Saturday 23 April 2011

Montessori Method


Montessori Teaching Program

Montessori Method of teaching was conceived by an Italian female physician, Dr. Maria Montessori. She with her years of research on children had come to the conclusion that they mostly learn from the environment.

Dr. Montessori gave the world a scientific method, practical and tested, for bringing forth the very best in young human beings. She taught adults how to respect individual differences, and to emphasize social interaction and the education of the whole personality rather than the teaching of a specific body of knowledge. The discoveries of Maria Montessori are valuable for anyone living and working with children in any situation.

The Montessori method trains teachers so that they can adopt the method of seeing children as they really are and of creating environments which foster the fulfillment of their highest potential - spiritual, emotional, physical, and intellectual development.

No Preschool level of teaching is complete without the theories of Madame Montessori. However our Pre and Primary teachers' training Course is not just a Montessori course. Keeping the essence of the Montessori method we would like our trainee teachers to be exposed to other approaches and methodologies which will help them address the needs of their particular class better and more effectively. The Sensorial and EPL Montessori equipments are essential for preparing the very young learners for the later years in school so we have equipment handling as an important component of the course. At the same time the ATI Teacher Training course makes the teacher aware of the more recent Reggio Emelia approach for early childhood education too.
The Montessori method is an approach to educating children based on the research and experiences of Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori (1870–1952). The Method arose in the process of her experimental observation of young children given freedom in an environment, leading her to believe by 1907 that she had discovered "the child's true normal nature." Based on her observations, she created an environment prepared with materials designed for their self-directed learning activity. The method itself aims to duplicate this experimental observation of children to bring about, sustain and support their true natural way of being.
Applying this method involves the teacher viewing the child as having an inner natural guide for his/her own optimal self-directed development. The teacher's role of observation sometimes includes experimental interactions with children, commonly referred to as "lessons," to resolve misbehavior or to show how to use the various self-teaching materials that are provided in the environment for the children's free use.
The method is mostly applied with young children (2.5–7), as this was the initial age with which Dr. Montessori worked. Her philosophy was based on certain characteristics seen in this age group. The method is also utilized successfully for ages 0-3 and 6-9, 9-12, 12-15 and 15-18, though the majority of children learning through this method around the world are in the 3-6 range.. In countries including the US and UK, Montessori primary or elementary schools have been approved to receive government funding.
Although the Montessori name is recognized by many, it is not a trademark, and it is associated with more than one organization. Schools and teacher training programs can differ in their interpretation, intensity, practical application, and philosophy in using this method with children. This article is about Dr. Maria Montessori’s research and discoveries and their practical application by adherents and practitioners with children.

Concepts

  • Inner guidance of nature. All children have inherent inner directives from nature that guide their true normal development.
  • Freedom for self-directed learning. The Montessori method respects individual liberty of children to choose their own activities. This freedom allows children to follow their inner guidance for self-directed learning. With each freedom the child has to make a choice, there are also limits to that freedom based on the functionality of the environment. For example, a child may choose his own work, but only that which is available at the time and on which he has had a lesson.
  • Planes of development. The natural development of children proceeds through several distinct planes of development, each one having its own unique conditions and sensitive periods for acquiring basic faculties in the developmental process. The first plane (ages 0–6) involves basic personality formation and learning through physical senses. During this plane, children experience sensitive periods for acquiring language, refinement of the senses, movement and order.The second plane of development (6–12) involves learning through abstract reasoning, developing through a sensitivity for imagination and social interaction with others. The third plane (12–18) is the period of adolescent growth, involving the significant biological changes of puberty, moving towards learning a valuation of the human personality, especially as related to experiences in the surrounding community. The fourth plane (18+), involves a completion of all remaining development in the process of maturing in adult society.
  • Prepared environment. The optimal conditions around children allow for and support their true natural development. For young children, the environment must be prepared with a particular series of scientifically developed material, "the apparatus", that are consistently organized by subject, degree of difficulty and complexity. All materials are displayed on open shelving and are available for free, independent use, to stimulate their natural instincts and interests for self-directed learning. Aesthetics are extremely important in a prepared environment. Because the child must choose to work, the materials must attract the child.
  • Observation and indirect teaching. The teacher's role is to observe children engaged in activities that follow their own natural interests. Based on these observation the teacher or "guide" determines when a child is ready for a new challenge, which is followed by a lesson or "presentation". This indirect teaching of responding to the child, contrasts sharply with the traditional teacher's role of implementing a timed, pre-determined curriculum. Children in Montessori environments, therefore, are not necessarily arriving at academic goalposts at the same time. Discipline in a Montessori environment is based on observation as well. For example, a Montessori environment has the teacher observing conflict and guiding children to resolve it themselves. When the guide must resolve misbehavior, she does so by refocusing the child to purposeful activity where she has observed success, rather than engaging in the ordinary system of rewards and punishments.
  • Normalization. During the 0–6 plane of development, children have the ability to shift their fundamental being from the ordinary condition of disorder, inattention, and attachment to fantasy to a state of perfect normal being, showing such external behavior as spontaneous self-discipline, independence, love of order, and complete harmony and peace with others in the social situation. This psychological shift to normal being occurs through repetitive deep concentration on some physical activity of the child's own free choice. Normalization can be fixed or unfixed. A child can move in and out of Normalization for a time, even years, before reaching it. It is part of the Montessori philosophy that all human beings have the ability to achieve Normalization.
  • Absorbent mind. The young child (0–6) has an absorbent mind which naturally incorporates experiences in the environment directly into its whole basic character and personality for life. This mental faculty, which is unique to young children, allows them to learn many concepts in an effortless, spontaneous manner. It also allows them to undergo the key phenomenon of normalization to return to their true natural development. After the age of about six, this absorbent mental faculty disappears.
  • Work, not play. Children have an instinctive tendency to develop through spontaneous experiences on the environment, which Dr. Montessori referred to as 'work'. In this sense, the children's normal activity is attached to reality in the present moment, rather than idle play through such means as toys and fantasy.
  • Multi-age grouping. Children learn from each other in a spontaneous manner that supports their independent self-directed activity. The ordinary Montessori classroom therefore consists of a mixed-aged group, such as 2–6 (primary level) or 6–12 (elementary level), based on Planes of Development (see above).

