A glimpse into Elementary Montessori
Many of us are familiar with the Montessori Method as practiced in the preschool years. This method has gained popularity over the years and many parents actively look for a Montessori school when their child is 2.5 yrs old.
When it is time for class 1, however, we start thinking of education as more “serious stuff”. We can’t quite see the correlation between all those vibrant, colourful Montessori materials and the reading, writing, arithmetic skills that must be imbibed. It seems too playful, perhaps? There is also the worry that by postponing entry into mainstream schooling we may be setting the child up for a difficult transition later.
This is an attempt to give parents a glimpse into a Lower Elementary Montessori environment (for children of ages 6–9 yrs) and deconstruct the process of learning here. I am grateful to Shahista Ismail and her team at FloMont World School for the opportunity to observe this process over the span of one morning.
Overview
A Montessori school groups children into mixed-age environments that span 3 years. So, the Primary program (preschool) has children of ages 3–6 yrs, Lower Elementary has children of ages 6–9 yrs, Upper Elementary has ages 9–12 yrs, and Erdkinder has ages 12–15 yrs. A child will reap the most benefits of the program by completing the 3 year cycle.
As Shahista explained to me, in the preschool years a child begins to acquire skills using the different materials, but Lower Elementary is when she focuses on mastery of those skills. So this is a full-day program. The children have an uninterrupted three-hour work cycle in the morning from 8:30 am to 11:30 am, when they focus on Math and Language. They have a snack break, followed by enrichment activities like Sports, Music, Theatre, Poetry, etc. Then they break for lunch.
The afternoon work cycle focuses on Culture. This includes Botany, Zoology, Human biology, Geography, History and STEM activities. Maria Montessori had created the five Great Lessons — the Origin of the Universe and Earth, the Origin and Evolution of Life, the Origin and Evolution of Humans, the Story of Writing and the Story of Numbers. These are woven into the afternoon session in an age-appropriate manner.
Inside Lower Elementary
I arrived in the environment at 9:30 am, which was an hour into their morning work cycle. The room was well-lit, with windows along two walls, and material neatly arranged on shelves on all sides. In the center of the room were children seated on mats, intently working with their material. One section of the room had low tables and chairs, for those children that were writing in their notebooks and worksheets. There were 18 children and 4 adults in the room today.
Montessori presentation of new material
Ms. Puja called for attention because she was going to do a presentation to the older children. Earlier, they had worked on division using pebbles distributed among bowls. Today, she introduced them to the unit division board. She asked them what the division symbol indicates, and they said “equally shared by”. She explained the layout of the board, where the top row has columns numbered 1 to 9 and 9 rows below it. To divide 32 by 4, we first collect 32 beads in a bowl. Since these will “equally shared by” 4, we place 4 skittles in the top row. Thereafter, we share the beads out below each skittle, until all beads have been shared. The beads extend down to row number 8. So, 32 beads equally shared by 4 skittles gives us 8. She wrote down the equation on paper.
They did this a few more times, and compared it with a case of chocolates being shared among children. Proper care of the material was stressed upon: the beads are small, the board is heavy and it is important to carry it on trays at all times. To their credit, the children walked about the room with perfect poise, holding quite large sets of material! They handled the material with great care, and everything was in very good condition.
Language
After the presentation, the older children were to work on their language activity, which consisted of forming words with suffixes. They worked in pairs, because they needed to use letter tiles from two separate banks. They used green letters for the root word, and red letters for the suffix. They read from a chart, each child resuming from where they had last left off. So one child was spelling out cheerful, helpful, etc, while another was working on narrowest, youngest, etc. When the teacher came by, she would ask the child to read out the words he had formed; in this way, one child realized that he had spelt clouiest, missing out the ‘d’! He quickly corrected it to cloudiest. Some of the children had finished working with the material and they were seated at the desks, writing the words and suffixes in their notebooks, either by choosing the correct suffix from a given list, or by matching them across columns.
Across the room, the younger children were spelling out series of words. A teacher was helping two children spell out words like rose, robe, cone, stone, etc. She would lay the picture of the object on the mat, and they would sound out the word together and figure out how to spell it using the letter tiles. Another child was working independently with a different set of words: stump, bunk, duck, skunk, bulb, etc.
Mathematics
Other children were working with the golden beads material to perform addition or subtraction sums. This uses golden beads to denote the units, bars of 10 beads strung together to represent tens, a matrix of 100 beads (or a wooden square) to represent 100, and a cube to represent 1000.
One child was computing 1462 + 1234:
· She laid out the quantities on the mat to visually represent these numbers
· Now, the real computation began: She added the beads in the units place and the result was 6 beads, which she placed below the line.
· She repeated this process with each place until she got the result in terms of the thousand-cubes, hundred-squares, ten-bars and unit-beads.
· She found the associated number cards, and assembled them to form 2696. She also wrote down the answer on paper.
This was “static addition” i.e. addition without carry-over.
Another child was performing “dynamic subtraction”, which involved borrowing. This can be done with the golden beads material, but she was working with the stamp game material. The process is similar, except that it uses stamps with their place value written on it.
So, to compute 4627–2899:
· She laid out the correct number of stamps to indicate the magnitude of each place.
