What is the Montessori?

The Montessorians Approach: 6 Guiding Principles

Our Approach

The Montessorians approach is providing an environment prepared to meet the needs of the child’s development. Coupled with a practitioner to guide each child to find their natural path of development.
Within this space there are very few limits to the child’s freedom and decision-making.

Children freely interact with their environment, taking an activity and interacting with it until they find a satisfactory outcome.

Through observations of a child’s choice and use of activities, a teacher can guide the child further by adding activities and increasing the range of materials to explore.

Each child takes ownership of their time, deciding when to be active, when to rest and watch, when to look at a book, to go outside, to have a drink or prepare a healthy snack.

When a child is free to choose within this environment, we can observe their interests unfold and follow these natural impulses to support their development..

The Six Guiding Principles

A Child’s Spirituality

Building on their inner moral and ethics to connect to their environment and care for those around them. We strongly believe that each child is innately good, so we look to our children for guidance on how we should treat each other and our environment.

Order and structure

Both enable an object to understand and make sense of itself in relation to its environment. This awareness is essential for a child to feel secure within its environment and to build on existing experiences. Order in our classrooms help our children feel safe and understand how things should be.

A child’s Sensitive Period

A period in which they have a heightened ability to intensely focus on an activities and learn extremely easily. This includes refining the senses, acquiring languages, physical development and socially. Our teachers watch out for these very creative periods and make sure that the children have the freedom to follow their interests.

A Child’s Senses

We use interesting materials that draws children to experiment with them. This is how we select the resources and equipment within our classrooms. This stimulates and develops all of a child's senses.

Freedom

We promote a child's freedom to express themselves and develop as creative and spontaneous individuals. Children are natural learners with an impulse to take joy in the process and not the end result. So we believe our role is to provide open and adventurous environments in which the children can become wonderfully dynamic, natural learners. Restricting a child's natural impulse can stop a child from enjoying learning, which often happens during school.

Culture and Diversity

We give our children an appreciation for the cultures and diversity they are surrounded by in their environment. By giving our children varied experiences of life and culture we allow our children to become rounded and in harmony with their environment.

Difference between Montessori & Traditional teaching

Child centred: Child is the focus of the lesson and chooses the direction of learning.
Uninterrupted play: Children work for as long as they choose on a chosen activity, allowing deep levels of attention and focus to be allocated to chosen activity.
Teacher guides: Through exploration and repetition a child learns to rectify their mistakes, encouraging awareness of their abilities.
Child teaches: Children learn from each other.
Mainly individual instruction: Teachers work one-to-one with a child, to make sure the lesson is specific to the child.
Child reinforces learning through repetition and success in mastery: Child enjoys learning the learning process of trial, error and mastery.

Teacher centred: Teach is the focus of the lesson and chooses the direction of learning.
Timed lessons and sessions: Lessons and routines are rigid and timed.
Teacher corrects: A teacher directs a child by pointing out errors, and correcting them for the child.
Teacher teaches: Teacher leads the lesson.
Mainly group instruction: Teachers work with children in groups and lessons meet need of the group.
Learning is reinforced externally: Learning is reinforced through repetition and reward.

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