Montessori parents are often bewildered by
the lack of paperwork coming home with their child. There's hardly any! So what
does my child do all day? What can he be possibly learning? For most of us our
school experience was a blizzard of paper work - spaces to fill in, lines to
write, dots to connect. Pages upon the pages of busy work that hopefully
conveyed to parents that we were learning.
Much of it was redundant, boring and the
waste of a good tree! But that was the measure for parents that learning was
happening.
You've now entered a new universe when you
chose a Montessori program. You didn't choose Montessori because it resembled
your learning experience but because it represented the learning experience you
wished you'd been privileged to have. When you visit the environment your eyes
feast on amazing materials - colors, shapes, complexities. Is this material
really for my three year old or four year old - isosceles triangles,
quatrefoils, reniform leaf shapes? Does he really touch it and feel it and use
it? But when there is no paper trail coming home, you wonder!
Socrates said,
"There is nothing in the mind that is not first in the hands." And it
is the touching of these concrete materials that begins the building of the
mental processes in your child. Traditional education begins with intellectual
development hoping to make the abstract concrete. Montessori education begins
with the development and refining of the senses, allowing your child to build
this concrete knowledge one step at a time until he is ready and poised to make
the great intellectual leap into the abstract. In Montessori education, it is
the child's own developmental timetable that causes this explosion of solid
(and unprecedented) learning to occur. It is not an artificial timetable based
on age or calendar but a continual cultivation and development of the child’s
growin intellectual power that is being fed day by day in a manner that allows
your childto appropriate and practices the tools and skills that will form his
intellectual abilities for a lifetime.
All this time the
child is building within himself this intellectual capability. Montessori
education is very much like the construction of a jetty. Rock after rock is
submerged in the water, seemingly lost beneath the surface but then the day comes
when the latest rocks begin to become visible and break the water’s plane. Your
child is building a very concrete foundation for all further intellectual development
one achievement at a time.
These processes and
achievements, in many ways, are very private for your child. Your child often
doesn't speak of them - or want to speak of them until after (sometimes long
after) they have become operative and well established in your child. It is not
that they want to exclude you from their developmental journey but they guard
it - not jealously - but protectively, as if speaking about it would jeopardize
its development.
This is why your best
ally in understanding your child's development and progress is the teacher and
not random pieces of paper that wend their way home. The teacher is a good
guide to share with you your child's progress because much of what the teacher
does in the classroom is to observe and document this progress. Montessori
education is never just a question of teaching or presenting materials but of
presenting and teaching at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way.
Each child has a different learning style - one size doesn't fit all. And it is
this different learning style of your child
that is celebrated
and used to your child's advantage in the learning process.
It is not so much
what is put into your child that creates this tremendous Montessori learning
explosion but what comes out of your child - out from their personality, their
talents, gifts, and temperament. Montessori is about aligning learning with the
way your child learns. There may not be another time in his life where the
whole world is bent to give him every advantage and opportunity to learn as
quickly and as effortlessly as possible.
Every day your child
is absorbing the whole world around him trying to make sense of it, trying to
master the parts he can. And it is in his Montessori classroom that this world
is made tangible and accessible. He can't always tell you when he is going to
make the discoveries that will propel him on to new and even more exciting
discoveries. ("Did you know that three times two is the same as two times
three? The windows are rectangles and so are the tables.") Instead of
being given the answers - which he would be expected to put down on paper -
which could go home; he is given the questions and allowed to discover the
answers for himself. This joy of discovery is hard to put on paper.
There are two ways
better than paper to know what your child is learning. Ask his teacher. She has
the great joy of daily watching the discoveries light up your child's eyes, of
watching your child work the challenges of learning and the joy that comes to
your child from mastery. She is watching the emergence of your child's
personality, watching his character form and his intellect develop. When you
are talking with the teacher listen to the excitement of her voice as she
relates your child's progress and read in her eyes the joy she shares in your
child's discoveries and accomplishments. Much better than paperwork.
Second, ask your
child. But don't ask him what he learned today - he may not be able to tell you
(and it still may be private but he'll share with you when he is ready.) Ask
him what he sees out of the window. He may just read the street signs to you
(which isn't bad for a three year old.) Ask him about his friends. Ask him
about colors or dinosaurs or cars - and then listen. He will tell you all kinds
of things. He will use all kinds of words - vocabulary and concepts you didn't
even know he knew. And if you keep listening you'll learn not only what he
learned but you will set a pattern for conversation and discussion that will take
you well beyond the teenage years - much more satisfying and important than
paperwork.
"Children First, Always"
