What is the Montessori Pedagogy? Easily Accessible Activities and a Focus on Active Learning
Activities are presented complete and ready for use, explains Barbara Isaacs
Unlike other early childhood curricula, Montessori pedagogy presents its entire curriculum, ready for use, on open shelves. This approach offers continuous provision of the key activities and enables children to decide what they wish to play with.
This choice is on offer from the day children start at nursery, and grows in variety and range as they mature and develop, refining their movements and increasing their capacity to concentrate.
To ensure that the activities are of interest they need to be aesthetically pleasing, where possible use natural resources and be of child-size, easy to manipulate. They also need to be presented complete and ready for use, and are placed in a basket or on a tray.
Having made the choice, children carry the tray or basket to a table or a mat on the floor, and it is their choice where and for how long they will play with the activity.
When they are finished, they are encouraged to return it to where they found it, “ready for another child to use”. This approach not only ensures that the environment is well maintained, but also demonstrates respect for the children and the provision, and provides the foundation for growing social awareness and emerging capacity for self-regulation.
Movement matters
The other important principle of learning within Montessori settings is the fact that movement (actions and activity) is seen as an integral and essential part of the learning process. Recognising that the young child is an active learner was one of the key discoveries Montessori made when she worked with children with special needs in 1890s and has been endorsed more than 100 years later in the EYFS.
It is with the holistic development of children, as well as their interests, in mind that the Montessori favourable environment is prepared to meet their unique needs. Initially they are offered activities that may be familiar to them from home: books, puzzles, mark-making opportunities as well as small-world play.
They also learn where to put their belongings, how to put on slippers or wellingtons and coats and jackets on their own. All this takes time, practice, patience and respect for the child’s efforts from the practitioners.
As children become familiar with the daily routine, their key person, other staff and children in the setting, they are gradually introduced to the Montessori activities focusing on skills encountered in daily life – such as learning to roll up a mat on which they will work, carry a chair to a table, use water to wash their hands, serve their own snack and use scissors.
Caring for the plants in the garden or fish in the classroom and cleaning the easel after painting enhances their repertoire of practical skills and gives them a sense of control over their actions.
Learning control
All these activities focus on the refinement of children’s manipulative skills – fine and gross motor skills, dexterity and flexibility of the wrist, strength in their fingers are all essential for effective and efficient use for the activities on offer as they progress with their work and play.
The activities of everyday living on offer on the shelves carefully scaffold children’s physical skills, by increasing in complexity, the need to concentrate and to problem solve.
This is well demonstrated in the pouring activities where children start transferring beans or sand from jug to jug, progress to pouring water from jug to jug and then to a glass and then several glasses, having to estimate the volume of water in each glass and finally pouring through a funnel, where they will need to control the flow into a bottle.
Children are also offered culturally diverse utensils, such as metal spoons from the Middle East or chopsticks, to make the activities more enticing and encourage their repeated use, through which children grow in their competent use, becoming confident and self-assured learners.
Barbara Isaacs is the academic director of Montessori Centre International. MCI offers distance learning Level 3 & 4 Diplomas in Montessori pedagogy – Birth to Seven (Early Years Educator). Visit montessori.org.uk/mci-training.
