Jasper Hoff takes his teachers’ hand and leads her to a rack of wooden trays. Together, they select one tray and set it down on a small area rug. Jasper’s teacher, September Luetjens, lifts wooden triangles out of their holes and runs two fingers around the outside of each one. She smiles and makes eye contact with Jasper, inviting him to do it. Neither one speaks. Jasper is rapt.
Jasper is 5 and a student at Bright Water Montessori in St. Paul. His classroom is filled with sunlight and built on a child-size scale. He can reach every shelf, hook, and switch. He can take out any object he wants, and he can put it back where it belongs.
Jasper’s dozen or so classmates move quietly around the room, some with purpose and some a little aimlessly. Some are in a constant state of motion. Others sit quietly the whole time. This is the way they will spend at least three hours of their morning, doing uninterrupted “work.”
Luetjens and the lead teacher, Martine Smaller, know where every child is and what sort of work each one is doing. They kneel down, to a child’s three-foot-off-the-floor eye level, to talk to the kids. They use quiet but adult and respectful tones. No talking down. No raising of voices.
If someone, like Jasper, wants to use something new, he asks for a “presentation” and Luetjens or Smaller shows him what the object is and what he can do with it. After that, kids are free to use anything that interests them.
Rais Hill, a tall, engaging 5-year-old in a Vikings jersey, moves to the kitchen area and takes out a plastic placemat, a porcelain jar, and a small mortar and pestle. He measures spices out of the jar with a small wooden scoop and crushes them in the mortar, narrating his work quietly to himself the whole time. When he’s done, he gets a plastic bag and sweeps up his ground spices. Cleaning up is as much a part of his work as taking out the supplies, and he can do every step without asking for help.
Meanwhile, four kids have taken out wooden trays and lined up in front of Smaller. Even observing closely in the small room, I completely missed whatever signal or invitation the teacher might have given to get them to gather for a group activity. They just seemed to appear.
Smaller asks each student to bring her a certain number of beads. “Will you bring me 5,000 units?” she requests. “What are you going to bring me?” Mauricio Badillo-Moorman answers, “Five thousand,” and returns with five wooden blocks representing 1,000 units on his tray. “You brought me just what I asked for! Thank you!” When a tray comes back with a different number of units, Smaller says, without chiding, “But I wanted 2,008 units. Can you bring me 2,008 units?” Without ever being told, these kids are learning the base-10 system, before they reach kindergarten.
Just the right size
It is now over a full century since Maria Montessori opened her first Children’s House — Casa dei Bambini — in the slums of Rome. She was a medical doctor — the first woman doctor in Italy — and worked in a psychiatric clinic. The Children’s House was an experiment, a chance to study “normal” children and apply what she learned to her work with the developmentally challenged.
What Montessori observed in the children was a thirst to do real work, to use the same tools that they saw the adults around them using. She saw them learning independently, using all five senses. She saw the way their environment shaped how they learned and how they behaved. The Children’s House was a beautiful, light-filled, child’s-scale place; and the children responded by making it their own.
Word of Montessori’s success with these otherwise forgotten children spread around the world. Today, according to the Montessori Index, there are about 7,000 certified Montessori schools in the world and 4,000 in the United States (about 200 of those are public schools).
In Minnesota, the two largest certifying agencies, the Association Montessori Internationale, founded by Maria Montessori herself, and the American Montessori Society recognize, respectively, 10 and 17 Montessori schools. Most are private, some are charter schools, and a handful are public.
But — and, for parents, here’s the rub — a search on a few popular private school directory sites turns up as many as 61 Minnesota schools using the name “Montessori.” The name itself is not protected and is not a guarantee that any particular school — while it may fit a child’s and a family’s needs — follows the Montessori method. And, despite the name recognition it enjoys, not everyone understands what that is, anyway.
