Montessori elementary is different: What children study, What Children Do

Montessori Life, Spring 2003 by Rosanova, M J

Do you know this tune? Can you recall the melody?

School days, school days

Dear old Golden Rule days

Reading and writing and 'rithmetic

All to the sound of a hickory stick

My grandmother was born in 1900. For her generation, the "school days" song was an object of rueful nostalgia. Rare was the teacher back then who spared the rod or spoiled the child.

Rarer still was a completed high school or college education. The idea of universal education was still relatively new, and it didn't extend very far beyond the first few grades.

Many of the children of the day were destined to enter factories and other workplaces directly, with little or no schooling at all. In such workplaces there was no pretense of education: either one worked or one went hungry. On the farms and in the factories, a false step or a frivolous attitude often led to injuries.

In the days before laws forbidding child labor, the number of Americans spending their youth in the care of schools and colleges was very small. Given the abundance of unskilled work available in America as it emerged from its rural past, the small number of graduates may have seemed tolerable or even normal.

But today, it's difficult to get a job without at least some postsecondary training. Today, the vast majority of Americans face 15 or more years of institutional "care" and regulation. The reach of institutionally delivered education has radically changed.

But traditional and neotraditional practices are still the norm outside of Montessori. And today the vast majority of American children are subjected to one form or another of such mistaken practices.

Montessori Is Different

When you walk into a Montessori elementary classroom, you may see a small group sitting on the floor, with an adult facilitating a lesson. Other children will be working individually or with partners or in groups of three or four.

There are shelves full of science experiments and models and other handson project materials. There are cartons and cabinets full of card materials and research project outline forms to help children remember the steps in finding things out for themselves. There are various collections of textbook and other reference materials laid out within convenient reach of the hands-on project materials. And every child has a form to help him track his daily progress as he fulfills his work contract, covering subject by subject step by step according to the individualized path that he and his teacher have agreed to.

And the room is full of pleasant chatter, the cheerful buzz of meaningful, interesting work. There is the look and sound of respect for work in an atmosphere of congenial dignity.

All of this is obvious to the sincerely interested visitor to a Montessori elementary classroom.

But What Do the Children Actually Study? In a traditional or neotraditional classroom, the Three R's are the focus. The teacher stands before the group, disburses information, and then leads a few group drills. One size fits all. Children who don't catch on are relegated to lower "ability groupings," and the same mistaken teaching practices are repeated. Reading, writing, and arithmetic facts are scattered across the crowds of children in great sweeps of teacher talk. There is no coherent context for the facts. There is only the threat of tests, report cards, and "your permanent record": what your parents will think, what the educational bureaucrats will think, what the admissions officers at the next school will think, and so on.

In Montessori elementary, both writing/reading and arithmetic are radically contextualized. Basic letter-sound correspondence and basic quantity-number correspondence are usually mastered in Montessori before entry into first grade. By first grade, emergent readers are reading longer and longer versions of the three-part cards that are typical of social and natural science materials in the Montessori curriculum: parts of the tree, parts of the bird, animal kingdom classifications, water forms (bay, lake, etc.), land forms (peninsula, island, etc.), continent boxes (sensory-perceptual exploration of objects from various countries on each of the continents). The first graders are moving beyond brief labels to sentences and paragraphs and to short booklets which extend each child's hands-on experience.

In Children of the Universe, a book describing the subject matter imparted in Montessori elementary programs, the authors remark: "In our years of teaching, we have been amazed at how many students learned to read because of their interest in and enthusiastic use of these materials, particularly those focused on animals" (Duffy & Duffy, 2002, p. 85). The authors are describing mini-story card and booklet materials used to stimulate children into both guided and openended research in biology. "At the end of the study," they report, "the child is able to produce a basic research report on a particular animal" (p. 84).

Biology for First and Second Graders? Well, yes. Montessori really is different. The curriculum is much more thorough and carefully articulated than what is generally available in American schools, including some unusual areas: