The Lead Montessori Conference in Prague was a bounty of Montessori delights and I was able to bring back (after buying a second piece of luggage!) a number of Montessori resources that make the Montessori method, pedagogy, and principals accessible.
Dr. Maria’s Montessori’s original texts are rich and dense and full of inspiration but understandably we generally don’t have the time freedom to commit to absorbing them so feel welcome to take a look at what I’ve brought back and see if one inspires your next reading adventure.
Emily
Our Growing Collection of AMI Texts.
For loan we have in our parent resource library:
From the AMI Collection:
The Absorbant Mind
The Discovery of the Child
What You Should know About Your Child
Education for a New World
To Educate the Human Potential
The child in the Family
The Advanced Montessori Method, Vl. 1
The Advanced Montessori Method, Vl. 2
Education and Peace
From Childhood to Adolescence
The 1946 London Lectures
Psychoarithmetic
Maria Montessori Speaks to Parents
the Secret Of Childhood
Citizen of the World, Key Montessori Readings
From other Author’s:
Cultivator of the Human Spirit: Revisiting Maria Montessori’s Journey, Punam Bhatia
We couldn’t be more excited to announce that as part of their 40th Anniversary celebration NorthwesTel is celebrating the hard work of our 2018/2019 students with a concert by Speed Control!
In the 2018/2019 school year, as part of the NorthwesTel Directory Recycling Program, our amazing elementary students collected the highest number of phone books per student – not just in Whitehorse but all across the North! NorthwesTel is celebrating our student’s accomplishment with a private concert for our elementary students and their families on Friday, November 15th at 6:30pm at the Old Fire Hall.
Space is limited at the Old Fire Hall so this will be an intimate affair with Yukon Montessori School’s elementary students & their families as the guests of honour.
During the day on the 15th our Upper Elementary students will join Speed Control at the Old Fire Hall for a wicked musical crash course that’ll give them the skills and confidence to open the evening’s concert with a song. It’s gonna rock!
We never cease to marvel at the efforts and accomplishments of our young students.
This simple question is the
frame from which every one of our school community’s decisions should be based.
It focuses us to consider if the vision, goals, pedagogy, culture, environment,
efforts, and strategic planning are aligned with our grand mission; guiding the
child toward their full potential.
Montessori education is
transformation: it honours the child as the key to the betterment of humanity.
No one facet of the school
community alone can hold the weight of the responsibility to serve the spirt
and humanity of our children. We each, parents, staff team, leadership, and
community partners must feel compelled to action.
Take a moment to reflect on
what it is you want for your child? What belief in themselves do you hope they
cultivate? What kind of community and global citizen do you want them to be?
Through what actions do you hope they show compassion for themselves and
others? What faith in their community do we hope they hold?
Now take a moment to reflect
on the ways we ourselves are helping to realize that vision for our children.
We would benefit to ask ourselves if our investments of energy and time align
with the path we envision for our child’s future? In what ways are we aligning
our hopes for our child with building a school community that helps realize
that vision? In what ways are we helping to realize our child’s moral,
physical, spiritual, and mental being?
As a community of parents
and educators who believe that each child holds the capacity to positively
shape the world, we have a moral obligation to our youngest souls to set in
motion the momentum that will carry them forward as they cultivate
independence, realize their capacity, and then themselves be the change they
wish to see in the world around them.
Montessori education is a
gift and an opportunity. In Whitehorse, several years ago, a group of motivated
parents began the first Casa classroom to meet their desire for early childhood
education that aligned with their belief that their child deserved an
environment that honoured their humanity. It was through the momentum from
parents who felt compelled to action that founded our school. With parent
involvement school community has continued to grow as those children have
continued along the Planes of Development.
Our school community is
peering over the edge of a precipice; we are positioned to grow the capacity of
the school to enhance the lives of our children and our community. Momentum
from our parent community is the foundation on which our school potential
rests.
My own reflection brings me
to the immense gratitude I have for the ways I am able to support the spirit of
the children in our community by building the capacity of our staff team, Board
of Directors, and community partners. I am committed to the admirable vision we
share for a school community that meets the needs of our children.
Greta Thunberg, 2019 Photograph: Michael Campanella/The Guardian
When Greta Thunberg addressed the
United Nations on September 20 2019, she stated: “Yet you all come to us young
people for hope. How dare you.” It was a
bold statement calling for action by adult leaders from the now famous teenage
activist. It was also a desperate call
to action in the face of changing climate events.
The question I have as a teacher is how
to bring the children we teach to this big world with big questions in a way
that they feel empowered to going beyond the novelty of marches, banners, and
strikes. What is it inside children that
we as a society can connect with so that they can transform big action into
daily effective action? In a Montessori
classroom this is a question we ask ourselves as teachers regularly. More exactly how do we allow children to do
things in our classroom that will be an impression that will inform the child
in front of us, and the person that they are developing to BE. Recent demonstrations about climate change
show “attention” to a big problem and the children I teach are connecting with
it. What I see our role, children and
adults alike in the classroom, is to bring “intention” to actually address this
big idea of a global crisis. What we are
doing this month is identifying and codifying how we as a community behave in
our daily lives through surveys the children will conduct. This first step will
lay the baseline for the children to then make observations about those
behaviours. Then they can work to relate
them to issues of climate change.
I am hoping it is then that children
will make the recommendations that they need to follow and then share with all
of us. We can then go on to record how
effective we are at carrying out that modified behaviour. Parallel to this work we will also look at
some basic scientific concepts that are part of climate changes. For example, carbon, what is it, where does
it come from, and what does it do? Likewise
we will look at the role of water vapour in the rising of global
temperatures. We will examine those two
concepts to bring a scientific understanding to the issue of global warming to
balance out the more sociologically inclined events that are present
recently.
It is so positive that Greta Thurnberg
has glavinised a population to act, and it is our role now to transform that
act through knowledge to sustainable efforts of intention here at home. Fortunately, as Dr. Maria Montessori
observed: “The child is not an empty being who owes whatever he knows to us who
have filled him up with it. “ Instead
the Child is the number one builder of self.
In fact there is no person existing who has not been formed by the child
he once was.
Climate change protest in Whitehorse, Yukon Canada
Hershey Montessori School is a leader of Montessori programs and the first in the world to offer a complete continuum of Montessori education from birth-18.
As YMS explore options looking a head to what a high school program at our Montessori school could be we hold with admiration what the Hershey team was able to provide for their community in Ohio.
Many schools around the globe offer an adaptation of this authentic Montessori High School model. Some prioritize the IB Diploma program but still hold close the Montessori pedagogy. Some offer a Montessori-like implementation of contextual curriculum. In any case the goal is lofty and admirable and providing quality high school education that opens doors and minds is the goal.
Poke around the website of the Hershey Montessori School – I have no doubt you’ll feel as dreamy about it as we do at YMS.
Continuum of care at the Hershey Montessori School.
