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Montessori for Made Easy for All Ages by S.V. Wilhelmi
My name is Suzanne Wilhelmi, and I am here tonight to talk to you about Montessori. The title of this talk is Montessori Made Easy for All Ages. How many of you, first of all, are new to homeschooling? How many of you have homeschooled for more than three years? I've come to realize that homeschooling is a lot like parenthood, it grows on you. I have eight children and people often ask how I do it. I just tell them that after the first three kids, they break you in, and after that it gets easier. And I think it's a lot the same with homeschooling - after you homeschool for at least three years, it really does start to get easier. I'm one of those who was real slow to get started. It took me six years to convince myself to homeschool my kids. My oldest begged me for six years. Finally when I was ready, he decided to go to high school, but I did start with a kindergartener and an 8th grader. And now I wonder why I waited so long. That summer I did go to a Christian homeschooling conference in South Dakota and started thinking seriously about homeschooling. Two weeks later I went to Lincoln, Nebraska for a Catholic homeschooling conference and it's there that I was convinced that this was what I was going to do for our family. Besides, there were lots of moms around - with babies in slings - and I felt right at home because I had a six month old baby back then. I do want to start tonight with a prayer: In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Help us O God to enter into the secret of childhood, so that we may know, love and serve the child in accordance with the laws of Thy justice and follow Thy holy will. In the name of the Father and of the Son and of the Holy Spirit. Amen That was a prayer from Maria Montessori. A lot of people don't realize it, but she was a Catholic, and I'll clue you in on some of the wonderful things that she did do, tonight. Before I start talking about Montessori though, I want to cover a few basics, just to make sure everybody knows the difference between a curriculum and a method of teaching. You've probably heard about a lot of the methods - a* curriculum* is a course of study, it's "what" is taught. Like Kolbe, Seton, Mother of Divine Grace - they offer you the entire package. A *method* is a way of teaching. So, before tonight, had any of you heard of Montessori before, are you somewhat familiar with it? When we hear Montessori most of us think of some elite preschool where the tuition is at least $3000 a month, and the materials cost a whole lot more than that. Montessori is actually a method of teaching, a way of teaching. Other methods you might have heard about might include the Traditional, or the school-at-home method, a lot like the public schools, they rely heavily on textbooks and workbooks and that type of thing. The Unit Study is something that will integrate a lot of subjects together with one theme, an example of that would be the Prairie Primer, Laura Ingalls Wilder. Charlotte Mason is another method, another way of teaching that recommends living books, biographies and that type of thing and discourages twaddle, or dumbed-down literature. They are also very much into nature studies and timelines and that type of thing. There's also the Classical Method, which is based on the Trivium, and so you've probably heard of Grammar, Logic, Rhetoric - Laura Bergquist is the name that's usually associated with that. There's unschooling, or natural learning started by John Holt. It stresses real life learning through experiences, where the child decides what he wants to learn. And then there's the Eclectic method, where you pick and choose from any or all of the methods available. Montessori in some ways, even does incorporate a lot of these other methods into the way that things are taught. To best illustrate Montessori to you tonight I have an illustration for you. What form would you like the education of your child to take? That of a muffin pan or that of a rose? If you think about those, the rose is something that is living, the muffin pan is not. The rose is warm, it's rooted. On the other hand, a muffin tin is cold, it only touches the surface. The muffin tin is very compartmentalized, where you've got several different subjects and you fill each one of those just to a certain point. Where with Montessori the subjects are integrated, if you go back to the Unit Study it will help you to understand that term a little bit. The muffin pan method would be rigid, dull, pre-formed and then on the other hand you've got flexible, unique, attractive. The important thing about the rose picture is that the growth comes from within, to where it can reach it's fullest potential. Where the muffin tin is something that's filled and it's done. Did any of you know before today that Montessori was Catholic? ... a few of you did. She *is* in the Catholic Encyclopedia. She was a doctor in Italy, who in 1907 was asked to start a day care program for underprivileged children in the slums of Rome. What has become the Montessori Method of education grew from her scientific observations of children and their behavior. Pope John XXIII said that Maria Montessori knew how to "discover