The Montessori Method
One Approach to Early Childhood Education

 

1. What is the Montessori Method?
     The Montessori method is a multi-sensory approach to learning. The goal is to cultivate the child’s own natural desire to learn.

2. How is the Montessori child taught?
     In our Montessori environment the child is given individual or small group lessons with specially designed materials. These are attractive, child-sized pieces of apparatus that are self-correcting. The child develops at their own rate, according to their own capacities, in a non-competitive atmosphere.

 

Our teachers “Control the environment not the child” leading to the ultimate emergence of the new normalized child.

We teach children to observe, to think, to judge. The children are introduced to the joy of learning at an age when they are most sensitive and foundations are laid for a lifetime of creative learning.

 

Montessori vs. Traditional Methods

Environment and method encourage self-discipline. Mainly individual instruction. Mixed age grouping. Grouping encourages children to teach each other. Child chooses own work. Child reinforces own learning by repetition of work and internalization. Organized program for learning care of self and environment.

Teacher acts as primary enforcer of discipline. Group and individual instruction. Same age grouping. Most teaching done by teacher. Curriculum structured for child. Learning is reinforced externally by repetition and rewards. Less emphasis on self-care and self-instruction.