Woodland Montessori School

ALERT: Due to the forecasted weather and high likelihood of widespread power outages, Woodland Montessori School will be closed tomorrow, Thursday, March 12.

We will notify families and staff by 6 AM Friday if school schedules are impacted for that day.

Stay safe, WMS

Don’t wait—enrollment for the 2026-2027 school year is filling up quickly! 🏃‍♂️💨 This is your chance to secure a spot in an incredible educational experience, but act fast—spaces are limited! 📚✨ Call us today at 406-755-3824 to schedule your exclusive tour and see firsthand the amazing opportunities that await you! 🌟😊

Montessori Tid Bits: Sensorial Learning

From ages two to six, generally, a child is in their sensitive period for refining their senses. This makes them especially fascinated by experiences using their senses!

Does your child love to play in the water instead of washing their hands? Or, perhaps, your child hears small sounds that you don’t pick up at first? Do they want to touch and feel everything? This is all developmentally appropriate!

The Montessori classroom offers children many opportunities to explore the world with their senses, and the teachers encourage their curiosity and wonderment as the child explores, asks questions, and makes predications.

The materials in the early childhood classroom draw a child in because they are beautiful, orderly, and a child gets to move their body with them. All of the Sensorial materials are designed to help a child classify, clarify, and better understand the world around them. They refine their senses with the materials as they see which cube is the largest, listen to which shaker is the loudest, smell which candles have the same scent, taste the difference between sweet and salty, and feel the difference between light and heavy.

A bonus to Sensorial learning is that the child is preparing for reading, writing, and math activities as they refine order of work, fine motor coordination, concentration, and independence! Modern research has also shown that consciously engaging in using multiple senses is a key to stronger, more lasting memory formation in adulthood.

Try telling your child a simple story about making and eating breakfast with all the sensory input imaginable: “I heard the bacon sizzling and smelled its smoky sweetness…and when I bit into the crispy slice of bacon I could taste the salt…”

Montessori Tidbits: Practical Skills for Life

The Practical Life area of the Montessori curriculum includes activities for taking care of oneself, taking care of the environment, control of movement, and grace and courtesy. This includes serving oneself a snack, washing the leaves of a plant, practicing opening and closing clothespins, or learning how to ask if you can join a friend’s work. As an adult these tasks may seem mundane and second nature to us; as a child these tasks are new and exciting, holding wonder and their engagement.

When a child has the space and means to practice these skills during their sensitive period of order, generally ages two through four, they blossom in many ways. The child’s confidence is boosted by the ability to do things for themself, which can be the most rewarding part for an adult to witness!

“Never help a child with a task at which he feels he can succeed.” Maria Montessori

There are plenty of ways that you can encourage these Practical Life skills in your home environment, taking the time to show the child the way you would like things done and then giving them the space to practice (this means walking away and not directing the activity anymore).

Watering plants, putting dishes away, sweeping the floor, setting the table for dinner, feeding the pet, washing windows, putting their toys away…

What does your child do to take care of your home environment?

Did you know that your children are developing their mathematical mind every time they build with blocks, notice patterns, use comparison, order objects, and solve problems?

As children move into working with materials from the math shelves, everything is very concrete. They get to feel quantities by the differences in the length of wooden rods, holding small spindle sticks, or carrying golden beads in forms of one unit or a thousand beads forming a cube. As the Montessori math materials continue to build on children’s learning, symbols are added to quantity, larger numbers are learned, and much repetition is available in many fun ways with self correcting materials. Children are introduced to materials that give them concrete practice with skip counting, multiplication, what a square and a cube of a number feels like, looks like, and gets the hands on knowledge of how these squares and cubes are constructed.

The Early Childhood Montessori classroom provides abundant opportunities for children to internalize mathematical thinking that will directly help them understand and work through math later in their schooling.

Montessori Tidbits: What is normalization in Early Childhood?

This is simply the process of becoming a contributing member of a community. Maria Montessori believed that treating each other and your environment with respect is the normal state of operation. The most fascinating aspect of a normalized child is that they willingly comply with little direction! An example is when a child automatically cleans up and puts away one activity before getting out the next.

Young children show signs of normalization spontaneously when their environment is set up to provide meaningful opportunities to develop themselves; instilling many skills, such as confidence, independence, order, and self discipline. The child wants to repeat these activities again and again, gaining concentration each time. Practical life activities are often the catalyst for young children to feel purpose and joy in their work.

Let us imagine a young child setting the table. First, they follow the request from the adult because it is something they also want to do. If they are given the space to do this as independently as they can and are not corrected, they will feel like a purposeful member of the family/community.

As they continue to concentrate on this task, the habit and process becomes joyful, and the child has become self disciplined in setting the table.

Montessori Reflections: Building Long-term Skills

Skills such as independence, emotional maturity, and problem-solving can be worked on at this young age in a multitude of ways, all day long! One such way that comes up in a classroom community, around many different children, is communicating actions the child likes or does not like. We encourage children to stand up for themselves by telling their peers if they do not like something the other is doing. AND to understand that if someone is telling you they don’t want to work with you, hug you, or play with you, that it is not rude or mean and needs to be listened to. This is a beginning lesson in personal boundaries and respect for others’ boundaries.

Check out this song about boundaries that has been an earworm in our classrooms!

The Boundaries Song - "That's a Boundary." A social/emotional song for kids- no, for everyone about setting healthy boundaries with others. 🙂Subscribe! ➜ https://www.youtube.com/c/hopscotchsongs?sub_...

Grow Through What You Go Through

At Woodland Montessori School, we embrace the belief that growth is rooted in experience. We are thrilled to announce that our theme for the 2025-2026 school year reflects this belief: “Grow through what you go through.” This motto reflects our shared journey of learning, resilience, and transformation.

In our Montessori environment, challenges are not obstacles but opportunities—for a child mastering a new skill, a teacher deepening their practice, or a parent navigating the evolving path of parenthood. We support one another with compassion, curiosity, and grace, fostering independence while nurturing a deep sense of connection and belonging. We hope you will embrace this theme with us, and together, we will grow stronger through the experiences we face and the wisdom we gain.

Jane Nelsen, author of Positive Discipline, encourages this idea in her books and trainings, “Wouldn’t it be wonderful to hear an adult say to a child, ‘You made a mistake. That is fantastic. What can we learn from it?’”

⏰ DEADLINE: January 16, 2026! ⏰
💛 Want to support WMS students without spending an extra penny?
Here’s how you can make a BIG impact—at no additional cost to you:
✨ HOW IT WORKS:
✅ Redirect your Montana income tax (up to $200,000) directly to Woodland Montessori School
✅ Receive a dollar-for-dollar tax credit 💵
✅ Help fund scholarships for our students 🎓🌱
🚨 ACT FAST! This program is first-come, first-served and capped at $7 million statewide!
📋 TO PARTICIPATE:
📬 Drop off or mail your check to:
Woodland Montessori School
📍 5 Park Hill Road, Kalispell, MT 59901
🗓️ Must be received by Friday, January 16, 2026
📝 Complete the form at:
👉 https://forms.gle/GntvuJgbm3jMSj9M9

Thank you for supporting our students and strengthening our Montessori community! 🌈✨

Student Scholarship Organization Tax Credit Thanks for donating to the Woodland Montessori School Scholarship Fund. By submitting this form, along with your donation, you are may receive a dollar-for-dollar credit on your taxes as outlined in 2021’s Montana House Bill 279. WMS will submit your donation for approval in the Montana Department...