Whether this is the first time your child is headed to school or you're preparing for your youngest of six, the first day of school evokes all kinds of emotions. You may be feeling anxious about leaving them, or excited to have a little more space to breathe and think...
Are your shelves cleaned? Have you reorganized your cupboards? Are they a safe distance apart? Decided whether the loft should be a reading nook or an observation perch? Is it a safe distance apart? Is the label maker out yet? Are your first-day checklists complete? Do...
This is a curious summer. Some children have returned to school after months away. Others are still at home with their families, maybe now for long enough that the regular routine of going to school at all seems long forgotten. While your infant or toddler may be atten...
Montessori teaching is a calling that demands self-care. We are intellectually engaged long beyond after the children have gone home, analyzing our observations, preparing lessons, maintaining the environment, and active models whenever they are present, scientists, se...
You may be getting ready to return to your classroom this fall with a whole list of teacher resolutions in your mind. Maybe you're planning to take more time for yourself this year. Maybe you're hoping to take time to offer more advanced lessons. Maybe you're determine...
These are curious days, when we are neither where we have been nor where we are going, comfortable in this in-between space because we’ve been here so long, anxious still about when what we used to know will be what we do again. The early moments of patience (or impati...
When Montessorians talk about protecting the child's spiritual development, we are not talking about issues of religion or theology. In this practice, the spiritual life of the child is the child's nature state: peaceful, collaborative, curious, intrinsically motivated...
Montessori describes the ideal analysis of rhythm, notes, notation and other individual components of music that she proposes can be taught in our classrooms. And in our efforts to replicate the precise lessons we have been shown in teacher preparation programs and to...
History demonstrates an ongoing tension between back-to-basics school reform and models that focus on the “whole child,” like Montessori, a tension that is reflected on how and when the arts are integrated into “real school.” When school reform efforts are focused pri...
When Montessori acknowledged that the tendency toward the construction of the mathematical mind was universal among human development, I don't think she meant rote memorization of times tables or the order of operations. We are...