Montessori materials and curriculum

The Montessori Teacher

The Montessori method involves a curriculum of learning that comes from the child's own natural inner guidance and expresses itself in outward behavior as the child's various individual interests are at work. Supporting this inner plan of nature, the method provides a range of materials to stimulate the child's interest through self-directed activity. In the first plane of development (0–6), these materials are generally organized into five basic categories: practical life, sensorial, math, language, and culture. Other categories include geography (a child's perception of himself in space), history (a child's perception of himself in time), and science (interactions with the natural world).

Practical life

Practical life materials and exercises respond to the young child's natural interests to develop physical coordination, care of self and care of the environment. Specific materials provide opportunities for self-help dressing activities, using various devices to practice buttoning, zipping, bow tying, and lacing. Other practical life materials include pouring, scooping and sorting activities, as well as washing a table and food preparation to develop hand-eye coordination. These activities also provide a useful opportunity for children to concentrate bringing about their normalization. Other practical life activities include lessons in polite manners, such as folding hands, sitting in a chair, walking in line.As the child ages into an elementary program, Practical Life activities take on a practical purpose, such as cooking and vacuuming.


Sensorial

The sensorial materials provide a range of activities and exercises for children to experience the natural order of the physical environment, including such attributes as size, color, shape and dimension. Many of these materials were originally suggested and developed bySeguin in his prior research with scientific education.
Examples of these materials are pink tower (series of ten sequential cubes, varying in volume); knobbed cylinders (wooden blocks with 10 depressions to fit variable sized cylinders); broad stairs (ten wooden blocks, sequentially varying in two dimensions); color tablets (colored objects for matching pairs or grading shapes of color)
Mathematics
In this area, for the Primary level, materials are provided to show such basic concepts as numeration, place value, addition, subtraction, division and multiplication. For numeration, there is a set of ten rods, with segments colored red and blue and "spindle boxes", which consist of placing sets of objects in groups, 1–10, into separate compartments. For learning the numeral symbols, there is a set of sandpaper numerals, 1–9. For learning addition, subtraction, and place value, materials provide decimal representation of 1, 10, 100, etc., in various shapes made of beads, plastic, or wood. Beyond the basic math materials, there are materials to show the concept of fraction, geometrical relationships and algebra, such as the binomial and trinomial theorems.


Language

In the first plane of development (0–6), the Montessori language materials provide experiences to develop use of a writing instrument and the basic skills of reading a written language. For writing skill development, the metal insets provide essential exercises to guide the child's hand in following different outline shapes while using a pencil. For reading, a set of individual letters, commonly known as sandpaper letters, provide the basic means for associating the individual letter symbols with their corresponding phonetic sounds. Displaying several letters, a lesson known as the "Seguin three-period lesson" (see below) guides children to learn the letter sounds and the movements of their shape. When the child is proficient with the majority of the sounds, he can create words using moveable letters from the "moveable alphabet". When their hand is strong enough from use with the Metal Insets and other materials, he may write words with a pencil using the shapes he learned from the sandpaper letters. Following writing with the movable alphabet, the child begins to read words. Montessori language materials have also been developed to help children learn grammar, including parts of speech such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, articles, prepositions, adverbs, conjunctions, pronouns, and interjections. The materials evolve for further complexity in the later planes of development.