and bring light to the most hidden virtues and capacities of the child." The Montessori Method is in the public domain. She refused to have her methods patented. So anyone can claim to be Montessori but it doesn't guarantee that what is taught is true to what Maria Montessori started. She worked directly with children around the world; in Italy, Spain, Holland, United States, India. She once said: "My life has been spent in the research of truth. I have scrutinized nature at its origins both in the East and in the West through the study of children, and though it's been forty years now since I began my work, childhood seems to be an inexhaustible source of revelations, and let me say it, hope." Actually it's been almost one hundred years since Maria developed her teaching methods. Her educational foundations have been tested and have survived because her ultimate goal was to preserve the dignity of the child. How can a child not thrive and learn in a prepared environment that emphasizes respect and integrity? A respect and integrity not only of the materials, but more importantly of the child, and of those with whom he interacts. The basic philosophy of Montessori is to "follow the child." Maria Montessori believed that education, rather than being the rote transfer information, must seek to serve the whole child, and to nurture the human potential of each individual. The child naturally learns to walk and talk, and Montessori found that within the child is the same type of ability to naturally acquire skills for reading, writing and mathematics. In the Montessori environment the materials are designed to be self-correcting. We do have a booth here where we have a lot of materials with us, but we can only put about four or five sets of them on the table at a time. So come by and we'll keep switching materials, or we can pull them out for you. But it's really neat to see how these materials can be self-correcting. What it does, is it allows the child to learn in an atmosphere of success and positive reinforcement. The child corrects his own errors and works towards the mastery of concepts through repeated manipulations of the materials. His motivation is not for external reward, but for internal fulfillment. The basics of the Montessori principles can be illustrated with a triangle, where you have the child; you have the directress, or the teacher; and you have the environment which includes the materials. The teacher takes the role of directress, it's one who directs the child to learning. She is responsible for the preparation of the environment. The prepared environment is one that invites the child to grow. It's an attractive environment that will lead the child to a spontaneous exploration and discovery, or self-learning. Basically, it begins with a place for everything and everything in its place. There are a number of materials specific to Montessori, most of which can be homemade. That's another thing we are working on developing; it's going to be a Big Book of Montessori Made Easy including directions to make your own materials. I've been working on this for about a year and we've got just about everything made, and it's now a matter of getting it on paper to share it with others. But even if you don't use the Montessori materials you can make adaptations to what you do have, to make the *way* you teach more Montessori oriented. Over the past six years of homeschooling, I have tried different curriculums and different methods of teaching. I do have two children who are graduated from homeschool so I have an idea of where I'm headed and I have six more children to educate, ranging in age from two to eleven years. Now when I am looking at new learning materials I have two goals in mind. I look for materials that are multi-sensory, so they can be usable for children with different learning styles, and for materials that are usable for children of different age and grade levels. The first thing you might want to do is take an inventory of the materials you have on hand now. That's what was really helpful to me. I have some forms in the back of (From Creative Chaos to Livable Learning) that help you to determine the difference between toys and learning materials, and then you can categorize your learning materials according to subject areas. Then, evaluate your learning materials and see if they can be adapted to be self-correcting. This will allow the child to use the material independently to acquire knowledge. In other words, it allows a way for the child to self-test. The Montessori Method uses a number of ways to make materials self-correcting. In most cases the answers are provided with a control card or a control chart. Many materials can be made self-correcting simply by putting the answer on the back of the material. For example with file folder games, we do have some samples. Carson-Dellosa is one of those file folder game companies where they make the big manuals and then you can make your own file folder games. Then what we do, is put a pocket on the back for all the pieces, number how many pieces go back in there. On the pieces themselves, for example - it comes like this where you have the number five and you are supposed to match it to the five dots, but to make it self-correcting you put the five dots on the back of the numbered piece so they can do it totally independently. The materials are often demonstrated in the form of a presentation, that's an activity that the child is expected to duplicate. The standard approach is called a three-period lesson. The three-period lesson is as natural to us parents as talking to our toddlers. Many of us have already practiced a form of the *three period lesson* with our younger children. Think of how your toddler learns to talk:
So in a Montessori presentation the language used is something like this: For the first period you say "This is..." and then name the object. The second period is "Show me... Point to... Hand me...Where is..." and for the Third Period you would say "What is this?" A vital part of Montessori education is what's called observation. I use a weekly/monthly planning calendar to record observations of my children at work. I have learned so much, being more aware of watching how they learn. We can learn a lot by watching them. It's very important that once a child becomes absorbed in a work cycle, where he's working on a number of things in succession, that his concentration should not be disturbed. This is the hardest thing for us as adults, because we have to resist the urge to correct, encourage, or even acknowledge by a wayward look the work of our child. An example of this is when my three year old was in the same room while I was teaching my older daughter to read. He hadn't started talking yet, and we didn't know if he was even going to talk because he had had a stroke as a baby. But what happened is - as I was teaching her phonics and she was sounding out the words, he was repeating those sounds in the background. So naturally I verbally showed my excitement, and he stopped! His concentration was interrupted. In the following weeks he did continue to learn to talk by listening to his sister read, but every time we acknowledged him, he stopped. The course of study with Montessori, if you follow the curriculum that goes beyond just the way of teaching, has five basic areas. The first is called Sensorial - some of these terms when you first look at them - it takes a while to absorb what it really means. What that is - is using things that you can see, hear, smell, taste, touch and then comparing the similarities, contrasting the differences, and grading the sequences of those things. An example of that would be these little sound boxes. These are just little film canisters and they have different types of materials inside of them. Shake one with a red dot and then shake one with a blue dot - and those are the same so they can match up. Shake two more, now those two are different. It really teaches them to see the subtle differences in things. And then once they can compare the similarities and contrast the differences, then they can grade them from softest to loudest. I was recently in a real interesting discussion on an egroup about Montessori, and there was an issue about some things in the world today, with the New Age Movement and different things like that, and people are so very tolerant of differences and that kind of thing, and I interjected to the group and I said. "If you only look at the similarities you are going to have a distorted view of reality. You have to look at the similarities with the differences in order to see the truth. So that's how you can take little sound boxes and film canisters and make a Theology lesson out of it. Another one of the pieces in the Sensorial set is the Pink Tower, we just call it the Tower or the Cubes - they are blocks that differ one centimeter each time you go down. And so you build this tower and there's only one way to do it - that it's right - so again with this there is truth inherent in this material and it makes itself self-correcting. Now most people look at this and say this is just for pre-schoolers, but if you look at this - this is one unit. The next one has actually eight units which is the cube of two, the next one is the cube of three. I never knew that numbers that were cubed made cubes when you put them together. I'm learning with my kids, so that was really neat. And with this one too, I thought, you can teach about the Protestant church, and how they broke off - with this tower of cubes. You have one group that took this much of what we teach (randomly removing one of the larger cubes from the tower) and got off on their own and another one that maybe took a few little ones and eventually you're having people pulling pieces out but once you start this construction - with the truth that was inherent in it to begin with - (tower falls) it loses the foundation that was there to begin with. So again, another theology lesson, from some blocks. The Practical Life area is the next section, or the next course of study. That includes care of self, care of one's environment, and social grace and courtesy, like everything from tying shoe laces to greeting someone properly. I don't have a lot to physically show you because we just incorporate it into our daily routine. It's a real neat way to *show* the kids how to do their daily chores instead of telling them what to do because children at that age imitate more than they listen. One of the biggest challenges I had in the house last