Montessori For Toddlers Archives

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A Surprisingly Non-Academic Approach to Strong Academics

When parents tour our Montessori schools, we often hear questions about academics: when will my child read? How do you teach math? Will your program get my child ready for Kindergarten? In this competitive world, parents of toddlers are rightfully concerned with future academic success. And research supports this concern: children who start elementary school poorly prepared have a hard time catching up and diagnoses like ADHD have grown exponentially, even in the youngest students.

But does this mean you need to subject your toddler to programs like preschool prep or Baby Einstein, and enroll your preschooler in Kumon or similar preschool academics programs?

We think the questions and concerns about early academics are legitimate: a child’s experiences in his formative toddler and preschool years can have a significant impact on his future academic and life success. Poor preparation can, in fact, leave children behind, making it harder for them to achieve their full potential.

Montessori preschools do an exceptional job preparing children for academic success. Montessori children start their elementary career ready to flourish: most learn to read in our age 3-6 classroom, and solve arithmetic problems into the thousands. But the important point is how. Montessori children do not learn by drill-and-kill memorizing of flash cards, or repeatedly watching academic videos, or completing endless worksheets.

Montessori schools approach academics in a surprisingly non-academic way, laying strong foundations for self-motivated, successful learning as early as in the toddler program. Much of what we do is what Maria Montessori called indirect preparation: toddlers and younger preschool students engage joyfully in activities that impart a wide range of prerequisite skill which then, down the road at age 5 or 6, enable an almost explosive growth in academic achievement. Here are some examples of this indirect preparation for academics:

The ability to concentrate. ADHD diagnoses have grown by over 5% per year in the past years; about 12% of all boys ages 5-17 have at some point in time been diagnosed with ADHD, which can severely impact a child’s ability to function in life and in school. While there is no consensus on what causes the disorder, ADHD symptoms include an inability to sustain focus on a task for extended periods of time. Treatment often includes programs that help children learn better executive function skills. Learning to concentrate on an activity, to immerse oneself fully in a chosen task, is one of the most important goals for a child who enters a Montessori preschool or toddler class. In Dr. Montessori’s words, “The first essential for the child’s development is concentration. The child who concentrates is immensely happy.” When your child joins the Montessori toddler program, we offer him activities that appeal to him, and then give him the freedom to work with a chosen activity for as long as he likes. In this environment, even 18-month old children regularly focus for 10, 15, even 20 minutes on one task. As your child progresses through the Montessori preschool sequence of activities, he’ll tackle increasingly more challenging, longer tasks. It’s not at all unusual for a 5-year-old Montessori child to spend an entire 3-hour work period engaged in one chosen task, such as tracing, coloring and labeling a map of Africa, for example.
Developing executive function skills. A recent article in the New York Times explored the question of what really drives life success. One surprising discovery: being able to set goals, to self-motivate, to make mistakes, learn from them, and persevere in the face of challenges may well be more important than scores on academics or intelligence tests. Unfortunately, those are skills rarely taught, not in school and not in most preschool programs. Montessori is different. As early as the toddler program, Montessori children choose their own activities. However, there’s usually only on of each activity, so children learn to patiently wait their turn (no adult-enforced sharing happens in Montessori classrooms.) Children are free to make mistakes—indeed, Montessori encourages us to “become friendly with error.” Further, it’s usually the activity itself that shows them their mistake—water spills, a porcelain plate breaks, a tower doesn’t stand—and the children learn to pay attention to mistakes and learn from them (as against avoiding them for fear of being criticized by a teacher.) And as tasks get longer and more challenging, students learn to keep at it, often working on the same projects for several days at a time, not because a teacher instructed them to, but because they chose to do so. This internal discipline is precisely what life success requires, and what Montessori teaches so beautifully!

