Higher Ground Education

12/10/2021

See you there! This is going to be a great panel discussion.

In the past few years, there has been tremendous focus on the way schools approach diversity, equity, and inclusion. The prevailing view has been that concerns of racism and prejudice must be addressed as systemic and structural, rather than as issues of individual attitude, habit, judgment. Trainin...

10/16/2021

Children's House deep dive - Part 5/5

The foundations of History and Science:
Geography and culture lessons in the Montessori classroom offer the inspiration for a child’s future study of history and science. Children’s early experiments with physical properties, land and water forms, natural objects, gardening, sorting, parts of animals, and parts of plants inspire them to fall in love with the scientific world. A child’s work with puzzle maps, flags, cultural items, and beautiful cultural photographs to compare and categorize introduce him to varied geographies and cultures, and represent the first steps on a path that will later lead to the study of history.

Working with the land and water form material:
Students in the Children’s House community learn the basis for scientific and historical thinking from the bottom up, by direct exposure to the foundations of these subjects in a form that they can understand. Even at a young age, Montessori children feel at home in the natural world, having fostered their ability to observe, their vocabulary, and their explanatory understanding of many natural domains. And they are deeply curious about history, having a sense of where both natural and man-made things originated—naturally giving them a deep and authentic appreciation and gratitude for the things and people around them.

10/15/2021

Children's House deep dive - Part 4/5

Maria Montessori believed that the human mind — every human mind — is fundamentally disposed to mathematics. Human beings measure things (number, quantity, volume, weight, shape, time), order things, and compare things. Our mathematical minds solve real world problems and help us to invent tools that assist us in living our lives.

Math through the senses:
Montessori children experience the wonder of math through engaging materials that inspire concrete understanding and joyful problem-solving, paving the way for a smooth transition to abstraction. In the Children’s House, children are exposed to rich and varied mathematical materials that build skills gradually. Each child will work with the decimal system into the thousands, will be exposed to addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division—and through this will develop a keen number sense, the foundation for a lifetime of quantitative and analytic fluency.

Montessori’s beautiful golden bead materials introduce the child to the concepts of the decimal system, place value, quantity, and the four operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. Slightly more abstract and symbolic, the “stamp game” uses color-coded tokens (where colors express place value) to revisit the same four operations. Older children learn long division from the “racks and tubes,” where sets of beads allow them to literally divide a quantity that can represent numbers into the thousands.

Your child will gradually move from performing mathematical operations with these concrete objects, to the pure abstraction of numbers on a page. In your child's mind, basic mathematical understanding will become intuitive, and grounded firmly in concrete reality.

10/14/2021

Children's House deep dive - Part 3/5

Reading and writing joyfully:
The Montessori approach to language study makes learning appear effortless, because it recognizes the individuality of each child. Maria Montessori noticed that in each child’s development there is a moment, occurring at a slightly different time for everyone, when the child suddenly becomes interested in written language. When this moment comes, if the tools are available to feed her interest, she will joyfully “explode into” writing, then reading. A child’s guide watches closely for this moment, patiently building the foundation that will allow your child to experience reading and writing with confidence and joy.

Your child will first be introduced to a rich and varied vocabulary, and will later analyze words into sounds. He will then learn to associate each phonetic sound with its corresponding letter, and trace the letter to internalize the movements made in writing. Older children use the “Moveable Alphabet” to put those sounds together into words and sentences. Five and six-year-olds in our Children’s House typically write beautiful true “stories,” illustrated in color pencil.

This approach breaks down language learning into clear component skills, so that children can grow confident with each step before moving on to the next.

10/13/2021

Children's House deep dive - Part 2/5

Developing the scientific mind with sensorial materials
Children this age use their senses to explore the world. They enjoy the beautiful sensorial materials and learn to compare and contrast, to discern slight differences, and to place things in order. Both artists and scientists need the ability to really look at what is in front of them: to notice small details about the world that have significance for their work. The sensorial materials also highlight mathematical relationships that exist in the real world, providing the foundation for understanding arithmetic, geometry and algebra. These materials allow a child to develop mastery over his observational powers: the sensorial mastery of the scientist, the artist, the mathematician.

The sensorial materials also prepare your child for mathematical exploration. Mathematical relationships exist in the real world, and the sensorial materials highlight them. For instance, the “constructive triangles” material is fascinating for four and five-year-olds, who love putting the triangles together in different ways to form other shapes. This work prepares them for the study of geometry, as they begin to understand relationships between shapes.