· She tried to subtract 9 from 7 in the units place, and realized that she couldn’t do so without borrowing. So she took away one ten-stamp from 20 and dipped into a bank of material beside her, to exchange it for a set of 10 unit-stamps that she now placed under 7. Now it was a matter of subtracting 9 unit-stamps from 17 unit-stamps, so the unit’s place in the result was 8.
· She repeated this process until she got the answer of 1728, which she wrote on paper.
Another child was performing subtraction using the subtraction strip board. This had numbers 1- 18 written along the top row, and a grid of squares below.
To calculate 14–6:
· She first placed a grey strip covering all the numbers from 15–20. This gave her the first number, 14.
· To “take away” 6, she placed a blue strip of length 6 squares below 14 in the top row.
· She counted out the remaining squares in the grid; they totaled 8. So she placed a strip of length 8 squares over this area.
· Hence, 14–6 = 8.
This visual representation of arithmetic with various kinds of material just reinforces the concepts over and over again.
Later, Shahista explained to me how the Montessori approach begins with large material like golden beads so that the child gets a real sense of the quantity, and gradually moves to smaller, compact material like stamps and finally a bead frame, by which time the concepts are thoroughly ingrained in the mind. The goal is to move the child gradually from the concrete to the abstract, until they are able to perform the sums directly using pen and paper without the material. But until they get to that point, they do both. They use the material to compute with, and they write down the abstract representation on paper.
STEM
Towards the end of the morning work cycle, Ms. Sweta presented a STEM activity to illustrate the force of gravity. The children sat around in a circle, as she brought out a wooden frame with three strings hanging from it, a paper clip at the end of each. She showed them how, even when she tilted the frame this way and that, the paper clips pulled the strings taut and kept them parallel. The children contributed their thoughts to the discussion on why this was happening, and how the force of gravity pulls each object towards the earth. When she removed the clips, the strings hung loose and touched each other when the frame was tilted.
Then she suspended a metal scale, with three magnets on it, between plastic blocks at either end. She brought each paper clip close to a magnet and it stuck! The force of gravity was not strong enough to pull them down. Detaching it from the magnet made the clip fall again.
By this time, the children were all excited, with hands vigorously waving in the air, because each one had a point to make! They began surmising what happens when a stone is dropped (it falls to the ground), when a paper is dropped (it floats to the ground because the air pressure pushes back), when a paper wrapped around a stone is dropped (it falls to the ground). There were thought experiments going on all over the room! Some of them wanted to do this at home and asked where they could get magnets, a metal scale, etc, etc. That was how the morning work cycle concluded.
Grace and Courtesy
One point that struck me was the element of courtesy in all interactions between the children and adults, and between the children themselves. As they moved around the environment, I would hear murmured Excuse-me’s and Thank-you’s as the children deftly carried their material to and from the shelves. I felt quite big and clumsy amongst these little ladies and gents!
Before starting a new activity, a child would ask if s/he could share a mat with another before sitting down. On one occasion, there was a misunderstanding and one boy came and took the spot that a girl had reserved earlier. She asked Ms. Puja what to do and agreed to work in her notebook instead. Ms. Puja later went to the boy and reminded him that next time he should first check if someone else is using this spot.
When I recounted this to Shahista later on, she told me about the “Peace Rose”. This is a token used to express and resolve conflict. It is a rose that sits on a shelf in the room and is available to any child who feels that she has an issue to discuss with another person. She picks up the peace rose and walks up to the other child and says “I am feeling ______ with you, because _______” thereby expressing how she feels and what the other child did to make her feel that way. She also offers a solution saying “I would feel better if you would _______”. The other child acknowledges the feelings and they end by saying “We are friends.” I thought this was a beautiful way to give children a channel to express their feelings and resolve conflicts among themselves.
Behind the scenes
Now, what I have described here is just a slice of two hours in an Elementary Montessori environment. But of course, this is part of a bigger plan and a lot of work goes on behind the scenes. Shahista told me that every Thursday, the teachers put together the work plan for each child for the next week. This is reviewed and finalized by Friday, so that the requisite material is on the shelves for the following week and others are put into storage. They also prepare the worksheets accordingly. In the coming year, each child will also participate in this process, and discuss with the teacher which material he wishes to work with for Language, Math, Science, Art, etc, thereby building a weekly work plan that he is responsible for.
The traditional classroom environment where a teacher writes on the blackboard and explains a concept to 20 to 30 children is a “spray and pray” method. The teacher “sprays” the information and “prays” that each child has understood it. She asks them if they haven’t understood and repeats for the benefit of those who speak up. This works for those with median levels of comprehension/attention, but outliers at either end suffer. There cannot be a “Goldilocks” pace that is “just right” for everybody!
In contrast, a Montessori environment allows the child to “pull” what he wants to learn and at the pace that he is comfortable with. He repeats the activity as many times as needed until the concept is ingrained, and moves on to something else when he is ready and eager to do so. The teacher is a guide in this journey.
“The greatest triumph of our system of education will always be to obtain the spontaneous progress of a child.” — Maria Montessori, in “The Discovery of the Child”
Photo credit: Flomont team
