All posts filed under: Montessori at Home

Montessori for Infants and toddlers: Object Permanence Skills and Imbucare Box

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When you look for Montessori materials for infants and Toddlers , the most well known are the Object permanence Boxes and Imbucare Boxes. But what is it and what does it refer to?  The object permanence boxes – whether it is wooden or an empty tissue box – is referred to as “imbucare” which is Italian for “post”, as in post a letter in a mailbox. When you put something INSIDE of something (ball in box, shell in drawer), that is imbucare. Any activity where the child uses his hands to put something ONTO something (“infilare”) or INTO something (“imbucare”), it aids in the development of the hand which ultimately aids in the development of the brain and the flourish of neural connections. Posting objects into boxes is a natural inclination for young children. This activity gives the child practice with hand-eye co-ordination as the soft ball is pushed through the hole. The shape is then retrieved from the front of the box in the drawer to repeat the activity over and over. The Skill involved in these activities is the Object …

Montessori activities: Learning the months with a Slovak Fairy tale “The Twelve Months”

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 ONCE upon a time, there lived a mother who had two daughters. One was her own child, the other her stepdaughter. She was very fond of her own daughter, but she would not so much as look at her step-daughter. The only reason was that Marusa, the stepdaughter, was prettier than her own daughter, Holena. The gentle-hearted Marusa did not know how beautiful she was, and so she could never make out why her mother was so cross with her whenever she looked at her. She had to do all the housework, tidying up the cottage, cooking, washing, and sewing, and then she had to take the hay to the cow and look after her. She did all this work alone, while Holena spent the time adorning herself and lazing about. But Marusa liked work, for she was a patient girl, and when her mother scolded and rated her, she bore it like a lamb. It was no good, however, for they grew crueller and crueller every day, only because Marusa was growing prettier and …

Circular Calendar, a Waldorf way for teaching the seasons, the months and the year {Grapat Toys}

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Few months ago, we started a new routine in our house to help to give rhythm to our days. Every morning with #1 before the school run we set the date, we check the seasons, revise the months and days of the week. I was looking for a fabric calendar for months and we finally got our hand in one while we were in Holidays in France. This calendar is really well made and it is a lovely educative room/playroom decoration. We love it a lot. But little by little,  I noticed that #1 was struggling a bit with the concept of year, months and seasons. We have talked about the solar system trying to help with the cycle concept. This is when I realised that our fabric calendar was not helping. I then thought that a circular one will be more helpful and realistic. Why a circle? We usually think of the passing of time as linear, with one event following another in sequence by day, by month, by year. But placing events in a circular or wheel shape …

Montessori inspired Toys or traditional materials for home? Introduction to Grapat Toys

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When we decided to switch and totally commit to Montessori pedagogy, we also decided to change our way to play. We use the Montessori materials to work and we make things clear for our daughters that they are not toys but we also wanted to keep a specific space at home for free play. But what about the toys we wanted ? It is quite an important question if you want to settle a Montessori environment at home. You do not need Montessori materials but you might be willing to use Montessori inspired toys, but what to choose? Clearly, we wanted some toys that will enhance the teaching and be in the continuity with the Montessori materials. One of the hallmarks of Montessori is the use of natural materials and colours that are not over stimulating. Natural materials are more beautiful and offer the child the understanding of the true weight of an object, helping them learn how much strength is needed to lift or move something. So through that lens, even if bright colours are not really Montessori …

The specificity of Montessori Materials

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Montessori materials are quite unique and once you discover all of them, I promise you that you are going to be fascinated and never look back again. All of them are linked together while having a specific goal. Montessori materials invite activity. Each of the Montessori apparatus brings you to explore by the forms, colours and engage all the senses to help learn. The specificity of Montessori materials are that each of them isolates one quality. For example, the pink tower is made up of ten pink cubes of varying sizes. The child constructs a tower with the largest cube on the bottom and the smallest on top. This material isolates the concept of dimensions. The cubes are all the same colour and texture; the only difference is their size. The aim of this apparatus is to help the child feel with all his senses the variation in size by the weight, length, etc. Other materials isolate different concepts for example, the colour tablets for the colours, the geometry materials for forms, and so on. Moreover, all Montessori materials are …

