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.
My dad was raised on a farm outside Regina, Saskatchewan, by his German parents. While there was always food on the table, there was not much else. Everyone worked hard to make the farm successful. My grandparents were devout Christians, and raised their children to love and serve God.
Fathers have it a bit rough when it comes to being involved in their children’s educations. It’s often the mother who drops kids off at school and picks them up, and many times the mother is the only one who attends the parent/teacher conference.
Speaking generally, mothers are also more likely to help their children with [...]
Growing up, I always enjoyed Mother’s Day. My dad would buy a corsage for my mom, and we would take her out to lunch and shower her with cards and presents. I always looked forward to the day I would celebrate Mother’s Day as a mom.
Then, after the loss of my stillborn daughter in [...]
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.”
Adam Walsh. Polly Klaas. Elizabeth Smart. Jessica Lunsford. Madeleine McCann.
Children are abducted by total strangers so rarely that when it happens, their names are seared into our consciousness forever.
Here’s the trouble: when we teach children about safety practices, most of what we say involves “stranger danger”, even though stranger abduction is rare. We give them [...]
Geocaching is an exciting treasure hunt game that families around the world are playing. It requires a GPS device and a love of adventure. The basic steps to the game are that you visit a site like Geocaching.com, enter your zip code and receive a list of hidden caches in your area. Then, you set [...]
When I was teaching, I observed an interesting phenomenon. Many of the parents deliberately chose Montessori for their child over “easier” options, like public school, but after the child began attending, they questioned and doubted everything that makes the Montessori method special. It was as if they wanted the results of Montessori without the “Montessori-ness” [...]
When I was teaching, I was asked about the transition from Montessori to traditional school many, many times. Because few regions of the world offer a complete Pre-K-12 Montessori program, transitioning is something the majority of Montessori kids will have to accomplish at some point in their school careers. The good news is, studies suggest [...]
Are you buried up to your ears in snow in Norway or wondering if the rain will ever stop in not-so-sunny California? We all get feeling a bit cramped in wintertime and children may be feeling especially constrained, their abundant energy pent up from being inside all the time. Here are five suggestions for fun [...]
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