Tag Archives: Student
The journey from a student to a teacher
I looked at the time on my car clock and winced. It was already 8:00 am and I still couldn’t find my placement nursery. As I drove along the road, wondering why GPS devices are so useless when you actually need them, I spotted the nursery on the other side of the road. Ten minutes later, I was flushed and excited as I began my first day of a journey comprising of 420 hours, lots of determination, hard work and most importantly, love.
New Beginnings
A belated Happy New Year to everyone! New year is always a chance for a new start, for thinking about where we are now and where we’d like to be in the next twelve months. It’s been an extremely cold and unforgiving start of the year in this corner of the world – we’ve had snow and ice, not to mention fallen trees to contend with, and getting to work and school has been somewhat of a challenge at times. I have discovered that pushing a buggy through snow is a fantastic workout for the upper arms!
The Montessori method: children in their second year of life
The intervening months between the first and second birthday must be the most interesting and challenging time in a young child’s life. Innate curiosity drives these young people to investigate and explore every aspect of their environment and this inquisitiveness requires very special skills and attitudes from the adults caring for them. They need energy, patience and acute observation skills, with an awareness of danger, whilst enabling little explorers to take risks and feel free to ‘find out’.
A Momentous MCI Graduation
We are nearly at the end of 2012, which has been a bumper year for many here in the UK, with the Queen’s Golden Jubilee, and the 30th Olympiad being hosted in London. So much to celebrate and so much of which to be proud. It is certainly a year that will live on in the memories for a long time to come.
How Montessori changed me as a parent
We have half term coming up and this means all three of my children will be at home full-time with me for a change. No more school runs, no more racing around to clubs, activities, trying to remember what day it is and therefore whether I need to pack musical instruments, wellies, lunches or homework.
And that’s just for me!
The Essence of the Role of the Montessori Teacher
Sometimes, there are real moments of magic in the Montessori classroom and I recently had one of those on my teaching practice. I was watching two children using the broad stair. I had been writing some observations of the activity, when they started to hold up some of the prisms and bang them together. I felt I had to intervene to remind them to use the materials with respect. I then remembered that in my Apparatus Workshop, we had used a marble as a control of error to test whether or not the prisms were placed in the correct order. I fetched a marble and we rolled the marble down the broad stair. I encouraged the children to listen in order to hear the noise it made.
