Barbara Kingsolver On Montessori: “You Can Do Hard Things”

2018-06-21T09:10:08-05:00February 21st, 2018|Categories: Montessori|Tags: , , , |

Barbara Kingsolver (Animal, Vegetable, Miracle, Flight Behavior, among many others) does a wide-ranging interview in Sun Magazine touching on writing, climate change, food, and more. The interviewer asks about perseverance: How do you nurture people to work hard enough to move all that dirt? How do you do that with your own children? And all of a sudden there’s this: “There’s something I have said so often to my children that now they chant it back to me: ‘You can do hard things.’ " “I [...]

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The Community

2016-11-29T10:29:03-06:00July 8th, 2016|Categories: Raintree|Tags: , |

An excerpt from Montessori Madness by Trevor Eissler Montessori education is infused with the idea of community. One experience has given me a singular perspective on the importance of community. It was a plane crash. My own. Shortly after college, I drove to Alaska looking for a job flying airplanes and some adventure. There was plenty of both there, and I found myself flying a small single-engine Cessna up and down the Bering Sea coast of western Alaska. My job was to fly a load [...]

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Montessori Congress 2017

2018-06-21T09:22:23-05:00June 2nd, 2016|Categories: Montessori|Tags: |

Pathway to Peace: Montessori Education for Social Change The next Montessori Congress will be in Prague, Czech Republic July 27-30. The Congress will demonstrate that Montessori is an educational approach guided by the natural laws of human development, which enables all human beings to become agents of positive social change, which in the long term can lead to a more harmonious and peaceful world. The Congress will inspire a universal effort. Through dialogue, solidarity and collaboration each participant will come away with practical tools to [...]

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Nine Qualities of an Authentic Montessori School

2016-11-01T15:28:37-05:00November 17th, 2015|Categories: Raintree|Tags: |

1.  Teacher Training Authentic high quality Montessori schools have teachers who were trained by the Association Montessori Internationale (AMI) or the American Montessori Society (AMS). Do not be confused by other acronyms when looking at a teacher’s diploma.  2.  Teacher Tenure Montessori teachers who have found an authentic Montessori school to work in do not leave. Ask how long the teachers have taught in the school. A long tenure speaks to the school’s authenticity 3.  Length of class time Authentic Montessori schools have a long uninterrupted work [...]

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Montessori: A Leap of Faith

2016-11-01T15:28:37-05:00June 30th, 2015|Categories: Elementary, Raintree|Tags: |

Being the parent of a Montessori child takes a leap of faith. Most of us, and this includes Montessori teachers, were educated in traditional classrooms. When we started our elementary program, we thought, “We have to test these kids. We can’t be having this much fun, and the kids are learning, too,” so we invested in a norm-referenced assessment, the Kaufman, testing the students at the end of third grade, and then again at sixth. But the tests didn’t tell us anything we didn’t already [...]

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A Letter to Elementary and Soon-To-Be Elementary Parents

2016-11-01T15:28:37-05:00May 2nd, 2015|Categories: Elementary|Tags: , |

Dear Parents, Welcome to our elementary community and to your new role as the parent of an elementary-age child. You did it! You successfully nurtured your child through the crucial first six years of life, giving them a solid Montessori foundation on which they will now begin to build a healthy childhood as the foundation for a healthy adolescence. It wasn’t easy at times, and there was so much to learn about your child and yourself as a parent, so many surprises, so much to [...]

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Coming to the Office

2015-06-24T11:13:46-05:00April 24th, 2015|Categories: Raintree|Tags: , |

I don’t get many children “sent to the office” for misbehavior. Maybe a dozen in a school year. Pretty remarkable considering the size of our student body. To find out why, the article Given The Right Conditions in the April newsletter. Does that mean children behave perfectly all the time at Raintree? No, of course not. But what happens if they are sent to the office? It depends on the age of the child, of course, andthe issue. For some it is simply a place to cool down. My method is benign neglect [...]

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