The discipline that we are looking for is active. We do not believe that one is disciplined only when he is artificially made as silent as a mute and as motionless as a paralytic. Such a one is not disciplined but annihilated. We claim that an individual is disciplined when he is the master of himself and when he can, as a consequence, control himself when he must follow a rule of life. Dr. Maria Montessori, in The Discovery of the Child

Strong motor skills. Handwriting is an important skill a child needs to master to succeed in elementary school and beyond. Children who cannot write well often under-achieve against their potential. Motor skills (and several other skills, such as visual-perceptual skills) are supremely important in learning to write. Montessori toddler and preschool purposefully develops these foundational gross and fine motor skills. Scrubbing a table or cleaning the blackboard strengthens shoulder and arm muscles. Peeling an egg, scooping beans, pouring water from a small pitcher, making orange juice, squeezing a sponge: these all strengthen wrist muscles and control. A series of activities, from the Knobbed Cylinders to the Metal Insets, from pinning activities to puzzle maps, help children strengthen their fingers and develop a proper pincer grip for later pencil use.
Oral language skills. A strong vocabulary and elaborate language is an important predictor of future success in literacy tasks. The Montessori toddler program builds these skills systematically. Children learn much vocabulary with matching object/card sets. Our highly educated Montessori teachers consistently use elaborate (age-appropriate) language. They may say things like “Sarah, I notice your pants are wet. They must feel very damp and uncomfortable on your skin. Shall we go and find you some dry, cozy pants to change into?” rather than “Oh, you had an accident. Time to change!” Of course, we read many stories, sing songs, and discuss daily events with each other. We also introduce toddlers beginning phonemic awareness skills: a teacher may hold up small objects, like a cat, a pan, and a mop, and have children identify the beginning sounds.

Earned self-confidence. In today’s age, many people talk about fostering children’s self-esteem. All too often, that means lavishing praise upon toddlers for every action they take. Unfortunately, research has shown that empty praise not only fails to foster real self-confidence, it in fact can inculcate an anti-effort mindset. In Montessori, we don’t play this game. We are convinced that self-confidence must be earned by real personal achievements, resulting from sustained effort. That’s why we present lessons step-by-step, and set our students up to explore, practice, and earn mastery. When they do succeed, we don’t offer empty praise. Instead, we help them appreciate their real-world achievement by offering up what Montessori calls a point of interest: “Notice how when you put the cup down slowly, without making a sound, the water stayed in it”, or “See how straight the mat stands in the basket when you roll it tightly?” When this is repeated frequently, over a child’s years in the Montessori toddler, preschool and elementary school programs, children learn that with effort, they can master tasks. They come to enjoy the struggle to master tasks, and don’t fear the natural failures that are part of the learning process.

Self-esteem doesn’t contribute much to success. But success contributes mightily to self-esteem. Kids have to “do” something, and do it well, to get a self-esteem boost. Madeline Levine, PhD, in Teach Your Children Well

Just imagine your child, at the end of his third year in Montessori preschool: he’ll be able to look around the class and all the materials in it. He’ll know that when he first entered the class, all these activities were strange, challenging, and maybe even a bit intimidating. But now, as a 6-year-old, he knows he has mastered them. Can you see the earned pride in his eyes—and the confidence that this real achievement will give him as he enters elementary school?

Toilet Learning, not Potty Training

Potty training: Just mention this word, and many parents of toddler cringe. Numerous books have been written about the subject–including variations on potty training for boys and potty training for girls–and parents and educators hotly debate the right time and approach for children to transition out of diapers and learn to use the toilet.

At LePort, we apply Montessori principles to this important childhood task: toilet learning is an integral part of our Montessori toddler program, and, of course, included in the program at no additional charge. (We say toilet learning, not potty training, for a reason–read on, and you’ll find out why!)

- Toilet learning is a natural part of a child’s developing independence skill set. Being able to use the toilet without help by an adult is an important milestone to a child’s independence. In a Montessori toddler class, it’s just one natural step in all the other work on independence your child will engage in. In fact, many of the independence skills we teach him – hanging up his coat, putting on socks and shoes, learning to button and to close zippers, proper hand washing techniques – are skills that will make it much easier for him to successfully use the toilet by himself.
- A respectful focus on learning, not training. Much advice on “potty training” includes relying on rewards (stickers etc.) and punishments. These extrinsic incentives, in our view, are detrimental to any learning process, including learning how to use the toilet independently. In the Montessori toddler classrooms, your child will instead encounter the toilet as a natural part of growing up. He’ll see older peers using potty chairs or low, child-sized toilets. He’ll be invited to try sitting on the toilet, as a natural part of changing his diaper. The child’s wish to imitate his older peers, his burgeoning desire to be master of his own needs, and his interest in a consistent routine are our best allies here. And, of course, our 1:6 (or in limited cases 1:7) ratio up to age 3 enables us to spend more time teaching than in other programs, where the ratio of staff to children sometimes changes to 1:12 at age two, long before most children have completed the toilet learning process!