Montessori for Infants: Heuristic play and Treasure Baskets

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Recently, treasure baskets have been really all over the places and I am sure you have crossed them or at least heard these words somewhere. They are selling as a set or you can buy parts to make your own. This is how you might have heard about them. But at the end, what is it all about? Where does it come from? And what does it stand for? Treasure Baskets are an extension of a concept developed in the early 1980’s by Elinor Goldschmied and Sonia Jackson in their book, People under Three, called HEURISTIC PLAY. What does Heuristic play means? Heuristic play is rooted in young children’s natural curiosity. As babies grow, they move beyond being content to simply feel and ponder objects, to wanting to find out what can be done with them. Toddlers have an urge to handle things: to gather, fill, dump, stack, knock down, select and manipulate in other ways. Household or kitchen utensils offer this kind of activity as every parent knows, and can occupy a child for surprising stretches …

The Five key learning areas of a Montessori classroom

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During my research about Montessori, I have discovered something very fascinating: the five key learning areas. The fact that learning is divided into five subjects and that these subjects are all linked together, I thought it was genius. Then discovering all the Montessori apparatus and all what Montessori has done, I was definitely converted. In a Montessori classroom, you will normally find these five areas separated with the designated materials. At home, depending on the space you have and if you are looking to recreate a classroom, you can try to follow the learning areas or just put things together on your shelves. We are trying to set up a classroom so we are following this as much as we can. So a Montessori classroom is divided in five areas: the Sensorial area: The Sensorial area of the classroom helps children become more aware of smaller details that are often overlooked. Each sensorial activity focuses on one important quality such as colour, weight, shape, size, texture, sound or smell. For examples, the knobbed cylinders and colour tablets. Sensorial activities …

Montessori at Home – How to create an appropriate environment?

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So the first step of our Montessori at Home Project has been to change our environment. The first room where we made the changes was our, what we used to call, Playroom. One of the main aspect of the Montessori philosophy is to keep the environment in order and tidy , the aim of it is to obtain a calm atmosphere. “The environment must be rich in motives which lend interest to activity and invite the child to conduct his own experiences.” Maria Montessori For Maria Montessori, the first three years of life are precious as she called it the “Absorbent Mind”. So the home is the first place a child is going to evolve so we should try to make the most of it first. “The first phase of the child’s development goes from birth to, let us say, six years of age. At this stage the child is partly at home, partly in school. The plane of education should take both the situations into consideration.” (Maria Montessori – Four Planes of Education, p. 2) Maria Montessori observed …

Montessori at home

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In September last year, #1 started at reception year and she was five. One of the challenges was to teach her reading. She knew her alphabets and was eager to learn but quite rapidly we realised that she was struggling with the concept of blending. It was just like putting some toothed wheels together and not knowing how and where to start the mechanic. #1 suffers from ASD, she is high functional which means that her struggles are more subtle but they are here and we try to help her as much as we can each time we have one in front of us. Since baby, I used to work with her with the Montessori pedagogy but just by doing some Montessori inspired activities. I never drown myself into it properly. I just liked the fact to involve a young child in our day to day life and let her be. At two, she was folding the clothes with me, cooking with me and able to snack by herself. All these little engaging things we …

Rainbow box, Montessori philosophy, child’s play and Toy Rotation

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We are lucky to have a spare room in our flat and we use it as a playroom. We have never been satisfied by the way it was looking and found it so unpractical with lots of plastic boxes filled with toys.  It took us few months to decide exactly how we wanted to organize this spare room and how we wanted to use it. We definitely knew that the room needed to be divided in different areas like reading, playing, and study. We wanted to make a class room with a Montessori philosophy. I will explain this later in another post. Basically, we are looking for the child independence and try to encourage it by letting him choose and decide. Therefore, the two essentials we absolutely needed were a child-sized table and chairs and  low shelving unit for materials. We choose the famous Kallax units {Ikea} and used them to divide the room too. We made a reading/Montessori Study corner, a writing/Art corner with a table and a playing/Practical life corner. We now organize any educational …