Cultural subjects

The Montessori classroom may also include other materials and resources to learn cultural subjects, such as geography (map puzzles, globes, cultural suitcases containing country-specific materials), and science, such as biology in naming and organizing plants and animals. Music and art are also commonly involved with children in various ways. After the age of approximately six, learning resources include reading books and more abstract materials for learning a broad range of advanced subject matter.


Elementary (6–12) curriculum

During the second plane (6–12) of development, the curriculum takes on a more conventional appearance of books and writing activities, since children now function more through abstract reasoning and are no longer as sensitive to the physical environment. The contextual format for this more advanced curriculum is described as cosmic education, a concept that was first explained in England in 1935.Cosmic education is the total interrelated functioning of the whole universe, which allows elementary children to store and organize a great amount of knowledge from among a wide range of different subject matter areas and disciplines.


Lessons

In the Montessori method, a lesson is an experimental interaction with children to support their true normal development. With materials, these lessons primarily aim to present their basic use to children according to their own individual interests and academic readiness. These lessons are therefore given in such a way that the teacher carefully shows the precise use, through isolated movements or steps, so as to leave the child with a high potential for success and not to interfere with the child's own free learning directly through the materials themselves.
For many presentations, a three-step process, described originally by Seguin, is used in the Montessori method for showing the relationship between objects and names. This is called the "three-period lesson." With this nomenclature lesson, two or three materials are selected from what the children are working with.
  • Period 1 consists of providing the child with the name of the material. In the case of letter sounds, the teacher will have the child trace the letter and say, "This is /u/. This is /p/." This provides the children with the name of what they are learning.
  • Period 2 is to help the child recognize the different objects. Most of the time with the three-period lesson is in period 2. Some things the teacher might say are, "Show me the /u/. Show me the /p/” or "Point to the /u/. Point to the /p/.” After spending some time in the second period, the child may move on to period 3.
  • Period 3 involves checking to see if the child not only recognizes the name of the material, but is able to tell you what it is. The teacher will point to the "u" sandpaper letter and ask the student, "What is this?" If the child replies with, "u", the child fully understands it. With letters, the lessons continue until the child can combine the letters, or "sounds" to make a words, such as "up."

Montessori in the Home

Aspects of the Montessori method are readily employed with children at home. With young children, the practical life materials and exercises are provided through everyday household activities and chores, such as setting the table for meals, food preparation, and folding clothes for laundry. Parents follow the method by using slow, simple movements in showing how to do these chores, as well as by establishing routines for children to conduct their own activities with as much independence and self-direction as possible.


Music in a Montessori environment

Maria Montessori discovered that musical education greatly benefits children during their developmental years. As it is reinforced by Diana Deutsch, a professor at the University of California at San Diego in an interview on WNYC radio, infant brains are sensitive and responsive to musical sounds, preferring them over other types of sounds. A child's musical receptiveness remains especially strong through the preschool years until about the age of six. That is why parents speak to their infants in a high-pitched, "sing-song" type of voice. Educators, scientists, researchers and doctors are confirming that musical training can significantly enhance child development.Several studies  indicate that exposure to music (listening, learning and playing) does have beneficial effects for preschoolers. Active musical training can improve their problem-solving skills, physical coordination, poise, concentration, memory, visual, aural and language skills, and self-discipline It fosters self-confidence and improves the ability to learn.The Montessori environment provides experiential learning with a set of bells, tone blocks and movable note blocks.
Montessori sensorial materials are materials used in the Montessori classroom to help a child develop and refine his or her five senses. Use of these materials constitutes the next level of difficulty after those of practical life.
Like many other materials in the Montessori classroom, sensorial materials have what is called "control of error", meaning that the child not only works with the material, but has a way to check the work rather than seeking out the teacher. This is done to help promote independence on the part of the child.

The cylinder blocks

There are four cylinder blocks. Their purpose is to provide various dimensions of size to help the child distinguish between large and small, tall and short, thick and thin, and combinations of these.
The cylinder blocks are ten wooden cylinders of various dimensions that can be removed from a fitted container block using a knobbed handle. To remove the cylinders, the child tends to naturally use the same three-finger grip used to hold pencils.
Several activities can be done with the cylinder blocks. The main activity involves removing the cylinders from the block and replacing them. The control of error is constituted in the child's inability to replace a cylinder in the wrong hole.

