Montessori way of learning means an approach that insists on few characteristics of a personality, by combining independency, supervised freedom, according to psychophysical development.
There are several key principles of every Montessori house:
– the children in a group are of different ages, to encourage the youngers to learn by watching the olders, whereas they will develop self-confidence and empathy helping the youngers;
– the children are free to choose from the wide range of activities, adapted to their age;
– efficiency and comprehensiveness of learning, not in a traditional way of “the teacher talking and the student listening”, but with the teachers presenting and children engaging in every process;
– the usage of special materials developed by Maria Montessori and her collaborators;
– the children are free to move inside of a classroom;
– a trained Montessori teacher; one of the biggest advantages of this pedagogy is interaction of every child and the natural environment he lives in;
According to Maria Montessori, pedagogy has few areas of implementation:
Everyday activities – encouraging children’s natural curiosity and exploratory spirit in order to motivate them to eat independently, to take care of their basic needs and the needs of the others, to speak, to calculate, to use their physical capacities etc.
Tasks – choosing tasks freely in order to make knowledge acquirement easier, with higher motivation that a child has since all the asks are adapted to his age and interests. They are set to be as interested as possible which enhances attention span. The benefits of repeating are widely used, for the knowledge to be gained.
Montessori materials – according to different levels of maturity and interests, they support the development of logic, efficient dealing with tasks from everyday life and mathematical way of resolving problems (starting from the simplest ones – napkins for cleaning to more complex ones – cognitive tools)
Trained Montessori teacher – with the mission not to give a lecture but to present, to supervise and stimulate task completion; by repeating an activity, a child will gain useful knowledge from different areas of life. The main idea of working with a child is – “Help me do it by myself….”
Environment – what is typical for the space where Montessori programme is carried out is absence of school atmosphere, with special focus on these two possibilities: a child is free to move in the classroom and all the materials needed are available.