.

If a child transitions to Montessori as a 5-, 6- or 7-year-old (i.e., late in preschool or early in elementary school), he may not have had these same experiences. And, maybe more importantly, his parents may not have received coaching on how to foster this type of independence at home.

The best solution, if your child is in this situation, is to start now! Think about what things you may be doing for your child that he could do alone, if you made some slight adjustments to your routines and gave him some extra initial support.

Here are a few ideas to support independence for kindergarten age or early elementary school children (useful whether or not you enroll them in Montessori for elementary school!)

In the kitchen.
1. Provide your child with a low shelf or drawer with his own utensils, so he can set his table. Make this a daily responsibility.
2. Set up healthy food choices on low shelves in the pantry and refrigerator: jars with cereal, a basket of fruit, cut-up veggies in a bowl, a small pitcher with milk or juice. Invite your child to help himself to a healthy snack when he is hungry!
3. Invite your child to help you with food prep. For Small Hands carries a great selection of child-sized implements, from vegetable peelers to cutting boards and aprons. 5- or 6-year-olds can do a lot of food prep, from peeling apples to cutting carrots, from measuring out flour to flipping pancakes!
4. Enable your child to clean up after himself. Set up a child-sized broom & dust bin, a small bucket, a scrubber and a sponge, and ask your child to clean up around the table after eating.
In the bedroom, bathroom and laundry room.
1. Ensure your child’s closet is child-friendly. Make sure he can access all his clothes easily. Limit choices to those appropriate for the season and day-to-day activities (put away special occasion clothes, unless you are ok if your child wears them every day!)
2. Organize things so your child can do his own laundry. Get a two-compartment hamper for easy clothes sorting. Show your child how to manage the washer (including pre-treating stains!) Show him how to fold & put away laundry.

In his Montessori elementary classroom, your child will have an increasing amount of responsibility. He’ll have the opportunity to keep his own work organized, take care of classroom plants and pets, and help keep the general classroom organized. He’ll learn how to be in charge of his own academic activities, planning out his daily and weekly tasks, and taking the initiative to reach out to teachers and friends for help when he needs it.

Giving your child more independence at home will help get him ready for this new environment of freedom within limits (more on that in the next blog post here.)

Read more in our Transitioning to Montessori blog series:

Summer Travel: Should you “app” it? – Part 2

There is an ongoing debate on how much technology-based engagement is appropriate for very young children. (The American Academy of Pediatrics recommends no screen time prior to age 2, for example.) Whatever the answer, the extra time with our children we have during summer travels is an opportunity to be cherished. A healthy dose of skepticism towards technology-based entertainment is, we believe, appropriate.

That said, something that is undesirable in excess is not necessarily undesirable in moderation. There may be times when an electronic device is a useful and perfectly appropriate way to entertain your child (think 10 hour international airplane flights!) Many of us adults rightly love our iPhones, Androids, Kindles etc.: technology, used correctly, can be a great tool.

So what’s the best way to use portable electronics with children? What guidance can we as Montessori educators provide for parents who want children to use these gadgets the right way?

Use gadgets purposefully and responsibly.

Beware of obsessive use. While it’s ok for a child to occasionally enjoy screen time, make sure that your child doesn’t become obsessed with your iPhone. One warning sign: if the child regularly prefers time with the gadget, over real-world experiences with you, you likely need to cut back on screen time.

Use technology as an enabler. There are great tools out there, from wonderful videos that explain the world (the show “How It’s Made” is one of our favorites!), to great tools (dictionary.com or a similar application should be on all parent’s smartphones!) Plus, not all content on the device has to be games or video: fill your device with chapter books that are great to read aloud, audio books, and music.

Don’t overestimate educational value. Games can be fun for children, and keep them busy. Just don’t overestimate how much learning goes on between a preschooler and a gadget: focus on the fun, and take any educational value as a bonus. That way, you won’t be tempted to give too much screen time, because it’s so educational!

Select the apps you use carefully, with eyes wide open.

Technology has wonderful potential: It can provide a built-in control of error, enabling children to independently learn from their mistakes. It can combine audio and visual inputs, helping children, for example, to identify letter sounds, or to spell from dictation. It can individualize, for example by repeating letters or spelling areas that children struggle with.

Unfortunately, many educational apps and games are made by programmers, not educators. As a result, many apps have questionable pedagogical approaches. You as a parent need to be aware of these shortfalls. Be on the lookout for a few common errors, and you’ll be able to more easily weed through the huge number of apps out there to select the better ones for your Montessori child.