- An early start to learning. In a Montessori infant or toddler daycare setting, toilet learning starts early. When we diaper babies in our infant daycare rooms, we do so in the bathroom, to begin associating elimination processes with the appropriate location. We invite them to help: to lift up their legs, to climb up on the low changing table, to pull open diaper tabs. Once a child is able to stand up steadily, we start changing his diaper while he is standing up. We also invite him to sit on the potty, sometimes for children just barely over a year old. We never force a child to sit on the toilet or otherwise rush the process of toilet learning– but often, they become interested in these activities the same way they become interested in other things older children or adults do!
- An encouraging follow-the-child approach. Montessori teachers are careful observers, introducing activities to children whom they judge to be developmentally ready. The same is true for toilet learning: while we encourage participation in the process from day one, our teachers watch for signs of readiness to start a more intensive, “official” toilet learning phase. Readiness, in this context, does not mean a child who declares, “I want to use the toilet and wear diapers” (although some 2-year-olds have been known to say just that!) “Potty training” readiness means a child who has mastered prerequisite skills (e.g., who has a dry diaper for longer periods between changes, who can pull his own pants down and back up) and who shows an interest in becoming more independent and/or in using the toilet (observing other children, asking questions, being interested in flushing, talking about bodily functions.) Once we identify a child as ready, we begin to work together with you, the parents, and switch from diapers to cotton underpants.

A joint school-parent effort. In order to help your child be successful at toilet learning, we work closely with you to identify the right time, and to put in place a consistent approach at home and in the school. For example, once your child starts, we want him to be in cotton underpants (no pull-ups!) for all his waking hours, at school and at home. Since some “wet events” early in the process are unavoidable, we work with you to start the process at a time when you can dedicate your attention to it at home, too. We provide detailed, written tips that we encourage you to follow, from the language to use (e.g., saying “Let’s use the toilet now that you are awake”, rather than asking “Would you like to use the toilet”, which invites a reflexive no from many toddlers!), to advice on clothing to wear, and common mistakes to avoid in the process. Every year, we also host one or several Parent Info Evening dedicated to potty training, where you can get your questions answered by your child’s teachers.

We have found that toilet learning the Montessori way is often much easier than parents expect when they first approach the “potty training” process. When parents and school work closely together, a child can easily complete toilet learning well before the age of three, the time the child transitions to the primary classroom, which requires him to be fully independent in the use of the toilet.

When to start preschool: why earlier may be better

When is the right time to start your child in preschool?

Often, the answer depends on your personal circumstances: if you have the opportunity to stay home with your child; if you have the time, energy and knowledge to create a stimulating, orderly, Montessori-like environment in your home; and if you are able to enrich your child’s experience with regular excursions out into the world, it may well make sense to delay preschool until your child is around 3 years old.

On the other hand, if your child will be in someone else’s care, it might as well be a quality preschool, rather than merely a safe, fun daycare setting!

Here are a few questions to consider, as you make your daycare decision:

- Will your child be in an environment optimized to meet a toddler’s unique needs? Toddlers are at a prime age for learning, and everything in them is oriented towards this need. Yet all to often, a toddler’s needs for order and exploration are perceived not as natural opportunities for them to grow, but as challenging obstacles for parents and other adults (think tantrums, constant “no’s”, hyper-activity, and toilet training struggles!) Dr. Montessori observed that many of the allegedly abnormal behaviors toddlers exhibit occur because their needs aren’t being met. Toddlers want to be independent, yet our homes make it hard for them to be (think adult-sized sinks, toilets, shelves; adult-paced transitions like getting out of the house or rushing through a grocery store!)
  Toddlers’ brains are growing, and need mental stimulation just as urgently as nutritious food, yet often, parents, grandparents and daycare providers aren’t educators and don’t have the knowledge to consistently provide optimal mental nutrition for toddlers (think noisy plastic toys, too much stuff in overloaded boxes, TV time, and constant adult-led activity.)
  
