Montessori Method is an educational approach developed by Italian physician and educator Maria Montessori (1870 –1952). Her educational method is in use today in public and private schools throughout the world.
Dr. Montessori began to develop her philosophy and methods in 1897. Her general educational principle is: first the education of the senses, then the education of the intellect. She first developed a teaching programme that enabled ‘defective’ children to read and write, through repeated exercises: Looking becomes reading; touching becomes writing. The success of her method was then extended to ‘normal’ children education. In 1907, she opened her first Children’s House in Rome. Montessori education spread rapidly to the United States in 1911, but languished after 1914, due to the conflict with the American educational establishment. Montessori education returned to the United States in 1960 and has since spread to thousands of schools there.
Montessori Method is fundamentally a model of human development, which characterized by an emphasis on self-construction, liberty, and spontaneous activity. The model has two basic elements. First, children and developing adults engage in psychological self-construction by means of interaction with their environments. Second, children, especially under the age of six, have an innate path of psychological development. According to Dr. Montessori, from birth to six years old is the first plane, during which the child is seen as a concrete, sensorial explorer and learner engaged in the developmental work of psychological self-construction and building functional independence. She described the young child in the first plane enjoys two great natural gifts: the ‘absorbent mind’ and the ‘sensitive periods’, also known as times of optimal learning, during which the young child effortlessly assimilate the sensorial stimuli of his or her environment, including information from the senses, language, culture, and the development of concepts. She believed that this is a power unique to the first plane, and that it fades as the child approached age six.
Montessori’s education method called for free activity within a “prepared environment”, meaning an educational environment tailored to basic human characteristics and to the specific characteristics of children at different ages. In the Montessori classroom, the space is divided into several logical areas, arranged for Practical Life exercises, Sensorial, Language, Math, Cultural and Creative Subjects, including art, music, geography and science. The Montessori Curriculum is an integrated thematic approach that ties the separate disciplines together into studies of the physical universe, the world of nature, and the human experience.
Montessori Method is practiced in an estimated 20,000 schools worldwide, serving children from birth to eighteen years old. Many parents are using Dr. Montessori’s discoveries to raise/educate their children at home.