- - Beware of sticker shock. No, not in the sense of prices, but in the sense of sticker-like artificial phrase. Mindless cheers (“You’re awesome!” after every move!) or smiley faces are not a good source of motivation. Research repeatedly shows that internally motivated learning is much better than activity motivated by rewards. Good apps are inherently motivating, as the player progresses through levels and completes challenges. They should not require, on top of the challenge, constant clapping, cheering and stickers. Unfortunately, while many games aimed at adults recognize this, most apps for children fall into the fake-praise trap.
  - Avoid the clutter. Think Montessori classroom: simple, zen-like games that focus attention on the learning objective are much better than those that are full of clutter. Why do numbers have to swim in an aquarium, anyway?
  - Don’t go for boring stuff. Many apps are nothing by glorified flash cards. Flash cards don’t work in real life. Why would they work on a gadget? (No big danger here, though: your child will just not be interested, and the only damage will be to your pocket book!)
  - Beware of any “learn to read” app. Most are full of pedagogical errors and potential conflicts with your child’s Montessori experience. Here are just a few of the most common problems, which afflict almost every single reading app I have tried:

- - 1. Using letter names. In Montessori, we teach letter sounds, not names, because only letter sounds matter in learning to read. What does this mean: “kayayetee”? Can’t figure it out? It’s “CAT”, spelled using letter names. You can’t read that? Neither can your child! Yet most apps that teach letters use letter names. You’ll see a yak, a cow and wasp appear on the screen, and the child is ask to touch the animal that starts with “why” or with “double you.”
    2. Mispronouncing letter sounds and applying phonics wrong. Many applications that do try to teach phonics mispronounce sounds, saying “kuh” for the letter “k”, instead of just using the initial consonant sound. Other apps introduce phonograms incorrectly: for instance, they might show the word “pool”, and spell it out with the short letter sounds p, o, o, l, then say “pool”, without ever introducing the idea that “oo” has its own sound. Confusing, not helpful!
    3. Using print, not cursive. Almost all apps use print letters, and often capital print letters. That’s not horrible if they are aimed at reading, but less helpful if they are focused on writing activities, such as tracing letters to learn their shape.
    4. Focusing on “sight words”, rather than decoding. Many apps follow the public school approach of teaching children to look at words as a whole to guess their meaning from their total shape, rather than sounding words out to make meaning. Memorizing decodable words or guessing at words is not a good habit for young readers to get into.

So with all of these caveats, are there any apps that a thoughtful Montessori parent can use? I’m no expert on the app world, and as with anything parents buy for their kids, there is an element of personal preference. But after reviewing dozens of apps for my 3- and 5-year-old children, here are some that are better than the rest (although many still suffer from some of the issues outlined above):

- - Kids Finger Painter. This is a free-form painting app, and about as creative as you can get with a gadget. Kids select different colors and brush width, then create art work on the screen. They can even save the artwork when done!
  - My First Tangrams. This is a simple geometry app, best played on a larger screen, which simulates physical tangrams, where children arrange simple geometric shapes to make more complex figures.
  - Bugs and Buttons. This is an app with an adult game feel (high quality animations, nice background music), with several games that teach different skills (sorting things, making patterns, counting, fine motor control.) Very well made and not at all annoying!
  - Montessorium apps. Created by Montessori parents, these apps try to bring Montessori sandpaper letters, number rods and puzzle maps to the iPad/iPhone space. Quite well done, these apps are simple, use phonics, no cheering, and include materials familiar to your Montessori child.
  - SoundSeeker. This app is basically a sound game “I spy”, where children drag pictures to the letter that stands for their beginning sound. It uses letter sounds, but unfortunately has a heavy dose of cheering and sticker charts.
  - Montessori Crosswords. Nice app that simulates word building with the moveable alphabet. Offers a cursive option, works with letter sounds and correct phonograms. Has lots of options that go well with Montessori: for example, you can focus on specific sounds or phonograms to have your child practice.
  - PhotoTouch SightWords. This app simulates the 2nd period of a three-period puzzle word lesson. The child hears a word, sees between 3-10 different words on the screen, and has to touch the correct word. You can customize the difficulty from preschool – 3rd grade level, and even create your own items and lists (helpful for practicing phonograms, for example.)
  - CardDroid Math. This is a simple math facts practice app for Android devices. Nothing fancy, just math problems that children can do and self-check their work. Fully customizable problem sets: start with simple addition up to 10, and end with double-digit multiplication. You can even set a time limit, and challenge the (older) child try to improve against himself in math facts speed.
  - MontessoriTech apps. I haven’t had the chance to try these apps yet (they require an iPad, and I don’t own one), but from the description and screen shots, these sound like great apps for older primary and younger elementary students. They include the Stamp Game, compound words, and math facts with Montessori beads.

