Whether you want to learn about what happens in the Montessori Elementary classroom, you are looking for help organizing your record-keeping, or you want to know how you can enrich your child’s work at home, you’ve come to the right place!
Helping a classroom run smoothly is a huge feat, and it can seem daunting.
It’s true that it is a lot of work, but it can also be joyful and transformative.
Let’s talk about what a system is, how to use Montessori theory to support their development, and how to create them.
This presentation was developed for the Hope Montessori Education Institutes’ regional conference in the Fall of 2024.
This was originally entitled “Summer Activities for the Elementary Child,” but in writing and presenting it, I realized the activities here are not just appropriate for summer – they could be used anytime of the year!
In this workshop, we will be looking at who the elementary child is and how they tick. Elementary children will engage in repetition of concepts, but it manifests as repetition with variety.
In this talk, we will look at different ways children can follow up from lessons, and use Montessori pedagogy to develop interesting ideas that the children can run with, make their own, or simply inspire them to be creative.
Guiding children into the world of writing is an incredible task! The goal is to have the child feel comfortable to write freely without pressure or stress to make it “perfect” every time. In Montessori, we work to isolate the difficulty when presenting new concepts and information to a child, and teaching writing is no different.
In this workshop, we will go over how to help support your child or students in their writing in a positive, collaborative step-by-step process. We will also spend time talking about how to support those reluctant writers in our lives.
Handwork is one avenue of follow up work that is vital to the elementary aged child. Similar to the 3-6 year olds, elementary children will repeat and practice lessons, it just looks a little different. Rather than repeating the same exact way every time to satisfy the external order of the primary child, elementary children satisfy their internal order through repetition with variety.
We will briefly go over who the second plane (elementary) child is, then we will dive into the importance of handwork. We will discuss different types of handwork, give examples of different things you can do as follow up work, go over general handwork materials that would be helpful to have on hand, and go over different resources that I have found helpful in my classroom.