I’ve been thinking a good bit about the role of lessons in a Montessori Unschool, and in particular, whether adults should initiate them. In my life, I’ve very much been influenced not just by Montessori, but also by “democratic free schools” (Sudbury Valley School in Massachusetts in particular), and by the “unschooling” style of homeschooling, especially the work of John Holt. In fact, my own middle/high school experience was in a school loosely inspired by Sudbury Valley School. At Sudbury Valley “teaching” from staff members happens only upon request. In Montessori, guides invite children to most lessons and decide what the content of those formal lessons will be. And of course, in traditional schools, adult initiated activities constitute the bulk of the day. How should we deal with this difference in a Montessori Unschool?

As much as possible, I try to read scholarly literature and books for teachers on teaching mathematics, nearly all of which comes from a traditional school perspective. Not only is it useful for my teaching, but I find it fascinating to read from the perspective of a Montessorian, because I come in with a different set of givens about what’s normal in a school. The book I’m reading right now, Building thinking Classrooms in Mathematics, by Peter Liljedahl, is especially satisfying in this regard, because he directly tackles those norms.

I have a confession to make: I hate Table C. If you’re an elementary guide, you may appreciate exactly why. If you aren’t, you may have no idea what I’m talking about. So why do I hate it so much? It’s boring. It’s so boring, it doesn’t even have a real name! For most children, creating Table C is a slog, and even when they do finish it, it’s apparent that most of them don’t value it much, because they immediately lose it!

Okay, not really. Teaching online is exhausting and feels far less effective than teaching in person; it is very hard to build a community via Zoom, and that also makes it hard to build a culture of work. I can’t wait to be back in a real, in-person classroom with actual, corporeal students and access to all the materials I need. (I’m fairly sure my students are currently corporeal, but it sometimes doesn’t feel like it.)

But, as I tell my students all the time, where there is a problem, there is an opportunity, and remote teaching is no different. Teaching remotely has pushed me out of my comfort zone and forced me to be creative in my teaching practice, and that will make me a better teacher when we go back to in-person teaching.

There is a chapter in Maria Montessori’s Book To Educate The Human Potential, called “The Six Year Old Confronted with The Cosmic Plan”. This is where she lays out her vision of Cosmic Education: beginning with the biiiiiiig picture (the Big Bang and the whole universe) and then filling in details over time. The idea is to plant as many “seeds” as possible, understanding that not all of them will grow and bear fruit, but they will all be there, waiting.

"Our job is to offer the lessons, and then do our best to observe with humility as the children choose what to take from it. Offer lessons, offer opportunities for follow up, and then watch with curiosity, joy, and a sense of adventure!" What do do suggest when the child is resistant to the offering of the lesson?

What do we do when we identify a problem and need to support our children? How do we actually lead from our wisdom?

The answer to this question is the art of teaching, and this is what teachers spend their lives learning to do better. But here are some tools that I find are effective with elementary children.

If you have spent any time in the Montessori world, you have probably heard the term observation bandied about frequently. You have likely been told to observe frequently (and if you haven’t, you may want to reconsider your source of Montessori advice), but exactly how do you observe, and what’s the point?

This blog has been a bit slow this past week, and may continue to be for the next few weeks, as it is the Jewish holiday season, as well as the start of the school year. Tonight is the beginning of Yom Kippur, the most important day of the Jewish year, when we fast and ask for forgiveness for our failings over the past year.

This week, I had a fascinating discussion with some of my students that gave me remarkable insight into their understanding. I asked them to calculate 24 + 32. First, we calculated this using the usual stack and add method, which no one had any trouble with, and came up with 56. If that were the end of it, this would be a really boring blog post, but it's not. Earlier in my teaching career, I would have said "great, these children can do static addition," checked it off on my lesson list, and moved on.

What are the children supposed to do after the lesson? The second in a series of posts on facilitating independence for children who are homeschooling or in remote learning.

Here’s how I’m approaching teaching children about multiples this year. Boy did we have fun!

This article is the first in a series of posts on facilitating independence for children who are homeschooling or in remote learning.

Today, we’re going to take a look at the forms work can take for elementary children. “Work” is one of those terms with great resonance in Montessori, but it doesn’t always have its colloquial meaning. In our adult world, work means “accomplishing things, often for the purpose of satisfying someone else,” but when we think of work for children in Montessori, we mean “meaningful, concentrated, and freely chosen activity.” Work can be sitting at a desk and solving word problems, but it can also be struggling to build a fence, program a robot, or get along with a sibling.

A key theme of Montessori’s “Cosmic Education” is interconnection, not just of the curriculum, but of reality. Montessori children end up very aware that we are literally "made of starstuff," as Carl Sagan said, and that we depend on the sun, plants, and other animals for our lives. They also know that humans depend on each other in ways so complex that we can't possibly enumerate them.

Last week, I wrote about the importance of estimation skills and I promised details on how to practice estimating in different ways. The simple answer is simply to practice whenever you get the chance! Here are some ideas and resources for when and how to do that.

I recently wrote about how I like to teach the Racks and Tubes: with a story! But in these interesting times, many of us are trying to teach the Racks and Tubes without any Racks and Tubes. What a nightmare! I think I have found an alternative, and I plan to try it with my students this year. It’s called Exploding Dots, and it’s genius. James Tanton, the creator of Exploding Dots is a long-time math educator who has come up with a huge range of interesting ways to explore math. I highly recommend all his work.

Estimation is an underrated skill. This problem reinforces the idea that estimations are not as good as “precise” answers, or even that estimates are just bad precise answers. But this simply isn’t true.

Racks and Tubes are one of those iconic Montessori materials, and it's hard to imagine running a classroom without them. But sometimes, the material doesn’t actually work to teach division. That’s because it needs a story.

The most frequently asked question I get from parents is about what curriculum I recommend.