Have you found any apps that meet the criteria we discuss here? We’d love to hear about them in the comments, or just post them on our Facebook page, in response to the link to this blog post there.

Heike Larson

Summer Travel: Should you “app” it? – Part 1

Summer time, for many of us, means travel time! From day trips to the local beach, to weekends at Grandma’s house, to long vacations in different parts of the world, summer is an opportunity to get out there and explore.

But travel time also means being stuck in a car, train or airplane for hours on end. For families with preschool-age children, it’s hard to know what to do to pass the time in these situations.

Out come the iPad, Kindle, Android phone or another hand-held electronic device: what easier way to keep your child occupied? And if you just invest in the right educational software, so your preschooler can learn her letters while you can focus on driving or enjoy a summer book for yourself, then doing so is totally guilt-free. Right?

Well, maybe.

There’s no question that electronic devices work very well in keeping preschool children occupied: videos and games do hold their attention. They do buy you quiet as you wait for a plane, or drive a car on longer trips. But are they really providing value? Are they the best use of the precious vacation time you get to spend with your preschool child—and are they optimizing your child’s vacation experience?

As Montessorians, we believe that its critical for a preschooler to view the world “out there”, the real world of people and places and objects, as a wondrous opportunity for discovery. This attitude is achieved through engagement with a caring adult who illuminates all the things to be encountered and explored. So while we as parents may occasionally call upon select apps for help (more on good and bad choices in this blog post), our view is that we should also prioritize the value of finding ways to share experiences that are unique to the trip, or that we’re otherwise unlikely to share with our children.

By thinking ahead, we can plan for many fun (and educational) experiences, most of which don’t require us to add time to our travel. Here are just a few ideas as you prepare your preschooler’s “travel environment”:

Give a lesson on simplified map reading. Many Montessori preschool children have worked with maps in the classroom. While they can’t read normal maps, you can easily sketch a map on a piece of paper. Draw in a few highlights: a tunnel, a refinery along the way, a big farm, some mountains, an airport, a planned lunch stop. Ask your child to find these places for you as you drive. Label highways, and you can practice numbers.
Explore the world you travel through. Identify some unique features you’ll encounter, whether outside the train window or in your car. Provide your child with the language: “See that lake over there?”, “look, there’s an oil derrick”, “see this farm? They are growing oranges!” Especially on car trips, there is much to see. On one recent trip, we noticed lots of trucks loaded with tomatoes, and had an impromptu discussion about farming, the many things tomatoes are used for, and transportation.
People watch together. Airports are great for this: watch the people with your child. Discuss where they might be going, and why we think that. Notice people in different moods, and discuss their feelings: this child is really upset, this couple is in their arms and happy to see each other again, and so on.
Read together. For airplanes, bring books instead of video games. Scour the library for topics that might be related to your trip – Hello Ocean makes a great introduction to the beach, for example; About Mountains is a great springboard for discussing on a trip to go hiking.
Play anywhere games. Some can be educational: ask your child to count white cars, or to add together three raisings plus five raisins before you give them to her as a snack. For ideas on games for any situation, try Fun on the Run, a pocket-sized little book full of easy ideas that require just you, your preschooler and maybe a few things like crayons that you probably have in your purse anyway.
Sing songs together. Music Together, a company that organizes very popular preschool music programs, sells two CDs of wonderful sing-aloud songs, called Family Favorites. The best thing? These songs are actually fun to listen to for the adults, too! Or make up your own songs as you go along, to any familiar tune.
Read and memorize poems. For slightly older children, a long car ride can be a good opportunity to memorize some poems. Jack Prelutsky has a fun collection of silly rhymes. Ride a Purple Pelican is one of our favorites: it’s a great travel book, as many of the poems relate to places in the US and Canada. The Random House Book of Poetry for Children is a great collection of children’s poems from many authors, a number of which are short enough to commit to memory.
Bring simple arts & crafts supplies. Your Montessori child may delight in fun activities like tracing & coloring simple animal shapes (this book is a fun source of ideas), making art with stencils (my 5-year-old loves Mandalas), threading beads (just bring a little tray to keep them together in the plane), or cutting up and gluing together colorful paper mosaics. For Small Hands, a Montessori-oriented online store, has many read-made crafts supplies, a number of which can easily be done at an airport or in a plane.

So back to the initial question: should you bring your iPad or other device? Our answer is yes, go right ahead. Just make sure to use it sparingly, so that it doesn’t take over the precious hours you can spend engaged with your child. This is your chance to make memories together—it’s worth the extra effort!

(If you do want to use an electronic device, read on here for our thoughts on how to go about selecting games for your child. And don’t forget that chapter books work well on electronic devices, as do audio books!)

Heike Larson

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