Teaching a child how to use a new material or do a new activity is a sacred event. We treat it like a tea ceremony that includes precise steps to follow at the beginning, in the middle, and in the end.
While each activity has it's own precise presentation, the general way we introduce and complete lessons is fairly consistent for everything we do in early childhood. Here's an overview of how that looks.
You've all heard about it, this radical and elegantly simple way to teach vocabulary to anyone at any age. Really, if you're working with toddlers or teaching a new language, the Montessori 3-period lesson is THE go to strategy to help build vocabulary.
Once you've learned it, it is incredibly easy to use. Here's the big picture. The teacher follows the following three steps to teach new words:
The key points to remember are that:
Why? First, because receptive language (understanding what a thing is called) is much easier than expressive language (being able to produce the name of a thing). That's why we do a lot of work in the second period, especially movement.
Read the full article for details,...
I presented this talk at the Montessori Foundation conference in St. Petersburg and participants were asking for my slides. So, I decided to post a video and slides in case they might help.
The big takeaways from the talk are,...
When we go to Montessori teacher school we are taught to have gorgeous examples of art throughout our prepared environment. But it's not just meant to look pretty on the walls! It's means to actually bring culture alive for us and our children. And, I think most importantly, it gives the children inspiration and motives for conversation. Young children are just becoming masters of our language. They need opportunities to organize their thoughts and express themselves aloud. With art, this is easy to do because whatever they think or say about art, they can't be wrong,... it's art!
You may have noticed that we started offering our Montessori Teacher Education Albums for sale. Historically, in the AMI Montessori world, this is a big no no and I am a huge AMI Montessori fan (and an AMI graduate). So, why the heck am I offering the public our sacred teachings without requiring them to have access to a teacher preparation course? In a nutshell, because I'm a scientist.
I am offering these albums because science can not study what is hidden. If we want the Montessori method to be validated through research, we must make the method known to those who would study it. We can look to the success of other manualized programs (like cognitive behavioral therapy) as a model to help improve our teacher education programs.
Read on for details!
I was invited by the Childhood Potential Conference to offer a talk on the BEST topic: Practical Parenting to Support the Brain. The video below is a brief/short version of the longer version made for the conference.
Key highlights include:
If you're interested in Montessori parenting, you definitely want to check out the conference!
Potty-training, also known as Toilet-Learning, is messy. There's no way around it. But, it doesn't have to be stressful on top of being messy! I've put together some basic information on how to accomplish this in a short YouTube Video. This video is a shorter version of my Practical Parenting to Support the Brain video created for the Childhood Potential Conference (an online Montessori parenting conference that you won't want to miss).
View the article to see the video and read details.
I prepared this talk to help (hopefully) the Montessori teachers working in Ukraine or who have been displaced from their home by the war. I'll be meeting with them to discuss their questions and we're going to record that so stay tuned for more! In the meanwhile, you can learn more about the Ukrainian Montessori Community on their website: https://montessoriua.com/
This post and the video below quickly review some high level information about chronic stress and evidence-based strategies to promote resilience (our ability to handle and move past challenges). Click all the way through (click on the "View article" link below) to read more and see a PDF of the slides.
founder of the Ukrainian Montessori Community, organized a zoom conversation with me and parents living in Ukraine in the midst of war and those who were displaced due to the war. You can watch a recording of that call here but I've also written down some of the ordinary and extraordinary questions that came up.
My heart is breaking that I am drawn to write about this topic. With so many shootings these days, I'm no longer shocked to hear about another act of insanity. That statement is in itself shocking.
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When tragedy arrives, we need to tend to our own and the children's need to process and make sense of what happened. But isn't it when we do both of these things at the same time that we protect ourselves against depression and helplessness? Isn't it in the process of helping others that we ultimately help ourselves?