  In contrast, an authentic Montessori toddler program is carefully designed around the child’s needs and offers much more than just daycare. The physical environment is child-sized, with low sinks and toilets, low open shelves with a few, carefully selected activities displayed so children can easily access them. The daily routine is slow-paced, which allows a toddler to do much more for himself: for example, snack time may well take 45 minutes, during which the children set the table, serve themselves, eat with their friends, and clean up afterwards. The activities selected have specific learning objectives. Usually, they are made from wood and other high-quality materials; there are no noisy plastic toys, nor is there ever any TV or video game screen time in a Montessori class! Trained Montessori teachers know just how to simplify the steps of a task so a toddler can understand it and, in fact, do it by himself.

- Who will be the adults your child will model? Toddlers learn by modeling after the adults they interact with. The adult’s approach to childrearing, and her ability to consistently, kindly implement it, matter a lot, especially at this tender age. In a Montessori toddler program, trained teachers consistently follow the Montessori approach. Their aim is to enable your child’s independence; they teach self-care skills (putting on shoes, pouring water, cleaning up spills) rather than merely taking care of your child’s needs (dressing your child, serving drinks in sippy cups, spoon-feeding your child to minimize meal-time messes.) They have a support system that enables them to be calm and patient all day: they have regular breaks to recharge their energy; coverage is available when they are out sick or for them to go on vacation; they have refresher courses and workshops to ensure continuous professional development; and they have colleagues and supervisors available to help them address any situation they encounter.
- Is there a clear educational plan to ensure your child maximizes his potential during a time of rapid brain growth? Toddlers have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to learn a tremendous amount, effortlessly. Dr. Montessori observed that during these early years, a child’s entire being is molded: his intelligence itself is being formed! A toddler has an urgent need to learn, and a Montessori environment enables him to do so in a deliberate, systematic manner that’s often not possible in a traditional daycare setting.

- - Supporting the sense of order. Young children need their environment to be predictable, orderly. Experience shows that if a child learns at age 2 to place his shoes on a mat upon coming in and to hang up his coat; if he learns to take out an activity, work with it, and replace it on its proper spot on the shelf; if he learns to sweep up crumbs he dropped and wipe clean a table—he will solidify his natural sense of order, and attain good habits that last a life time.
  - Developing an active mind and exploring with all senses. Toddlers love to explore: they are into everything, touching, smelling, tasting the objects around them. A Montessori toddler program enables your child to safely use all his senses to explore: there’s clay to be pounded, oranges to be squeezed and juice to be tasted, songs played together and mystery bags to be explored. We say our students work: their explorations are too important to be labeled as mere play!
  - Language development. Our trained Montessori teachers are deliberate about providing your child with rich language exposure, all day long. For example, we use full sentence, not short commands (“Let’s clean up, so we may come together for a story”, rather than “Clean up! Story time!”) We provide precise vocabulary through daily experiences (“Notice how sour this juice tastes!”, or “Look at how tall this tower is!”), as well as specific games to learn new words, such as matching objects/card games. We even start on phonemic awareness, with 2 ½ or 3-year-olds!

Does the toddler daycare you choose provide a good start for your child’s longer-term educational journey? Even if you aren’t convinced that the daycare choice at 18 months is critical, it’s worth thinking ahead. Quality Montessori preschool programs are in high demand. Often, children need to join as toddlers to be assured of admission to the preschool program! Additionally, Montessori preschool programs require children to be fully toilet independent by age three, and to be able to act independently (take off clothes, wash hands, follow directions…) If you want your child to join a quality preschool, it may well make sense to enroll him as a toddler, rather than opt for a different daycare setting that is closer or less expensive. In the case of LePort Montessori, access to the preschool program also means access to our elementary school Montessori program, which is generally filled from within, as Montessori preschool students seamlessly move up to the 1st grade. Plus, we offer several incentive programs to make it more affordable for families to stay for kindergarten and into elementary, so an early start can pay off financially, too!
What is the cost/value trade-off? There are many home-based daycare options cheaper than Montessori toddler programs: in many places, you can find in-home daycare providers that charge as little as $700 or $900 per month for 2-year-olds. Yet compared to a nanny, a Montessori toddler program can be a steal: one-on-one nanny care typically runs above $2,000 per month for full-time care; and even a 2-way nanny share is often around $1,400 per month, for 9 hours of childcare (with all the drawbacks of having only one childcare provider, who doesn’t get breaks, and may be out for illness or vacation time!) The question you should ask yourself is whether you believe that toddler daycare is a science, demanding a professional, nurturing approach. If you think the answer might be yes, we suggest you evaluate Montessori programs further.

