Here are my quotes first. The summaries I will post later. It is so hard to just pick two quotes:)
Quote 1 pages 174-75
"He has a special sensitiveness for words; they attract his interest, and he spontaneously accumulates a very great number....When taking the children out for a walk....the children taught (the teachers)the names of every kind of automobile....Insatiable at this age is the child's thirst for words, and inexhaustible his capacity for learning them."
It's funny to me how you know these things but when you read it the way Montessori says it it has so much more meaning. Anyway this quote explains the stage my son is in right now. He is three and he can name every make of car on the road...PT Cruiser, Honda Civic, Toyota Prius, Subaru Forester...This started at about 2 1/2. He would ask me what is that? I didn't know how to answer. A car? An SUV? A Nissan? How could he understand all these different ways of classifying cars? But it all seemed to make sense to him and now I know he wanted to know all of those answers at once! That is a Nissan Morano SUV. It really blows you away.
Quote 2 page 225
"Teachers who use direct methods cannot understand how social behavior is fostered in a Montessori school. They think it offers scholastic material but not social material. They say, "If the child does everything on his own, what becomes of social life?" But what is social life if not the solving of social problems, behaving properly and pursuing aims acceptable to all?"
I have found this to be a common misunderstanding about Montessori. The idea that if everyone is working on their own then they are not learning to socialize. I think of one of my good friends who was a middle school english teacher and now has three children 2-6 years old. When I asked her if she had thought about sending her oldest to Montessori she said "Yes but he is already very good at concentrating and working on his own. I want him to learn how to be social and work with the group." It surprises me that anyone can think that 25 children in the same space are somehow not in a social setting.
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4 comments:
Grainne,
I had to laugh out loud over the comment about your son and the cars! When my son was two and a half he was REALLY into contruction vehicles. He had an ABC book about them and it was photos with the real names. We read it over and over and every drive we took found him yelling out the names of construction trucks he saw. It became a huge part of our family life! One day on the way to Bear mountain my husband excitedly shouted "it's a double drum compactor!!" (we had caught the bug too!) :)
Guess you need to brush up on those car types!! ;)
I think it’s such a misconception that in a Montessori school children don’t learn to socialize with others since they work independently. If that was the case our classrooms would be silent, and I don’t know about you but our classroom isn’t. Children work together or side by side all the time. They also learn to be social because they are part of a community in the classroom, I think much more then in a classroom that dictates what everyone will do.
What surprises me even more, is how people think that if you throw 25 kids in a non-montesori class they will learn to be social. Someone described it once as "puppies in a box". If you put 25 puppies in a box, will they get along? Without careful attention to personal space and quiet reflection, how can a child learn to appreciate another child's space and need for reflection? It just becomes one big competition I think....
Why do people who come from traditional schools think that doing the same things at the same time [circles, group art, ect.] is more social than doing many different things in the same room, sharing the same space following ground rules that serve the common good?
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