Friday, August 08, 2008

Montessori in the Classroom

Are you a Montessorian? Have you ever read the book "Montessori in the Classroom" by Paula Polk Lillard? If you haven't, I highly recommend it. Especially if you work with little ones. I took it out from the library this week to re-read for the umpteenth time and it's always so fabulous. Giving me so many ideas and having me think, as well as guiding me a bit. Wonderful ideas on how to easily incorporate all kinds of things into the kids lives. That's what Montessori is really about--bringing the world to the kids and letting them explore and be fascinated by it.



The initial interest in some minimal school work has already waned. lol. We've been busy with stuff so I'm just taking it easy, maybe asking a few math questions, things like that. I suppose we already do so much--we went out with my mom and step-dad to a recreation area where we caught a large frog and there were a variety of plants that caught our eyes but we didn't know what they were. I took some pictures and when we got to my mom's, dd and I looked through a book on plants and were able to identify all of them. We now know what a snowberry is. :) And here we were calling it the "yogurt-covered berry" ;). They play outside and dd reads a lot and has gone through probably 2 years' worth of National Geographics in the past few days and I read to ds each night from "Little House in the Big Woods", which always brings questions, little explanations and even him predicting which word will be first when we turn the page. It's all good stuff! Reading Montessori has me being reminded that showing them things that may inspire them is far more important than having them practise this or that.

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