I am delighted to share with you a conversation I had recently with Andrea Coventry, a Montessori-child-turned-educator. She’s a writer as well, with lots of interesting articles to her credit.
I felt like talking to Andrea could help us, as parents and teachers, better understand how Montessori shapes a child’s mind, and what kind of adults our Montessori children will turn out to be.
For the past few years, I’ve spent a considerable amount of time studying online marketing. That’s one of the big reasons why my business has grown so quickly. As I’ve researched, one name has popped up over and over again as a thought leader in the world of marketing: Seth Godin.
After generations of gas guzzling SUVs, prepackaged convenience items, and people using the earth as their personal dumping ground, many argue that that earth is now in a dire situation. It has recently even become trendy to become more environmentally conscious, a process deemed “going green.”
My own history with foreign languages is a spotty one: a few years (well, about eight) squeaking through German, and one disastrous year spent trying French. In both cases, I approached the language as a teenager, well past the recommended age for learning new languages.
Some people have the mistaken idea that the Montessori method is strictly for wealthy or privileged children. Unfortunately, due to the cost of materials and training for the teachers, Montessori is often relegated to the private sector. A growing number of school districts, however, are paving the way for Montessori in the public schools.
As [...]
I hope you were able to read part one of this series on standardized testing: Anything But Standard: How Standardized Tests Diminish Learning. In part two, we’ll take a look at alternatives to standardized testing, as well as things that parents and teachers can do to either avoid standardized testing altogether, or at least find [...]
In a city in Northern California, teachers in the district’s poorest public school anxiously prepare each year to give California’s own STAR (Standardized Testing and Reporting) test to their students. These students hail from predominantly Hispanic families, many of whom have just arrived in the country and are living in the city’s poorest neighborhood.
Gang [...]
This week, I’ve been researching websites offering games for children. I was unhappy, though not surprised, to find that every one of Google’s top 10 sites for a search on ‘educational kids games’ features either advertising or a required login. It’s understandable that website owners want to see a profit when they make an effort [...]
When New York State Teacher of the Year, John Taylor Gatto, published his essay The Six-Lesson Schoolteacher in 1991, something seemed to resonate within the minds of people across the nation. Perhaps they remembered only too well the intense boredom, frustration, and enforced conformity of their own public school years. Perhaps the truth in the [...]
Montessori teachers, parents, students and the media are harnessing the power of the video sharing website, YouTube, to share and spread the Montessori message. The following is a list of most popular Montessori videos on YouTube, based on the number of page views each one has received. I’ve included a short summary of each – [...]
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