Fairbanks Montessori School

In the Montessori language curriculum, students learn the sounds letters make.

"mmm for moose!"

(Thanks to the grandparent who sewed this beautiful alphabet roll.)

Start of a wonderful summer at FMS!

Huge thanks to our volunteer Playground Committee Coordinator, and the individuals and businesses who've donated time, equipment, flowers, sand, and more!

We love what our students create 🎨🖌️

We hope you'll have time to catch up on some recent Fairbanks Montessori highlights! Link to our Curious Fox Newsletter is also in bio.

End of year reflections.

"We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself, and can, therefore regulate his own conduct when it shall be necessary to follow some rule of life."

What are our goals for teaching students to be disciplined individuals?

Why do students move freely about the Montessori classroom?

Why do we view discipline so differently from many commonly accepted cultural interpretations of this word?

Read more -

"Discipline must come through liberty....How shall one obtain discipline in a class of free children? Certainly in our system, we have a concept of discipline very different from that commonly accepted. If discipline is founded upon liberty, the discipline itself must necessarily be active. We do not consider an individual disciplined only when he has been rendered as artificially silent....

We call an individual disciplined when he is master of himself, and can, therefore regulate his own conduct when it shall be necessary to follow some rule of life. Such a concept of active discipline is not easy either to comprehend or apply. But certainly it contains a great educational principle, very different from the old-time absolute and undiscussed coercion to immobility."

from The Montessori Method, 1912

We hope all the moms had a nice Mother's Day! Photos of some of the beautiful handmade Mother's Day gifts that went home last week.

(Thanks to the parent who donated all the material for and sewed the pillows! Thanks to our Lead Teachers, who put the finishing touches on the projects late at night 🩷)

We hope all the moms had a nice Mother's Day! A few photos of the beautiful handmade Mother's Day projects that our students made with their teachers.

(Thanks to the parent who sewed the pillows! Thanks to the Lead Teachers who put the finishing touches on the gifts late in the evenings 🩷)

Far from just "stacking blocks" - the brown stair and pink tower, created by Dr. Montessori more than 100 years ago, to introduce decimal system and volume concepts. (The pink tower and brown stair looked just the same when Dr. Montessori had them made for the first time.)

Children spend hours with these materials, and create towers like the ones seen here.

They are working with concrete representations of what it is to have an item exponentially increase - the smallest cube of the pink tower is 1/1000 the volume of the largest cube.

Since the brown stair and pink tower are self-correcting - the pieces will fall if not placed properly - children can discover the properties of the material on their own, without the interference of an adult :).

The constraint of the floor mat, and the rule that the child cannot place any piece higher than they can reach on their own, provide structure inside which creativity can thrive and independence is prioritized (a child who places a piece where they cannot reach also needs help getting it down), allows for exploration and discovery, which in turn builds an innate sense of accomplishment.

The two children who built this structure - after trying many times to find the rights size pink cube to put on the top of the smaller tower - turned to their teacher and said, "Look! We did it!"

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