01/02/2020
The Montessori Method
The Montessori Method is characterized by providing a prepared environment: tidy, pleasing in appearance, simple and real, where each element exists for a reason in order to help in the development of the child. A Montessori classroom integrates children of mixed ages that are grouped in periods of 3 years. This promotes socialization, respect and solidarity among them naturally.
The Montessori education covers all periods in education, from birth to 18 years old, providing a integrated curriculum.
The Montessori Environment
The environment promotes the childs independence in the exploring and learning process. Freedom and self-discipline make possible that each child finds activities that respond to their evolutionary needs.
Montessori classrooms gather children in 3 different ages: younger than 3 years old, from 3 to 6 years old, from 6 to 9 years old and from 9 to 13 years old. These "mixed age classrooms" favour spontaneous cooperation, desire to learn, mutual respect and the acquisition of deep knowledge in the process of teaching others.
The Child
Dr. Montessori believed that every educator should "follow the child", recognizing the evolutionary needs and characteristics of each age, and building a favorable environment, both physical and spiritual, to respond to these needs. Children's development emerges as a need to adapt to his/her environment: the child needs to give a meaning to the world that surrounds him/her, and he/she constructs him/herself in relation to this world.
The first plane of development that starts at birth and continues until the child is 6 years old is characterized by children's "Absorbent Mind", which takes and absorbs every aspect, good and bad, from the environment that surrounds him/her, its language and its culture. In the second plane, from 6 to 12 years old, the child possesses a "rational mind" to explore the world with imagination and abstract thinking. In the third plane, from 12 to 18 years old, the teenager has a "humanistic mind" which desires to understand humanity and to contribute to society. In the last plane of development, from 18 to 24 years old, the adult explores the world with a "specialist mind", finding his/her place in it.
Tangible Materials
These materials allow children to investigate and explore in a personal and independent way. They make repetition possible, and this promotes concentration. They have the quality of "isolating the difficulties", which means each one of these materials introduces a unique variable, only one new concept, isolating it and leaving the other concepts without modification. These materials have a "control of error": the material itself will show the child if he/she used it correctly. This way, children know that errors are part of the learning process; they teach children to establish a positive attitude towards them, making children responsible for their own learning and helping them to develop self-confidence.
