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Preschool Prep Series: The Montessori Method
The Montessori Method
Part One
By Tara Swords
When daughter Kendall was very young, Scott Witmer and his wife did a lot to encourage their daughter to learn. They read to her often, enrolled in a parent-toddler music class and took Kendall to the park to be around other babies.
Scott Witmer admits that when it came time to enroll Kendall in an all-day preschool, he didn't know much about the school he and his wife chose. It was a Montessori preschool, and at the time, he had never heard of Montessori. But he had heard good things about a particular school and had a good feeling about the teachers there. So 3-year-old Kendall went off to be taught according to the Montessori Method.
"Just the way that my daughter has responded to it is amazing," Witmer says.
Its founder is Dr. Maria Montessori, who became involved in early childhood education in Europe around the turn of the 20th century. While working as a pediatrician, contact with young, poor children impressed upon her the idea that all babies are born with intelligence and vast potential. Perhaps the best description of her teaching philosophy comes from Montessori herself, in an excerpt from The Absorbent Mind.
"Ours was a house for children, rather than a real school. We had prepared a place for children where a diffused culture could be assimilated, without any need for direct instruction ... Yet these children learned to read and write before they were five, and no one had given them any lessons. At that time it seemed miraculous that children of four and a half should be able to write, and that they should have learned without the feeling of having been taught. We puzzled over it for a long time. Only after repeated experiments did we conclude with certainty that all children are endowed with this capacity to 'absorb' culture. If this be true – we then argued – if culture can be acquired without effort, let us provide the children with other elements of culture.
