Montessori School Visit!

Well hi there! It's been awhile, welcome back!

Okay, but seriously I haven't blogged in forever--I apologize.

So since we had a half-day today, I found it the perfect opportunity to visit the Marantha Montessori School. See I have a controversy. I need to observe all of these schools in action, but I myself am in school at that time. I guess I'll have to sacrifice some school time however to get the research I need.

Jumping ahead to the actual visit...

The Montessori curriculum is so much different from other daycares. Now I haven't actually observed many pre-k classes in action, but I could still see the difference. The lady, Mary-Anne Grosch, was very helpful and thank goodness she went to EHS so we had something to talk about. She let me sit and observe and take notes with my little notepad.

I should probably mention that the room I was in consisted of 8 children; ages 2-4. There were about two two-year-olds who Mrs. Mary Anne kept insisting really shouldn't be in there. And I could see that they did have shorter attention spans and weren't as responsive to the curriculum. She also mentioned the ideal class would consist of 3-6 children and I assume of the older age range.

When I got there, the children were doing "work." And yes, that's what they call it. Towards the end of my visit, one of the children made the comment, "can we do some more work?" I suppose that's a good thing. It shows that child likes learning, challenging themselves, and being productive. However, when I was first observing it did not seem like many of them enjoyed that "work" much at all. That was so apparent to me actually that I answered the question, "Do the children seem happy/engaged in play?" with the answer, somewhat. The little girl that I was sitting by had a toy that was a partitioned wooden box with coordinating spindles. The number of each partition resulted in that number of spindles. So for example, the seventh partition required seven spindles and this little girl was not cooperating. She got yelled at several times in front of me for day-dreaming and not doing her work.

Another little girl chose to play with a letter board. (They do have some say in the activity they do). When I asked her what she was doing she replied, "spelling." Initially, I was intrigued by this toy. I thought the girl was just putting together letters and making words. But the more I watched, the more I realized it was a learned pattern. She puts on the little yellow piece which has a photo of the word. It has little notches that corresponds to each letters different notches. The first word the girl did I asked her what it said and she correctly replied, "bag," but I wasn't later convinced that she could actually spell or read. Something about the way she slid her fingers across the letters made me think she was matching patterns, but maybe that's a good skill too.

As for the role of the teacher, I do think they did more of the observing role with prompts along the way. I did see a bit of controlling however as well. For instance, the way their curriculum works is the teacher shows them a lesson, followed by the children independently working on what they've just been shown. If they do something wrong, the teacher immediately stepped in and said, "No, let me show you how to do it." Although with activities such as reading numbers, the teacher would just repeat the activity until they got it right.

As far as general comments, the room was very quiet. The teachers didn't let the children talk much and they always seemed to be correcting them for something. Manners were very enforced. They were corrected and scolded without the use of manners. They had to be on their best behavior all the time and always working on something.

Mrs. Mary-Anne told me that the Montessori curriculum focuses on fine motor skills and spatial perception. I can see how those focuses are demonstrated through the toys that are required by the Montessori Board to be included in the room.

A quote that Mrs. Mary-Anne told me that I think really demonstrates the Montessori idea is, "You don't take the child away from a sharp knife, you teach them how to use one."

It will be interesting to see how the Montessori curriculum compares to other daycares/classes.