The pink tower

The pink tower has ten pink cubes. The smallest cube is 1 cubic centimeter in volume, and the largest cube is 1000 cubic centimeters in volume (each side is 10 cm in length). The work is designed to provide the child with a concept of "big" and "small."
The child starts with the largest cube and puts the second-largest cube on top of it. This continues until all ten cubes are stacked on top of each other.
The control of error is visual. The child sees the cubes are in the wrong order. The successive dimensions of each cube are such that if the cubes are stacked flush with a corner, the smallest cube may be fit squarely on the ledge of each level. If the smallest cube is too small or big to fit on the ledge, the tower cubes are in the wrong order

The broad stair

The broad stair (also called Brown Stair) is designed to teach the concepts of "thick" and "thin". It comprises ten sets of wooden prisms with a natural or brown stain finish. Each stair is 20 cm in length and varies in thickness from 1 to 10 cm.. When put together from thickest to thinnest, they make an even staircase.
As an extension, the broad stairs are often used with the pink tower to allow the child to make many designs.

The red rods

The red rods are rods of equal diameter, varying only in length. The smallest is 10 cm long and the largest is one meter long. Each rod is 1 square inch thick. By holding the ends of the rods with two hands, the material is designed to give the child a sense of long and short.

The colored cylinders

Also called the knobless cylinders, the colored cylinders are exactly the same dimensions as the cylinder blocks mentioned above.
There are 4 boxes of cylinders:
  • Yellow cylinders that vary in height and width. The shortest cylinder is the thinnest and the tallest cylinder is the thickest.
  • Red cylinders that are the same height, but vary in width.
  • Blue cylinders that have the same width, but vary in height.
  • Green cylinders that vary in height and width. The shortest cylinder is the thickest and the tallest cylinder is the thinnest.
The child can do a variety of exercises with these materials, including matching them with the cylinder blocks, stacking them on top of each other to form a tower, and arranging them in size or different patterns. When the yellow, red, and green cylinders are placed on top of each other, they all are the same height.
The binomial cube is a cube that has the following pieces: one red cube, three black and red prisms, three black and blue prisms, and one blue cube.
A box with eight prisms represent the elements of (a + b)3 or: a3 + 3a2b + 3ab2 + b3
The pieces are stored in a box with two hinged opening sides. The color pattern of the cube is painted all around the outside of the box (except the bottom).
The material is not designed as for math education until the elementary years of Montessori education. In the primary levels (ages 3–6), it is used as sensorial material.

The trinomial cube

The trinomial cube is similar to the binomial cube, but has the following pieces:
  • 1 red cube and 6 black and red prisms (varying in size)
  • 1 blue cube and 6 black and blue prisms (varying in size)
  • 1 yellow cube and 6 black and yellow prisms (varying in size)
  • 6 black prisms (same size)
This is similar to the binomial cube, but is a physical representation of the formula:
(a + b + c)3 = a3 + 3a2b + 3a2c + b3 + 3ab2 + 3b2c + c3 + 3ac2 + 3bc2 + 6abc

Other materials

There are many Montessori sensorial materials, and more are being investigated and developed by teachers. Other popular Montessori sensorial materials include:
Monomial cube 
A cube similar to the binomial and trinomial cube. The child has a sensorial experience of the power of multiplying by two and developing that into a cube.
Geometric cabinet 
Several different shapes are inset into wood and placed in drawers. The child distinguishes the different shapes, learns their names, and learns how to discriminate from the shapes.
The constructive triangles 
Different triangles are put together to form various shapes. Shapes made with the triangles include the parallelogram, hexagon, rhombus, and trapezoid.
Color tablets 
Boxes with tablets inside. The sides are usually made of wood or plastic. The middle is painted wood or plastic. The only difference between them is the colors in the middle. There are three color boxes. The first has the three primary colors (red, blue, and yellow). The second has 12 different colors. The third box has nine colors, but in different grades from light to dark.
Geometric solids 
Ten Geometric three-dimensional shapes made from wood and usually painted blue. The shapes are:
  • Sphere
  • Cone
  • Ovoid
  • Ellipsoid
  • Triangle-based pyramid
  • Square-based pyramid
  • Cube
  • Cylinder
  • Rectangular prism
  • Triangular prism
The mystery bag 
The mystery bag contains various object that the child feels and sorts without looking into the bag. The object is removed after the child has decided how to sort it and a visual check is done. (Though this may also be done blindfolded to add to the experience).
Rough and smooth boards 
Sandpaper is glued onto a smooth wood board. Various grading of sandpaper are used later as an extension of this activity to help the child discriminate between them.
Fabric box 
Different fabric materials are used that the child must feel and match. A blindfold is usually used so the child cannot see the materials.
Thermic bottles
Water of different temperatures is added to metal bottles. The child lines them up from hottest to coldest.
Baric tablets 
Wooden tablets of various weight to help the child discriminate between weight.
Sound cylinders 
Two boxes, each containing six cylinders. One set has a red top and the other a blue top. When shaken, each cylinder of the same color gives off a different sound. The sound from the red cylinder is matched with the same exact sound from the blue cylinder.
Bells 
Twenty-six bells are used to help develop a sense of musical tones.








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