Observation: Montessori elementary

“It is through appropriate work and activities that the character of the child is transformed.  We observe that a child occupied with matters that awaken his interest seems to blossom, to expand, evincing undreamed of character traits; his abilities give him great satisfaction, and he smiles with a sweet and joyous smile.” (Dr. Montessori; San Remo Lectures). Smiling sweetly at our baby lamb on this photo is my daughter Kaitlin. Taking care of the sheep, goats, chickens, and pigs is part of our daily routine and a job our elementary students treasure.

It is my privilege having to take (as per my AMI Montessori trainer) a few minutes per day to observe my class each day.   It is never so quiet that you could hear a pin drop, there is always a hum and plentiful of activity going on.  I’d like to share with you what I observed during today’s observation:

There is a wave of paper solids construction sweeping through the class; I see students looking through dictionaries in order to find the definitions for the spelling words they are not familiar with; there is a new art project on the shelf and one older student who is familiar with the activity is teaching the new craft to 2 younger children; two upper elementary students are compiling information about the World War II and drawing a time-line to illustrate their findings; one student is working with Racks and Tubes solving a 7-digit division problem; two Peg Boards are out for finding the factors of 60 and 20 and there is talk of combining the 2 boards to find the factors of 120; some children are practicing cursive capitals, two are gathered in the science area to try and replicate the slime experiment another child introduced at the science fair.  

In geometry, the upper elementary students are learning about the lateral and total surface area of various solids; comparing these with volume of corresponding solids.  This work, although demanding, will awaken the joy, satisfaction and pride upon completion. Two of my upper elementary students have been working all morning developing formulas for volumes of all solids and just successfully proved that their alternative formula for the volume of a sphere works.

Some lower elementary students are measuring and adding angles, finding sums of angles for all triangles, for squares and comparing the sums. 

We began our exploration of assorted poetry styles in December.  Now it is January and the poetry writing is alive and well. At this time, a pair of six-year old’s are hard at work on their I Wish poems.

My 10 minutes of observation has come to a close and as I started today with a quote from Dr. Montessori, I’d like to close with one as well:

“Education is a natural process carried out by the child and is not acquired by listening to words bu by experiences in the environment.”