News

The Harvard Center for the Developing Child has developed wonderful resources to help those who care for young children. This month they are focused on Serve and Return. The concept of Serve and Return is very much aligned with the Montessori approach. In Montessori-speak it means, "Follow the child." See how many "Montessori moves" you can notice in the video below.

We encourage you to share the Center's resources with your friends, staff, colleagues, and school families. Have a movie night to watch and discuss!

We've updated our "Parts of" the fish materials with a lovely new goldfish. Check out our new "Parts of" the Fish Cards and "Parts of" the Fish Book. Or, save money buy purchasing our discounted older editions. Either way, you win!

The Montessori Institute in Cairo just sent us a thank you note...we are grateful for the incredible work they are doing. Keep it up Lhamo!

"A special Thank you to Maitri Learning. Maitri has donated a large set of beautiful and durable English Language materials to help us start our AMI Training Center in Cairo and to support the work of our AMI Trainer Diwo Lhamo Pemba. Thank you!

We just received this lovely note from Post Oak school in Texas. It made our whole week! Thank you Renee for sending this along.

"I wanted to say thank you for your beautifully created materials.  The work of making language materials is extremely painstaking for a Montessori perfectionist, and the energy that then goes into re-making portions that get chewed, bent, or torn can be overwhelming to torturous.  I found during my observations and practice teaching back in 2008/9, that many classes did not have definition stage material beyond *maybe* one or two old, rarely used sets.  I also found that there was a lot of "extra" language "lessons" on the shelves that seemed to stall children in the phonetic word decoding stage of reading.  The first classroom I led came with exactly ZERO definition sets and a few incomplete "parts of" sets, and a glut of non-Montessori reading materials to "fill in the gaps." (this is not a judgement, but what the previous teachers were able to manage at a time that Montessori options or the time needed to make materials weren't available)  My first order of business was buying a complete set of the parts and definitions for botany and zoology.  It amazed me to see the difference when children took on the challenge of reading themselves the books after labeling and eventually reading and playing the exciting and humorous language puzzle of the definition stages.  I am just deeply grateful for your well-designed, thorough, and unyielding materials.  You don't dumb things down; you use the word "throughout" right there in the definitions of the parts of the tree, "easiest" set according to my students!  We love your materials, and I am deeply grateful for the level of excitement these materials bring to the students and to me in learning about and loving the world around us.

Much gratitude,
Renee"

Our new catalog is at the printers! It should be shipping out to everyone on our list in the next week or two. Look for our great new offerings including:

• Geography Cards
• Farm Families 3-Part Cards with sorting labels (matches the animal miniatures)
• "Parts of" the House Frame (matches the house building kit)

Send us an email if you'd like to make sure you're on our list or if you need extra copies of our new catalog for your school/training center.

The Center for the Developing Child at Harvard University has just published their latest resource: A guide for supporting the adult part of the families we work with. This guide looks at how we can support adults in building their core life skills, how stress affects our capacity, and how we can deliver information without adding to the stress! Check it out and spread the word.

A lovely article published in the Harvard Gazette today provides a summary of recent support for the long lasting benefits of early education. Use this to help support your advocacy work and parent education efforts.