If you need full-time daycare for your child, irrespective of whether or not you can afford a nanny, we believe your child will be best served by the benefits of Montessori toddler program. And even if you need less than full-time daycare, or have the luxury of staying home with your child, enrolling your toddler part-time in Montessori may well be worth it, to maximize his growth during these critical early years.

Montessori vs. daycare: what is the difference for your toddler?

Here’s a difference parents often ask when they come to tour at LePort: What are the main differences between a high-quality Montessori toddler program, and a traditional daycare center?

Our first answer is this: seeing is believing! Come in for a tour at LePort, then compare what you see to your observations at a traditional daycare. If you haven’t toured yet, please contact us to schedule a tour and observation.

When you come in for a tour, or if you reflect on a tour you may have recently gone on at a daycare center, here are some difference to note between Montessori for toddler and daycare:

A focus on child-led exploration, vs. adult-set group activities. Typical daycare centers have adult-set schedules in which children are shuffled into a new activity every 20-40 minutes: circle time, followed by art, followed by outside play etc. Typically, the whole group is required to move together from activity to activity, whether they’re engaged in the current activity or not. Instruction happens in a group setting, at a group pace, even if some children move more slowly or more quickly. In contrast, the Montessori toddler program supports a child’s budding independence and his self-discovery. Children have the luxury of time to choose their own activities, and to fully explore them at their own pace. Most instruction is one-on-one: teachers give short 5-minute presentations to individual children, after which they are given an opportunity to continue practicing until they’re satisfied.

A calm, orderly environment, vs. a messy, noisy place. Many daycare settings have a high noise level, and some seem proud to announce how messy they are! While there is a time for messes (we love for children to play in the mud, to finger paint, or explore foam), in general, the Montessori toddler environment is surprisingly calm and orderly. Since our goal is to enable children to learn to focus, to engage joyfully in a chosen activity, we need to provide them with an environment where they can do so without constant interruption and distraction!

A 1:6 ratio, vs. a 1:12 ratio. Most daycares in California switch to a 1:12 ratio at age 2, to save money. A 1:12 ratio, unfortunately, makes it all but impossible to provide a quality learning experience for toddlers. At age 2, a child can’t yet dress himself independently; he still needs help using the toilet; he isn’t able yet to clean up independently after play. By necessity, a 1:12 ratio means adult have to do these things for the children: there just isn’t the time to teach! In contrast, at LePort Montessori, we maintain a 1:6 ratio (or in limited cases a 1:7 ratio) all the way to age 3. This enables us to actually teach our students: to support them in toilet learning, show them how to dress themselves, and engage them in individual lessons with the many activities on the Montessori shelves.

Trained teachers, vs. revolving-door daycare providers. Most childcare staff have minimal training (often, just the 12 Early Childhood Education Units required by law.) Many daycare centers have high staff turnover as poorly trained and poorly paid daycare providers get burned out with the challenge of managing 12 toddlers. In contrast, at LePort Montessori, our lead teachers either join us with a Montessori teaching credential, often from an AMI training program, or complete their training while employed with LePort. The LePort head teacher turn-over is below 10%, a number unheard of in typical daycare settings!

Oversight by a Montessori-trained Head of School, vs. administrative management. Each LePort Montessori campus is lead by a Montessori-trained Head of School. This experienced master teacher has the full time job of monitoring all the classes at campus and ensuring consistently high standards. The Head of School regularly observes in all classrooms, provides feedback to teachers to help them improve their practice, and actively works with parents to resolve any student issues. In contrast, most traditional daycare centers are run by administrators, not by educators. (In addition to the Head of School, LePort campuses have one or two additional administrative staff whose job is to meet parent needs and address operational tasks, so that the Head of School can truly focus on maintaining high classroom standards.)

A deliberate, educational program, vs. all-day play. We agree that free play is important to children, and encourage parents to provide imaginative play activities at home. At the same time, we know that in the right environment, toddlers are eager to learn through exploration and practice. Toddlers in a Montessori program are surrounded by exciting opportunities to develop their skills: they practice opening and closing containers; they learn to button shirts; they identify objects by touch, sort things by color, transfer items with spoons, learn to pour water, put together puzzles, learn to cut with scissors, sew with laces, string beads, and so much more! The activities we offer in the toddler class provide a welcome change from what children typically find at home. This is in contrast to many daycare settings, where shelves and boxes are full of the same things your child already has at home—Duplo legos, blocks, wooden trains, cars, dolls, dress-up cloths, noisy plastic toys, and the like.

