Montessori is a highly hands-on approach to learning. It encourages children to develop their observation skills by doing many types of activities. These activities include use of the five senses, kinetic movement, spatial refinement, small and large motor skill coordination, and concrete knowledge that leads to later abstraction.

Montessori Method Information: Inside
[ Philosophy ] [ Implementation ] [ Montessori in the U.S. ]
[ Criticisms ] [ Famous Montessori Students ]

A Montessori classroom is quiet, bright, clean, well-maintained and attractive. Nothing should be torn, broken, dirty, or otherwise unattractive. Furniture is child-sized, and there is no teachers' desk. The typical classroom consists of four areas: Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, and Mathematics. Practical life includes activities such as buttoning, sweeping, pouring, slicing, tying, etc. Sensorial includes activities to stimulate and train hearing, touch, smell, and taste.

Most Montessori classrooms try to include ways for the children to interact with the natural world, perhaps through a classroom pet (rabbits, gerbils, mice, etc.), or a small garden where the children can plant vegetables or flowers.

In schools that extend to the upper grades, each Montessori classroom still includes an approximately three-year age range in order to establish a non-competitive atmosphere in the classroom. This system allows for children to review work as many times as necessary and to move rapidly through the materials as they are able, as well as allowing children to become natural teachers by sharing what they have learned. The children realize that class work is different for each person and are less likely to try to keep track of where other children are academically.

Every activity has its place in the classroom and is self-contained and self-correcting. The original didactic materials are specific in design, conforming to exact dimensions, and each activity is designed to focus on a single skill, concept or exercise. All of the material is based on SI units of measurement (for instance, the Pink Tower is based on the 1cm cube) which allows all the materials to work together and complement each other, as well as introduce the SI units through concrete example. In addition to this, material is intended for multiple uses at the primary level. A perfect example of this is the "Knobbed Cylinder" materials: not only do they directly offer a sensorial lesson, but indirectly the child's grip on the cylinders paves the way for holding a pencil, and the grades of cylinders allow for an introduction to mathematics.

Other materials are often constructed by the teacher: felt story board characters, letter boxes (small containers of objects that all start with the same letter) for the language area, science materials (e.g. dinosaurs for tracing, etc.), scent or taste activities, and so on. The practical life area materials are almost always put together by the teacher. All activities, however, must be neat, clean, attractive and preferably made of natural materials such as glass or wood, rather than plastic. Sponges, brooms and dustpans are provided and any mishaps (including broken glassware) are not punished but rather treated simply as an opportunity for the children to demonstrate responsibility by cleaning up after themselves.

At higher grade levels, the teacher becomes more involved in creating materials since not only the students but also the potential subject matter widens so much. However, many of the earlier materials can be revisited with a new explanation, emphasis or use; for example, the cube that a five-year-old used as an exercise in color matching is revealed to the junior-high level student to physically embody the mathematical relationship (a+b)3=a3 + 3a2b + 3ab2 +b3.

A child may not work with an activity until the teacher has demonstrated its proper use to him or her, and then he or she may use it as he or she wishes (limited only by his or her imagination or a danger to the material, himself or herself or others) Each activity leads directly to a new level of learning or concept. When a child "plays," he or she is acquiring the basis for later concepts. Repetition of activities is considered an integral part of this learning process and children are allowed to repeat activities as often as they wish. A child becoming tired of the repetition is thought to be a sign they are ready for the next level of learning.

The child proceeds at his or her own pace from concrete objects and tactile experiences to abstract thinking, writing, reading, science, mathematics. For example, in the language area, the child begins with the sandpaper letters (26 flat wooden panels, each with a single letter of the alphabet cut from sandpaper and affixed to it). The child's first lesson is to trace the shape of the letter with their fingers while saying the phonic sound of the letter. A next level activity might be the letter boxes (small containers each with a letter on the top, filled with objects that begin with that letter). Having mastered these, the child may move on to the word boxes (small containers each with a short three-letter word on the top, for example CAT, containing a small wooden cat and the letters C, A, T). One child might move through all three levels of lessons in a few weeks while another might take several months; although there is a prescribed sequence of activities there is no prescribed timetable. A Montessori teacher or instructor observes each child like a scientist, providing him with appropriate lessons as he is ready for them.

Home schoolers may find both the philosophy and the materials useful since each child is treated as an individual and activities are self-contained, self-correcting, and expandable. Aspects of the Montessori Method can easily scale down to a home schooling environment - save, of course, Montessori's requirement for large, mixed age groups of children.