Charting the progress of twelve children in a real Texas classroom, educator Donna Goertz shows how positive change can occur given the proper environment. In each case she describes a child's transformation from destructive troublemaker to responsible citizen of the classroom community. Readers will learn how to apply Montessori methods to virtually any early elementary environment.
Maria Montessori began her journey in education working with children in an asylum and others who lived in the city slums. Her method and materials were first developed based on observations of children she worked with in these settings. So often parents and teachers wonder if Montessori is right for children with special needs. After six years of experience using the Montessori Method with my own four special children with various developmental, emotional and physical diagnoses, I'm here to say YES! It's a perfect fit. The key to success is understanding how the Montessori and special needs worlds work together. Maria Montessori was years ahead of her time in her observations and solutions to problems educators face when teaching children with special needs. Her work is only beginning to receive the recognition it deserves. This book provides explanations, resources, and tips on how Montessori can help a child with special needs succeed in learning.
A parent's guide to building independence, creativity, and confidence in their children using Montessori learning techniques, written by Montessori president Tim Seldin. An international bestseller, How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way adapts Montessori teachings for easy use at home. Packed with Montessori-based preschool activities and educational games that build confidence and independence through active learning, this authoritative illustrated guide helps raise self-reliant and creative children. Celebrate physical and intellectual milestones from birth to age six with activity checklists, and encourage development through proven child-centered teaching methods. This edition has been updated to include information about the neuroscience of child development and shares advice about screen time in the digital age, co-parenting, other family changes, and gentle discipline methods. How to Raise an Amazing Child the Montessori Way shows parents how to bring the teachings of Montessori into their home to create a safe, nurturing environment for their children with clear and concise instructions.
A fresh, comprehensive biography of the pioneering educator and activist who changed the way we look at children’s minds, from the author of Oriana Fallaci. Born in 1870 in Chiaravalle, Italy, Maria Montessori would grow up to embody almost every trait men of her era detested in the fairer sex. She was self-confident, strong-willed, and had a fiery temper at a time when women were supposed to be soft and pliable. She studied until she became a doctor at a time when female graduates in Italy provoked outright scandal. She never wanted to marry or have children—the accepted destiny for all women of her milieu in late nineteenth-century bourgeois Rome—and when she became pregnant by a colleague of hers, she gave up her son to continue pursuing her career. At around age thirty, Montessori was struck by the condition of children in the slums of Rome’s San Lorenzo neighborhood, and realized what she wanted to do with her life: change the school, and therefore the world, through a new approach to the child’s mind. In spite of the resistance she faced from all sides—scientists accused her of being too mystical, and the clergy of being too scientific, traditionalists of giving children too much freedom, and anarchists of giving them too much structure—she would garner acclaim and establish the influential Montessori method, which is now practiced throughout the world. A thorough, nuanced portrait of this often controversial woman, The Child Is the Teacher is the first biographical work on Maria Montessori written by an author who is not a member of the Montessori movement, but who has been granted access to original letters, diaries, notes, and texts written by Montessori herself, including an array of previously unpublished material.
Joyce S. Pickering and Sylvia O. Richardson interpret Dr. Maria Montessori's language and development theories using a modern, clinical, neurodevelopmental perspective. With decades of experience, Joyce and Sylvia share strategies about how teachers in Montessori environments can include children with speech-language delays, dyslexia, attention-deficit/hyperactivity, and intellectual disabilities. They also describe Montessori strategies that special educators can use in their classrooms to offer effective remediation to children who learn differently.
Certain aspects of the system are in themselves striking and significant: it adapts to the education of normal children methods and apparatus originally used for deficients; it is based on a radical conception of liberty for the pupil; it entails a highly formal training of separate sensory, motor, and mental capacities; and it leads to rapid, easy, and substantial mastery of the elements of reading, writing, and arithmetic. - Introduction.
The Italian educator and physician Maria Montessori is best known for the teaching method that bears her name, but historian Erica Moretti reframes Montessori's work, showing that pacifism was the foundation of her pioneering efforts in psychiatry and pedagogy.