Grace and courtesy, vs. group conformity. Many parents want their child to become socialized when they enroll her in a daycare or preschool program. But “socialization” can mean different things in different settings. In a Montessori toddler program, we guide children to develop what we call grace and courtesy. We establish some clear rules that support a peaceful classroom: for instance, children may only take activities from shelves, never from another child. We give children the language they need to express their needs (“I am working with this; you may have it when I am done,” “I don’t like it if you talk loudly,” or “I feel angry because you messed up my work.”) Teachers model benevolent and cooperative behavior, for example, by shaking hands while looking into a child’s eyes as the child comes to class, or demonstrating how we politely offer food to a friend at snack time. The Montessori focus on teaching individual, pro-social skills is different from the group conformity at many daycare programs, where developmentally inappropriate skills, such as sitting still for an extended circle time, or indiscriminate “sharing” of toys may be expected from toddlers, without regard for the actual cognitive and emotional needs of the child.

A focus on developing inner discipline, vs. obedience training. In Montessori, the goal is to help children acquire self-discipline: we want children to understand the right course of behavior, and to be internally motivated to behave well. Our teachers don’t expect immediate obedience from toddlers, nor do they offer rewards (praise, stickers etc.) for good behavior, and punishment (time outs, for example) for bad behavior. Instead, we believe that children naturally want to do and be good, and that by setting up the right environment, and modeling kind, respectful behavior, we can guide your child to develop inner discipline. When a child does misbehave, we emphasize positive alternatives. For example, when a child runs in class, we don’t chide him, “No running in class!”; instead, we calmly explain, “We walk in class. Let’s go back and walk to the sink together.” And because we have mixed aged classrooms, older returning students are able to model healthy behavior; younger children benefit from the example of their older peers, and older children benefit from the opportunity to mentor and guide their younger peers.

Does our Montessori approach work? We invite you to come and see for yourself! Most parents are astonished to see how calm, capable, confident and serenely happy the children in our Montessori toddler rooms are. If you doubt that your own rambunctious, active toddler could ever be like that, rest assured that the children you now observe calmly seated eating snack together came to us no different than your child. The Montessori toddler environment really is that different for other daycare settings, and that’s why Montessori children behave differently, too!

A Day in the Life: A Visual Tour of Your Child’s Montessori Toddler Experience

When your toddler joins his Montessori toddler class, he enters a beautiful environment, carefully prepared to meet his needs. Materials are arranged on low, open shelves. The high-quality wooden chairs and tables are just his size. Art is hung up at his eye level. Activities are color-coordinated and set out on trays or in baskets, which makes it easy for him to find what he needs. The environment is orderly, everything has its place. This empowers your child to become independent, to do things by himself, and supports his natural need for order.

There are so many enticing activities on the shelves! As soon as your child joins the class, one of our trained Montessori teachers will work with him or her one-on-one. She’ll give him brief demonstrations of the materials, showing him slowly, deliberately how to remove and replace little figures, how to pour beans, use a paintbrush, squeeze an orange. Over time, your child learns a wide range of lessons, each of which he or she practices until mastery.

Then your child is off to the races! During extended, uninterrupted work periods, she can freely choose from all the materials she has been introduced to, and work with them for as long as she needs. Having freedom to explore at length, to explore activities slowly and in depth, to master new skills: this is the luxury of time the Montessori toddler environment offers your child!

At some time during the morning, your child will be invited to join the teacher and a few friends for snack (provided by the school.) This too is a learning opportunity! Children learn how to set the table, how to serve themselves food, pour a drink, and clean up. Early in the year, we keep the routine simple, and teachers assist quite bit. But come back in May or June, and you’ll be just stunned to see how well-mannered and independent these 2- or 2 ½-year-olds are at snack time!

Language development is a key part of our Montessori curriculum. Your child receives vocabulary lessons. He is regularly invited to story time. He sings lots of songs! And, toward the end of the year, we even begin to introduce them to phonemic awareness (an important step in learning to read), by asking them to isolate and repeat back the beginning sounds of words.

Motor skills are also very important for toddlers. That’s why our classrooms include a lot of movement and all kinds of activities that involve working with your hands, from stacking blocks to unlocking things, from gluing to painting, from dancing to walking around the classroom carrying a tray. When repeated every day, these are the activities that will help your child achieve poise and precision of movement!

