Everything I learned in Preschool…
This past week I met a woman who is a preschool teacher at a Montessori school. I used to travel by a Montessori school and always wondered about it. I was curious to know what is their philosophy in teaching. She explained that Montessori is a “method of education based on self-directed activity, hands-on learning and cooperative play.” The school focuses on the individual child and their developmental needs. The curriculum and teaching is established with the whole child in mind- body, mind and the senses. They focus on respect and civility: learning to respect yourself- cleaning up after yourself; respect others- saying “please” and thank-you”; sharing with others; being civil; caring for the mutual environment. The school fosters independence with guidelines and age appropriate decisions. The learning is experiential and encourages the children to discover the answers themselves- to appropriately allow them to experience consequences in the learning process.
On the Montessori website they reference a study that was published in the Frontiers of Psychology. (Of course the study is favorable to a Montessori education.) The study looked at the those who attended a Montessori school or conventional school (ages 18-81) and had them complete a well-being survey. They found strong evidence of elevated psychological well-being among adults who attended Montessori schools as children. In some ways, I am not surprised. Whether one agrees to the Montessori curriculum or not, the idea of respecting others, yourself, your environment, feeling a sense of control in one’s learning and becoming independent through responsibility makes sense. All those ideals help foster healthy and well-adjusted adults.
Makes me wonder what else I could learn…
One of the lessons that they employ is for a student to engage in a cycle of uninterrupted work periods: choose an activity; engage in that activity; clean up from that activity and then select a new task.
There are many days when I need to remember that lesson. I find, especially when I have a lot of tasks to do in a specific (namely short) amount of time, that I am frantically working from one to another and not doing a good job in any one of the activities. Plus, I seem to leave a wake of disruption and sometimes physical debris behind me. This always happens to me during the spring. I have so many tasks I want/need to complete before things get too warm: from a total clean through of the house- top to bottom and all in between- to a cleaning/working of the outdoor gardens and deck which has been “put away” for the winter. I find that I’ll start working in one area. I’ll notice something else and that pulls me to that activity and before I know it, I have begun four different tasks. This year, perhaps I can employ the Montessori method.
What about you? What lessons do you remember from school? What do you wish you had learned? What about kindergarten?
I think of the little tykes in a Montessori school. If only we behaved as they do- saying “Please, Thank-you, Good morning, How are you?”and showing respect to one another? What if we put back the things we used? What if we learned how to share?
I think of the classic book by Robert Fulghum, “All I Ever Really Needed to Know I Learned in Kindergarten”. He wrote it in 1986 but what he says still rings true. “…no matter how old you are, when you go out into the world, it is best to hold hands and stick together.”