Perhaps even more fascinating are Montessori’s binomial and trinomial cubes, which are concrete representations of algebraic formulas. The young child experiences this material as an interesting puzzle, fitting together blocks in a certain arrangement in a box. But in putting the puzzle together, her attention is implicitly drawn to relationships between the blocks: the same relationships that she will ultimately study when she learns algebra.

10/12/2021

The Children's House includes five different classroom areas — including one for each major academic subject — each with enticing and sequenced materials that your child will be introduced to with individualized lessons over a three-year period. This week we will explore each area

Practical Life:
When a child joins the Children's House class, his first experiences will be with the practical life activities. These lessons inspire the child with real-world, purposeful tasks and tools, helping him see himself, correctly, as capable and competent.

Practical life activities may appear to be unrelated to “academic learning,” but nothing could be further from the truth.

These activities are complex, with many steps that must be performed sequentially in order to achieve the result, helping your child strengthen key executive functioning skills. They give a child the opportunity to take on meaningful work that he can complete independently, while developing concentration. The practical life activities also prepare a child for writing by strengthening her hand and reinforcing motions and muscles important for producing the written word. Most importantly, they allow a child to absorb the basic, methodical problem-solving approach that is the foundation for all thought or creative expression, including such diverse areas as math, science, engineering, programming, writing, artistic expression, entrepreneurism, and athletics.

Practical life activities are deliberately designed to have a long series of individual steps, which must be performed in a specific order if the result is to be achieved. Everything is ordered logically, from left to right, top to bottom (this also prepares the child to follow from left to right when learning to read). In order to retain and follow these steps, your child must practice the skill of thinking logically.

The essential skills developed through the practical life activities will form the basis for all further learning as your child grows.

10/04/2021

Our Adolescent Program Manager & Coach, Carrie-Ann Biondi spent over 25 years teaching in universities before leaving academia and joining us at Higher Ground. Learn more about why this philosophy PhD and Aristotle scholar believes she can do more at Higher Ground to help equip young people with the ideas and tools they need to lead successful lives.

From the outside looking in, it’s easy to speculate, in general terms, why professors seem to be fleeing America's Universities increasing numbers.

09/14/2021

We have 3 FRIENDS OF GUIDEPOST giveaways for you this week!

1️⃣ Win Montessori materials! Deadline Wednesday 9/15
1st place is a complete math shelf set; 2nd place a pink tower and binomial cube; 3rd place a moveable alphabet set; plus other random giveaways! https://win.guidepostmontessori.com/

Bonus: the next two giveaways listed will earn you points towards winning the materials in this giveaway!

2️⃣ History of Education Course by Montessorium and Prepared Montessorian - Deadline Sunday 9/19
check out the Montessorium + Prepared Montessorian course on the History of Education. As a friend of Guidepost, you can get this course for 20% off using code LOVELEARNING. Or for those who are super quick, the first 10 registrants to use code PM10EDU will get the course for FREE ($180 value!) Earn points in the materials giveaway for checking out this course or skip straight to the registration page to try to be first to score one of the 10 FREE tickets https://www.eventbrite.com/e/the-history-of-education-tickets-163882052631

3️⃣Developing STEM Thinking for Children - Live Discussion - deadline Saturday 9/18
Check out an upcoming discussion from Prepared Montessorian on Developing STEM Thinking for Children.
Friends and family of Guidepost can attend for free using discount code GPFRIENDS 🥳
https://www.eventbrite.com/e/live-panel-discussion-developing-stem-thinking-for-children-registration-168598497645

Let us know if you are loving the free resources! What kinds of resources would be most helpful for your parenting or educational journey?

09/10/2021

Are you considering homeschooling your child? You’re not alone. Homeschooling has hit record highs, with over 11% of US children now learning at home.

Matt Bateman, VP of Pedgagogy, says, “There is disillusionment with the system from the pandemic. The current traditional system is buckling. It was buckling before the pandemic, but now parents see it.”

At Higher Ground Education, our mission has always been to transform education by bringing Montessori mainstream. “Making learning delightful has been the mainstay of Montessori education from its inception.” Kerry McDonald writes about HGE's Guidepost Montessori in Forbes. Guidepost now offers a wide range of hands-on learning options for families, either at home or at school.

Read more:

Entrepreneurs are recognizing the growing acceptance of and demand for back-to-school alternatives and are building new educational offerings that challenge the schooling status quo.

05/01/2021

“… the child’s individual liberty must be so guided that through his activity he may arrive at independence … the child who does not do, does not know how to do.” - Maria Montessori