Toddlers love to and need to explore with all their senses! We encourage them to do that – to play with goo and to touch woodchips, to experiment with shaving cream and to discover themselves in the mirror. As Aristotle said, “There is nothing in the intellect that was not first in the senses.”

Becoming independent is a big emphasis in the Montessori classroom. That’s why you’ll see students work on self-care skills like dressing and hand washing. You’ll see them learn to prepare food (cutting bananas and eggs, for example). They may even help in the garden, planting, harvesting and preparing vegetables!

Of course, outside time and physical activity are a key part of the day. Children may start their day outside, if they arrive early. They then have outside playtime in the morning, and again in the afternoon after nap, if they stay for extended care. When they get outside, choices abound. A variety of high quality play structures and slides beckon, tricycles await …

… running around is fun, as is chasing bubbles, or playing bunny with a teacher!

After outside time, students who stay for the afternoon have lunch together. We emphasize healthy eating: Dr. LePort, our founder, is an obesity surgeon, and he knows how important proper nutrition is. You can bring your child’s lunch from home (no sweets, please), or you can order a hot lunch from CaterTots, from a menu especially adapted to fit with LePort’s healthy eating policy. After lunch, the children turn in for a well-earned nap.

Want to see the toddler program in action? Click here to watch the LePort Montessori toddler program video.

Observing carefully and speaking clearly

When parents visit a well-run Montessori preschool classroom, they often are amazed to see the preschool teachers engaged in two activities not common in other preschools settings:

Observation. A Montessori teacher regularly steps back from interacting with the children to observe. Dr. Montessori likened the teacher’s role to that of a scientist, one who identifies salient facts about each child, strives to understand where that child is in his development, and then, on that observational basis, tailors her lessons to the child’s abilities and interests.

One-on-one lessons. While most preschools are primarily group environments, Montessori teachers in the preschool years deliver most of their lessons one-on-one. They tailor what they teach to each child, and to each particular moment in time, observing and responding to the child’s interest at that instant to make learning enjoyable and meaningful.

Recent research suggests that these two factors—observing the child and then providing language in response to the child’s interests in the moment, rather than just blanketing the child with verbal input—is the differentiating factor between children who speak early and well and children who lag in their verbal development.

While prior research had pinpointed the importance of the volume of verbal exposure by contrasting children from language-impoverished families to those of professional parents, Dr. Catherine Tamis-LeMonda of New York University aimed to understand why children of affluent, well-educated parents differed widely in their rate of language development.

In Dr. Tamis-LeMonda’s study, researchers analyzed how well-to-do New York parents interacted with their babies as they played with common toys and interacted over meals, then followed up over the next year, to track children’s language development.

Even in this homogeneous group of educated, well-off parents, all of whom provided a rich verbal environment to their children, language abilities diverged significantly by the end of the observation period.

Here’s how the results of the study are summarized in the book NurtureShock by Po Bronson and Ashley Merryman:

The variable that best explained these gaps was how often a mom rapidly responded to her child’s vocalizations and explorations. The toddlers of high-responders were a whopping six months ahead of toddlers of low-responders.

Remember, the families in this sample were all well-off, so all children were exposed to robust parent vocabularies. All the infants heard lots of language. How often a mother initiated conversation with her child was not predictive of the language outcomes—what matters was, if the infant initiated, whether the mom responded…

“I couldn’t believe there was that much of a shift in developmental timing,” Tamis-LeMonda recalled. “The shifts were hugely dramatic.” She points to two probable mechanisms to explain it. First, through this call-and-response pattern, the baby’s brain learns that sounds coming out of his month affect his parents and get their attention—that voicing is important, not meaningless. Second, a child needs to associate an object with a word, so the word has to be heard just as an infant is looking at or grabbing it…

This variable, how a parent responds to a child’s vocalizations—right in the moment—seems to be the most powerful mechanism in puling a child from babble to fluent speech.

Other studies have verified this mechanism: careful observation of young children, followed by verbal interactions that build upon the child’s interests, are the most effective way to stimulate language development.

This is exactly what we do in our Montessori classrooms.

In a Montessori classroom, teachers observe first, then provide lessons which tie language to specific objects or actions the child finds engaging.

