Serving Boone, Blowing Rock, Banner Elk, and other towns of the North Carolina High Country
Founded 05-05-05
January 18, 2007 issue
Mary’s Montessori School Celebrates 100 Years of Montessori Education
The children at Mary’s School are exploring the idea of 100. January 6 was the 100th anniversary of the first Montessori School in San Lorenzo, Italy. It was not a “Montessori School” then because Maria Montessori, the first woman medical doctor in Italy, had just been assigned to take care of the physical wellbeing of the children in a public housing project. The story goes that the construction workers in the San Lorenzo slums begged her to enroll the children in a program to get them out of their hair.
She set up the environment, and being a scientist, watched the children interact with it. She found that the children were industrious and worked hard at taking care of the space by sweeping and washing dishes, at taking care of themselves and at taking care of each other. She also found that they loved using the math and language materials that she made for them. She made a movable alphabet out of a fruit crate and some wooden letters, and the 4- and 5-year-olds were able to learn to compose words with them. She set up a series of sets of beads for counting from one to many thousands. She said: “One test of the correctness of educational procedure is the happiness of the child,” noticing that children, after a session of self-directed concentration, seemed deeply content.
The results of this experiment of January 1907 have inspired a movement that helped define child-centered education. More than 5,000 Montessori schools are spread across the United States, with at least 8,000 worldwide.
“It is wonderful to know about and communicate with schools and teachers all over the world,” said Mary Willis, lead teacher at Mary’s School, “Online I can, and do, talk to teachers in Australia, South Africa, France. It is a reminder of what we do, how we do it, and that children are similar everywhere.”
“Next week we will be using many of the materials that Montessori developed to count to 100. She started off as a mathematician, but her father thought that was too ‘masculine’ a profession! We will be using the 10 chain (10 sets of 10), the 100 board, and counting other things, including 100 flowers,” said Willis. “Not all the children will understand all we do, but Montessori believed that children repeating activities as they wish and watching older children doing more advanced lessons could learn “advanced” material with little effort. That is why the programs are designed to be multi-aged and to last over several years.”
For more information about Montessori education, click to the Mary’s School website at www.marysmontessori.com or call Mary Willis at 828-297-5045.