Montessori - When to Present

There are many questions about "mastery" of late - how to know when to move on to the next material or presentation. I would like to submit/repeat an idea to consider, to ponder.

At the primary age ("Casa dei Bambini" or Children's House) - If you are using an album set that has 4 subject areas (exercises of practical life, language, sensorial, math), and you present ONE thing from one album and wait a few days to observe your child's response, they will have ONE choice that whole time. Put yourself in their shoes/socks/bare-feet and consider what that is like. One activity to choose from? Seriously? As a child I'd be finding something else to do and the adult would be very disappointed.

So maybe you present one thing each day, 4 days a week. By the end of the week, the child has 4 options. Would you be bored? (those of you using albums that have more than 4 subjects will find that with this method you only touch on a subject once every 2-3 weeks - or longer).

Getting Started with Presentations and Work Choices: 

This work is not successful
until EPL and language are successful. 

So start out with a series of presentations - the EPL album has all the preliminary work, some of it is just practice carrying objects, practicing walking quietly (then in the kitchen and the bathroom be showing various skills as appropriate); the language album has all the spoken language games - go with it - "Let's practice carrying objects!" and do a series of objects - slowly, focusing on each one, but you might do this for an hour or two hours. Stop when your child needs a break. The first days of homeschooling will be full of EPL and language - and consciously involving your child in all aspects of household/family life. He should have some free time with his favorite toys as well.

Walking on the line; playing outside; singing songs; reading books; being involved in everything that happens in the home; keeping things neat and orderly.

Thus the first days will be ***busy***. They will be ***full***. It should be natural and fun. And there will be almost NO MATERIALS beyond what you have at home already.

This lays the foundation for when you do get into the "official" Montessori materials (or modified from at-home materials).

They can't do this until they have the focus,
the process,
the trust in the adult to show them something valuable.
All lessons learned from exciting Exercises of Practical Life
- many of them -
throughout the day
and over the course of weeks.

Continuing on with this theme of when to present and how much:

MASTERY - does a child need to master one material in a subject area before moving on to the next?

Short answer: NO! Let's apply the same logic as above. If you have 4 subject areas as AMI does, at 3.5, the child is likely to only have EPL, language and sensorial (math typically comes closer to the 4th birthday). That is THREE work options if you are waiting for mastery in one concept before moving to the next, within each subject. Within each album can be found a few threads that come together at various points (such as language as separate preparations for the physical side of writing and the mental side of writing), so in reality, within each subject are parallel "threads."

Do we want to be presenting all day long? NO! But think about the classroom experience of a child - he may not get a new individual presentation each and every day, but he does get lessons in grace and courtesy during group time, he spends time observing his companions (a presentation in itself), and he works with some of these companions at various tasks.

In the home life, this equates to being involved in as many aspects of home life as possible, observing the doings of the various people in the home and the neighborhood, having real conversations using real language, and being shown new skills or materials that are appropriate for his age and development. This last part is where we look to the scope and sequence for what is typically appropriate, then modify according to the individual child in front of us.

How Often to Present Once Things Get Going: 

If you look at this post at Montessori Nuggets: Montessori Nuggets - Organizing Primary Presentations and you've actually then opened yourself to the true depth of the Montessori materials, you'll find that you're presenting something every weekday of a year-round school. Something. Sometimes more than one something. Some things are left for child-discovery (a good deal is), but there are enough direct presentations for a homeschool environment to do something with your child (who, after all, wants to be with you) every day. Explore with your child.

Every day.

That's not a new material every day - that's "let's look at something else we can do with the spindles!" (just one example - I have noticed many people forget the bundling stage, but this is actually crucial to gaining from the true depths of this rather simplistic-looking material). And it might even be a suggestion thrown out while you are washing the dishes ;) That happens a lot in our home - I say "I wonder if you could (fill in the blank) with (list a particular material)? And show me when I am done washing the dishes (or whatever I am doing at the moment)." And THAT might be my presentation for the day!

Given we typically have a daily social graces lesson or chat (grace and courtesy), lots of involvement in real life activities of the home, go off and play by yourself time, outside time, etc.

Three-Hour Work Cycle in the Home: 

I have recently heard from several individuals that they expected their child would work independently (which equates to being "alone" for some of these children) for a solid 3-hour work cycle.

• Humans are social creatures. Young children learn their social skills from the adults around them. 
• Our work cycles at home are 24 hours every day, not 3. If you want a set-aside school time where the materials are only available during that time, that is awesome, but your child will be learning throughout all of every day - and many of the Montessori "works" do not require specific "Montessori" materials (Exercises of Practical Life, art & sewing & painting, much of the language work, applying math concepts to real life, real life science exploration (cause and effect, asking questions and testing out answers, etc.) - so much more). *Most* of Montessori is about living real life, not about materials. 
• During a school-based work cycle, the child is chatting with friends, having a snack, in the ideal Montessori environment the child is free to go outside and play/garden/watch butterflies, observing classmates, using the bathroom, etc. The child is alive and learning, but not always engaged with the specific material. And he has role models around him to guide him in his choices and possibilities. This needn't be any different at home! The child should be engaged in the environment and that includes the adult. If you have a block of "school time" use that time to prepare your materials, to practice with the materials, to explore for yourself - and be present when authentically needed ;) 
• Will the adult get some "hey! my child doesn't need me at this moment!" times - yep! It will happen. But if you really want your child to work independently of you, you should be engaged in the materials (making them, practicing with them, organizing them, cleaning them) - or doing something else (household or family related) that the child can't "help" with right now, but that he can observe you doing during his own work time. 
• Read more about the 3 Hour Work Cycle at Home at this Montessori Trails Work Cycle page. 