year was the laundry. I was being buried alive by our laundry. And I started to think, can I apply Montessori principles to our laundry? So what I did is I came up with a color coded chart for four different hampers. Now even my two year old can presort the laundry, and we can keep up with it. The next area is Math, and again, I have learned so much by being able to see and touch the Math. One of the activities is place value. With Montessori the materials go from simple to complex and from concrete to abstract. And this is a real concrete way to teach kids place value - you've got your hierarchy - the ones that are on green, the tens on blue, the hundreds on red, and that keeps going. The first little bead is a unit bead, then you have a ten bar, then you have a hundred square and a thousand cube. The other thing that's really neat about this is to understand the hierarchy because it has a pattern - you've got a point, a line and a surface. And if you kept building this - it would continue - this is the new point - it's a cube, but it's the new point, then the next piece is going to be a large line and then a huge cube. That's the kind of stuff that makes this just fascinating. It makes it fun for the kids. It makes it fun for us too. The next section is Language, and we've had a lot of fun with this. I have one who has really fought phonics and reading skills, but once we did this he's had a lot more fun. I am so into tackle boxes, it's dangerous. I stopped at Cabela's on the way here, and I was going to get *one* more of these, and they had a package of eight of them, for like nine dollars, so I had to get *sixteen* tackle boxes instead of one. But they do have a really good deal on them right now - so if you get into this it's fun. We're also working on a series called "Teaching from a Tackle Box." Ok, this is the first set for the phonics - you've got a pink series, a blue series and a green series and each one gets a little more difficult. This one has pieces that I pulled off a web site where the pictures were perfect for the phonics, and then what the kids do is put this picture card down and then we have a moveable alphabet that we made, with the ABC's on paper and they spell it out, and then they can self-correct themselves because the answer is on the back. That's another thing that Montessori discovered, is that kids will spell, then they'll go to writing, and then they'll go to reading, which is their natural progression. There are certain sensitive periods where there's times in their life where these things are going to come to them easier than any other time. And a lot of us don't realize that. And I've got a little to share with you on that in a minute. Culture is the next area, that's the fifth traditional area. That includes Geography, History, Science and a lot of times, Art and Music. This is something that we just came up with - the actual Montessori maps *are* this big but they are made out of masonite which would be a really difficult project unless you have the right tools. So what we did is took the file folders, and took two of them open, laminated the backgrounds and then taped them together with packing tape in the middle. These removable country pieces are laminated and attached with brads, so you can take them off and just like with the big real life Montessori puzzle they can put the pieces back again. They've got these for all the continents, the United States and this is the world. The other things that are really popular for a way of teaching, especially with science and things that have a lot of nomenclature or naming, are what is called three-part cards. And what you'll have is a card that has the illustration and the label all on one card, and then the next set of cards will have *just* the picture and *just* the label. So the first thing you would do when they are just learning is put the control card down and then match these pieces to the control card. When they get a little better at it they can just place the picture, match the label to it and then use the control card to self-check. I laminate my stuff, I love my laminator. The gal that was doing some Montessori consulting with me, she hand drew everything - you can do it or your kids can do it - your kids can make these cards and learn themselves. Religion is something I'm having fun with and that's another project I am working on - it's called Montessori Made Catholic - with applications to our Faith. This piece once it's laid out will cover our nine foot table. This is a Rosary where each of the Hail Marys has a little circle with Mary on it,. Then the piece that has the mysteries is numbered and it has the cross on it and the Holy Spirit (dove) on it for the Our Father and the Glory Be that we pray. So then we lay this out on the table and they practice - you can say the prayers as you do it - or they can just learn how the rosary is made up. The one book that I will show you later is From Creative Chaos to Livable Learning, it's something that I put together in the last month. But it really shows where I've come from in the last year in creating order in our home and bringing independence to our kids. (To be continued............The rest will be posted soon) |
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