Take the Pink Tower. In this activity, a teacher will present to the child a series of ten pink, graded cubes, which the child builds into a tower. It’s an activity that our three-year-olds delight in. It allows them to move about the room; to learn to walk gracefully as they carry the individual blocks; to practice fine motor skills as they carefully balance the blocks to build the tower.

The Pink Tower is a motor-skill activity, usually associated with the development of gross motor skills. But what’s interesting here, when we are concerned with verbal skills, is the way this activity is also an opportunity for language development!

Here’s how: the teacher may observe a child building the tower. When he is done, she may quietly sit down next to him, and give a lesson on vocabulary related to classifying and comparing things by size. As she points to the tiny one centimeter cube the child has just proudly placed at the top of the tower, she says: “This is the smallest.” Pointing to the biggest one at the bottom, she says: “This is the largest.” Pointing to the block one up from the bottoms: “This one is smaller”, and so on. The child may take apart the tower, and the lesson may continue: “Can you put the smallest one over here?” and “Bring the largest one back to the stand first.” The teacher may complete the cycle by pointing to the tiny cube and ask: “Which one is this?”, to which the child excitedly responds, “It’s the smallest one!” The child thus learns important vocabulary in a moment when his own interests have primed him for such learning.

This lesson is a perfect example of a teacher observing a child, and offering language that is tied to that individual child’s activity and interest, in the precise moment when the child is fully attentive.

Contrast this with how language may be taught in a traditional preschool or school setting, where a teacher may collect a group of children to learn about vocabulary related to size. She may use similar graded blocks, and use similar words. She may be engaging, and the children may repeat after her in a chorus. No one would deny that language instruction is happening here. But notice that the learning is adult-initiated and adult-led, and the child’s ability to absorb language is not optimized. Group-based instruction of this type misses the key ingredient of responsiveness, which the research shows is essential in optimally fostering language development.

Parents are often surprised at how quickly their children’s language skills blossom when they enter a Montessori toddler or preschool classroom. They are astonished that our preschoolers learn to read and write before they enter elementary school.

We don’t do achieve this rapid verbal skills development by drilling children in group language exercises and forcing them to repeat vocabulary in rote ways. Instead, we do what we’ve now discovered is consistent with the guidelines of the most up-to-date research: we individualize our instruction to each child and the things that fascinate him in the moment.

It’s all part of the Montessori “follow the child” approach. And as this research shows, it’s also something you can also try at home!

Heike Larson

I can do it all by myself!

With the new school year, we have a lot of new little friends who have joined our toddler classrooms. Naturally, this can be an anxious time for children and parents alike. Many of these children may be leaving mom or dad for the first time, and even for experienced daycare children, a Montessori classroom is an entirely new experience. They are taking a step in growing up, in becoming independent young people, and we do our best to make it a great experience for them.

That’s why we are so excited when we receive reports like this from Judi Chimits at our Mission Viejo Campus:

Parent Marcie U. said that her son, Dylan, who just started in Pre-primary (our toddler program) last week, is already starting to do things for himself at home. He’s pushing in chairs, putting things away, and he tried to put his cup in the sink (he’s too short and it spilled everywhere, but he tried to do it himself)!

I particularly love these stories of budding independence with our youngest students; they exemplify what’s at the core of the Montessori preschool philosophy of education. As Dr. Montessori explains:

If teaching is to be effective with young children, it must assist them to advance on the way to independence. It must initiate them to those kinds of activities which they can perform themselves and which keep them from being a burden to others because of their inabilities. We must help them to learn how to … go up and down stairs, to wash themselves, to express their needs in a way that is clearly understood, and to attempt to satisfy their desires through their own efforts. All this is part of an education for independence.

Everyone knows that it requires much more time and patience to teach a child how to eat, wash and clothe himself than it does to feed, bathe and clothe him by oneself.

The one who does the former is an educator…

Tomorrow, I’ll be giving a Parent Education Seminar at our Yorba Linda campus titled: “Help Me Help Myself—Montessori Techniques for Fostering Independence”. It’s all about how we as parents can help toddlers and preschoolers do more for themselves.

It’s truly wonderful to see all these children coming into our school, eagerly learning these important life skills and even more importantly, developing a confidence in their ability to deal independently with the world that will stay with them for the rest of their lives. Welcome, young friends: we love to have you with us!

Heike Larson

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