Children in the First Plane of development are learning how to push through struggles, how to try again and again and again, often motivated by an internal drive toward their own independence and mastery. Children in the Second Plane are typically already independent in their daily needs. They can dress themselves, feed themselves, and communicate clearly. They can express their frustrations in words and describe their emotional states and motivations. But they are still buil

Peaceful family dinners during the Age of Rudeness? Yes, it's possible. But just as bedtime had to change to accommodate the needs of a different plane of development so does mealtime. Children are now far more independent, more social and more scattered. And they may be exploring the limits of the rules they followed without question earlier. Expect that your children will be more talkative and more energetic during mealtimes than they may have been earlier. The social drive

Children are born motivated to learn. Think about how much a newborn changes and learns in their first year of life. No one grades them on how quickly they learn to roll over. They don't get gold stars for learning how to pull themselves upright, or use early language, or make eye contact with the people they love. Indeed, even if you wanted to (and why would you want to?) you can't stop an infant from learning. Their motivation comes naturally, without grades or rewards. Tha

If we think of the First Plane of development as a time when the child is building their cognitive filing cabinets, classifying and categorizing the world and relationships within it, the Second Plane of development is when those files get filled with as much information as the child has access to. In the classrooms, you'll see far more abstract materials for Elementary aged children, more opportunities for reading and more reliance on the child's experience with language to

As Montessori learners develop the ability to measure and "tell" time, they are increasingly motivated to use these skills beyond daily routines. We know children are fascinated by large numbers, including large measurements of time across generations or even eons. In the Elementary classrooms, children are introduced to the structures of timelines, then apply those structures to endless materials, both teacher-prepared and student-designed across geology, geography, botany,

The Montessori materials all share certain characteristics. They are beautiful and elegant by design, isolating a single concept and offering some child-centered control of error. For concrete concepts, like quantities or colors, this is fairly straight-forward. For abstract concepts, like time, for example, this can be more complicated. We match that by offering some lessons to embody the experience of the concept like carrying the globe around a candle the same number of ti

By the time your child is in the Second Plane of Development, so many qualities of their personalities have emerged and focused. You know their quirks and their strengths, their sense of humor and their anxieties. It's a goofy, playful, loving, serious, earnest mix of yet-to-be-ness, and it's a great time to help your children build a practice of gratitude. Children in the Second Plane are far more focused on their social groups and on issues of justice and fairness than they

If you think of the window of development between birth and age six as marked by the construction of labels for files in a cognitive file cabinet, the period between six and twelve is when children fill up those files. Children now are interested in learning to master the procedures of mathematical operations, to strengthen their understanding of the concepts on which those operations are based and to gain fluency and speed in recalling facts for use. Classrooms offer opportu

Remember what distinguishes the Second Plane of Development, that window from six to twelve years old. Moving out of the "construction of the individual" that marks zero to six, children in the Second Plane are capable of more abstract thinking, of moral reasoning and far more complex social development. The essential Freedom of Movement takes on new importance in this plane, moving from the physical growth and cognitive impact of early childhood to be an important tool as ch

If you believe what you see in the media, you might expect children in the Second Plane to be just plain awful, disrespectful and limit-testing and unkempt and chaotic. There's some of that, to be true, for important developmental reasons. But the same phenomena of development that make children in the Second Plane so distasteful sometimes also supports some really lovely expressions of empathy. In earlier development, children may have been capable of emotional contagion, pi