023: Is a Montessori preschool right for my child?

It’s that time of year: daycare and preschool tours start ramping up and parents have to try to figure out which is the right option for their child.  And many parents are overwhelmed by the options.  Montessori?  Waldorf?  Reggio Emilia?  How are they different?  Will my child be messed up if I pick the wrong one? This episode is the first in a mini-series to help us think through the questions you might have as you explore the options that are available in your community. Today we’re going to learn about Dr. Maria Montessori’s approach to early childhood education and what it’s like to have a child in a Montessori preschool with Mary Ellen Kordas, the President of the Board of Directors at the American Montessori Society.   References Gray, P. (2011). The special value of children’s age-mixed play. American Journal of Play 3(4), 500-522. Full article available at: http://files.eric.ed.gov/fulltext/EJ985544.pdf Isaacs, B. (2012). Understanding the Montessori approach: Early years education in practice. New York, NY: Routledge. Lillard, A.S. (2005). Montessori: The science behind the genius. Oxford, UK: Oxford University Press. Lillard, P.P. (1996). Montessori today: A comprehensive approach to education from birth to adulthood. New York, NY: Schocken. Louv, V. (2008). Last child in the woods: Saving our children from nature-deficit disorder. New York, NY: Algonquin. Montessori, M. (1971). The Montessori Elementary Material (Trans. A. Livingston). Cambridge, MA: Robert Bentley, Inc. Wentworth, R.A.L. (1999). Montessori for the new millennium. Mahwah, NJ: Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.   Read Full Transcript Transcript Jen:  [00:05] Hello and welcome to today’s episode of Your Parenting Mojo, which is called Is a Montessori Preschool Right for my child? I sort of skipped the whole preschool touring and decision making thing. It turned out we had a nanny at the time and I had planned to actually to work with her friend the somewhat long term, but she decided to work with a family with a younger child. So we found ourselves rather abruptly in need of care and I’d been doing a lot of research on the Reggio Emilia approach to early childhood education at the time. And we were actually lucky enough to find a daycare that had space for her on short notice. And so we just kind of went with that. But I know a lot of parents are able to plan ahead and spend a bit more time choosing between the different options that might be available to them. And so to help with that process, I wanted to do a little mini series of episodes where we learn about some of the options that might be available in your community and today we’re going to learn about Dr Maria Montessori’s approach to early childhood education and what it’s like to have a child in a Montessori Preschool with Mary Ellen Cordis. Mary Ellen is the incoming President of the Board of Directors of the American Montessori Society and has over 40 years of experience as the head of a Montessori school in the San Francisco Bay Area, and as an advocacy champion of Montessori. Mary Ellen’s school was the first accredited Montessori school in the state. Welcome Mary Ellen. Mary Ellen:  [01:43] Thank you very much. It’s wonderful to be here. Jen:    [01:45] Thank you. So I wonder if you could first start off and tell us a little bit about how you learned about Montessori and what about it called to you and how you went through that process of becoming a leader in the Montessori movement. Mary Ellen:   [01:56] If I’d only had you in my life, I may not have had to do all the research that I did, but this is exactly how I got involved is I had a three year old and I was looking around for what type of program I might enroll him in. Although I had come from the Midwest and preschool wasn’t that popular. People went to kindergarten and then they went to elementary school and that was pretty much how it was. So when a neighbor came around and said to me, I’m going to send Kathy, my son’s best friend, to the Montessori school. I said, what’s a Montessori school? And that began this journey. So the school had just opened. There were six children. My son was now going to be one of them and I fell in love. I found what really I thought was exactly what children needed. I was working with abused and neglected children at the time, and so I walked into a place where children were honored and respected and treated well and it just made my heart sing, so that was really my beginning. Jen:  [03:02] Wow, that’s awesome. And so you’ve been at this for awhile now and I understand that there’s probably not one single Montessori experience, but I wonder for those of us who haven’t been to a Montessori school, can you kind of walk us through in your mind what it’s like to be in a Montessori classroom? What does the room look like? What are the children doing and how do they move through their day? Mary Ellen:    [03:24] Sure, absolutely. Because it’s what drew me when I saw them in action. So first let me tell you that there are different levels in Montessori education. So what I’m going to choose to walk you through is a three to six classroom and that’s ages three years to six years, which is typical because there’s multiple ages in Montessori classrooms. So when you first enter a classroom, I think what you’re struck by first is the beauty that has been very intentionally created in the classroom. Mary Ellen:  [03:56] The furniture is child-sized. There’s often plants or flowers on the table. The classroom is not cluttered on the walls with a lot of pictures of things. It’s usually tastefully done pictures, if they’re hung it all, are hung low enough for the children. It’s definitely designed for the children. There’s low shelves, often made of wood that surround the whole classroom and materials, that’s the usual, the working apparatus in the classroom are on those low shelves so that the children have free access to them. So what you would see in the classroom is children moving about the classroom freely, taking something off a shelf, taking it to a rug. The reason that you see rugs in the classroom is it just sort of defines a space for a child. There’s nothing magical about it, but because there’s usually 24 children or so in a classroom of mixed ages, it just helps define a space. Mary Ellen: [04:53] So they’ll take the material that they’re going to work onto a rug. They may work alone, they may invite a friend, you may look across the room and see a teacher sitting with five or six children doing a presentation. You probably would see a table with two children or three children sitting at it, having a snack and conversing amongst themselves. It feels very peaceful and when I hear people comment on what they see, when they see a classroom for the first time, they’re struck by the calm, and yet there’s a real energy because the children are working at their own pace. They’re taking things off the shelves as they want to work on them, and so it feels peaceful, yet you can feel the energy and the spirit of the children. Jen:     [05:38] Wow, that sounds really awesome. Is there a kind of a set structure of the day that they do certain things for certain amounts of time? Mary Ellen:   [05:47] So that’s an interesting question. So what you would often see is upon entry to a classroom, let’s assume that the class goes from nine to 12. That’s a three hour classroom. That’s very popular. You see it all over in many schools as well as full day classrooms, but say it’s a nine to 12. You’ll see the children arrive and there’ll be greeted at the door by the teacher. There’s usually two teachers in a classroom, but they would be greeted probably they would shake hands. They would...