“If you ask people what they think of Montessori, you’ll hear, ‘It’s for wealthy children.’ ‘It’s for handicapped children.’ ‘It’s too structured.’ ‘It’s not structured enough.’ The truth is, it’s a balance of structure and freedom,” says Molly O’Shaughnessy, director of the Montessori Training Center of Minnesota.
Think of little Jasper, sitting with his teacher, observing the wooden triangles but not talking. Many first-time observers in a Montessori classroom find the quiet discomfiting. We’re not used to seeing so much concentration in small children or so little verbal direction from adults.
“One thing people often say is, ‘Why don’t you talk to the kids?’” O’Shaughnessy says. “But we do talk to them, just not constantly.” She explains that Montessori teachers believe that kids have a hard time processing oral and visual communication at the same time — that is, if we constantly talk at them while we’re showing them something, they’ll get too distracted. So Montessori teachers show.
Another thing many observers will note is the lack of dolls and other imaginative playthings in a Montessori classroom.
The story goes that the first Casa dei Bambini did have imaginative playthings but, when given a choice between real things and toys, the kids ignored the toys. So everything in a Montessori classroom is real: real glass glasses, real porcelain pitchers, real knives, a real iron that really gets hot, and a real toaster oven that even young kids use to bake.
At Bright Water, while Jasper traces his triangles and Mauricio hunts for thousands, a little girl, about 5 or 6, in a blue smock is making cornbread muffins in a toaster oven. She opens the door, reaches for a fork to pull out the rack, places a child-size oven mitt on her hand, and taps her muffins. Not done. She does every deliberate step in reverse and looks impatiently at the oven timer. Her teacher is 10 or 15 feet away, talking to another group of kids.
A slightly older boy, who has made himself at home in his Spider-man slippers, decides it’s snack time. He gets a napkin, places two Nilla Wafers on it. He takes a water glass and a glass pitcher of water from a shelf. He pours himself some water. He does this with a ritualistic slowness, all on his own, that perversely conjures a picture in my mind of his alter ego, racing through a room, grabbing as many cookies as he can, and running off.
It’s the room itself — the “prepared environment,” to use the Montessori term — that makes this kind of independence possible. The room is made for kids.
“Imagine you’re trying to cook in someone else’s kitchen and you don’t know where anything is. You keep opening and closing drawers and cupboards. Eventually, it would get very frustrating,” O’Shaughnessy says. “Now imagine what it’s like for a child to be in an environment that’s all their size, with these beautiful containers that they want to open.”
Some of these principles have found their way into much of mainstream preschool education, though perhaps not in a form Maria Montessori herself would recognize. When I think of my own children’s preschool — which makes no claims to the Montessori label — I can see faint traces of that first Casa dei Bambini. The room is arranged in “areas” — art, puzzles, house, etc. — that the children can choose during periods of open play. The boxes are labeled with pictures so even prereaders can put things away on their own. It’s standard preschool stuff, now, but it may be so thanks to Maria Montessori.
Options for all
Perhaps the most common misconception about Montessori education is that it is for the privileged few. But some in the Montessori community are trying to change that. Bright Water operates in the Camden neighborhood of North Minneapolis to serve that area’s underprivileged population. Ann Luce, the founder and director, says she hopes to open a Montessori elementary charter school in the near future (the school currently goes up to kindergarten). The Montessori Training Center plans to open the doors to a brand-new training facility next year that will include a school offering scholarships to about two-thirds of its students.
There are already a number of public Montessori schools, including Humboldt Junior High, J.J. Hill Montessori Magnet, Nokomis Montessori, and Crossroads Montessori in St. Paul and Park View, Seward, and Armatage Montessori in Minneapolis.
And, since Great River Montessori in St. Paul opened its doors as a charter school, it’s been possible to get a complete Montessori education through high school. That’s when kids like Jasper and Mauricio would get a chance to put their independent learning skills to an even tougher test.
For now, this morning, Jasper has gone back to the wooden trays on his own, taken one out, and started tracing the circles with two fingers.
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Tricia Cornell edits Minnesota Parent.
