Montessori Radmoor

Below are some recent observations in the life of our Montessori students.  In the toddler community children were sitting down to a healthy snack of fruit smoothies-a favorite in this community.  Another child was looking at books, practicing putting gloves off and on and spinning on the sit and spin.  The toddlers love to learn through movement as they begin to develop an understanding of the world around them.  Communication skills, independence, self-discipline and movement are an important part of a toddler’s development.

In the primary community one child was focusing on the five chain – counting each bead and placing the ticket on the 45, then 50, etc.  Also, working on a nearby rug was a child doing the map of Europe and learning the names of the countries with an adult.  When putting the map away, pieces spilled out of the map.  Two other children helped to pick them up.   Children were labeling the farm animals while two other children were building words with the moveable alphabet.  One child was writing a story and the other was building the word bubblegum.  In addition, I saw a child carefully rolling a rug, a child playing a song on the bells, activities of coffee grinding, tea making and cleaning dishes after snack at the dishwashing stand.  One child politely reminded the other, “You forgot to put your work away”.  “Oops”, said the other child and happily went to clean up his map.

In the elementary community, children were heading back to their individual work after a group lesson on parts of the circle.  The children were labeling the terms circumference, etc.  I saw the children collaborating and one stating to the other, “That looks really nice”.  One child was sharing his research on the Potato Famine in Ireland which will be followed by research on the Blarney Stone.  Activities of sentence analysis, the map of North America where you find the states, mountains, lakes or rivers and capital cities was being cleaned up.   A child was finishing his work on the sum of squares.

Upper elementary had children working on Cartesian quadrants, powers of numbers and an entertaining research on the Gloucestershire Cheese Rolling contest that began in the 1300’s and is still happening in England today.  One child was balancing on the Bosu ball after finishing up a French lesson on parts of the body.

I recently met with a group of our parents and posed the questions how do you measure success?  What goals or outcomes do you want for your child in the area of academic skills, personal characteristics and social skills?  For social skills they decided the top three goals are effective communication skills, empathy and respect.  The top three personal characteristics are self -confidence, independence and self-motivation.  The academic skills they shared are a love of learning, critical thinking/reasoning and being well rounded in their knowledge.

I enjoyed seeing how the environment provides the opportunity for the development of these skills.   How would you answer these questions?

 

 

Susie Hyatt

Administrator

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