Making Materials Takes So Long: 

Mom and son
together at Montessori school
He had been sitting and staring at the math materials for 30 minutes.
Doing some mental math he was trying to explain to me 

Most of you - I'll be honest, I love you all, so please know that going in to what I am about to say - MOST of you are making way too many materials. STOP!

• Your children should be involved in SOME of the material making. Extensions or ideas that they have? Let them help create materials! Primary aged children? Yep. Seriously, 3 year olds? Yep. And the 4s and 5s too. And if you have elementary children and teenagers - get them involved too. This is a lesson in creativity, using art skills in real life situations which is far superior than doing a craft just to do a craft. 
• If the children come up with an idea - they should be making it - or involved with the making of it. Wait, I repeated that. ;) I wanted to make sure you read that ;) 
• The children can SEE you making materials too. Let that be *your* work that they 1) observe and 2) makes you too busy to always be hovering like a helicopter. Your children might find they can problem-solve on their own sometimes, make their own decisions or get their own drink of water. YOU can do it! ;) 

Also see our Montessori Trails page on When Montessori Fails for futher insights into how the environment works.


Ask me other questions! I'll reply in comments and/or add to this post.

Botany Studies: Herbal Remedy Kit

Just a quick post to show how much we LOVE our Herbal Remedy Kit from LearningHerbs.com.

LearningHerbs.com - Browse their website - they offer SO much more! (and so much is FREE!)

I think this was actually making elderberry gummies
(not included in the kit,
but the elderberries are!
And the recipe is easy-easy-easy -
we added some extras for specific ailments)

The Herbal Kit - price ranges from $67-97 with various promotions. WORTH - EVERY - PENNY.
In fact, after you have the kit and you get started - just getting your hands into it, you'll find that you can buy replacements or change things up through purchasing items from Mountain Rose Herbs (or elsewhere, but we love Mountain Rose Herbs too!).... and we do that! BUT we decided to buy a second kit too!

The kit includes step by step EASY instructions. Nothing fancy; nothing complicated. So don't let my out of order photos here scare you! Legoboy could do all of these himself - in fact, he does done much of it all by himself, when modifying or re-making some items later. He has been doing so since he was 9 years old. :)



We have now made everything in the kit - including the elderberry syrup which works SO great for the flu virus! (the FDA does not approve of that statement, just as a disclaimer - even though there are scientific studies done that strongly show the affect of eldererry syrup on flu strains)

By the by - when it comes to flu.... I had those dried elderberries for almost 2 years. Every time I'd open that cupboard, I'd think, "What is that smell?" It wasn't *bad*, it just wasn't a yummy kind of berry smell either. Well, the day after we fully moved into our house (the apartment was empty but still needed a final cleaning), I opened the new cupboard that housed the elderberries, and thought, "Oh, THAT smells SO GOOD!" When I realized what it was, I realized, "I am sick." Our bodies do tend to crave what they need, until we train them otherwise. And I'd been ignoring all the signs of being sick (blaming it on the stress of moving, the all-day training I'd done that Friday, then doing the final moving of stuff in the rain at the end of a long day, coming into the house (where carpet people were supposed to be GONE already) to find broken dishes in the sink and broken glass all over the floor --- apparently the pounding from above had shaken loose a light fixture, hitting the sink and shattering everywhere, I blamed my feelings on "that time of the month", and my son's own moodiness (oh wait - he was sick too!!!). Talk about ignoring all the signs!!!!

Elderberry syrup though. YUM. And when my body didn't need it anymore, it didn't taste so good anymore. Still good, but not something that I was craving. Same with Legoboy. He really noticed the change in desire for it as he got better.

The best part of doing all this learning together? He could take care of me when I was sick and I could take care of him - no worries!

The pictures below start with the second kit; then move to the first kit. In no particular order. I will try to identify what is going on in each picture, but this is not a narrative so much as a demonstration of what could be done with an herbal remedy kit!

Full contents before unpacking anything.
That white spot is a wrapped up bottle of Lavendar essential oil.
Chunks of beeswax
All the jars, bottles eyedroppers, and tins needed for this particular kit.
Dried herbs (see below)
DVD instructions (with online access and some printed instructions)

First Kit:

stinging nettle sitting in place to make an infusion (all the goodness goes into the water,
then you strain out the physical herbs and drink the infusion - highly nutritious - and EASY)

strained herbs - these can go into the compost or be used other ways, depending on the herb mixture

This is maybe the stinging nettle infusion - the top part looks right,
but the liquid looks the wrong color.
So it might still be the herbal healving salve
herbs when being strained. 

the completed herbal healing salve
once you know how to make one kind, you can make ANY

getting supplies ready for making the salve

further straining the herbs that had been extracted into warm olive oil
just the liquid/oil is then added back to the pan with the beeswax
The bag helps to squeeze all the rest of the goodies out of the herbs. 

the herbal healing salve setting up - just poured into the jars
warm is darker and more liquidy yet
the solid parts are cooler and lighter in color

just a pretty picture of the lavendar essential oil, the olive oil and the tin tops

the salve while setting up - some was still warm (darker)

the pretty box the herbal remedy kit comes in ;) 

overview of the kit contents

closer look at the kit contents

melting the beeswax

Geometry in Nature

Recently, Legoboy participated in a class at the local-ish museum called "Geometry in Nature". Not a homeschool thing - this was on a Saturday so any children could come. 

I had this awesome post up - almost ready to go - went to edit just a TINY bit - and the whole thing was lost. That has never happened before and I was NOT happy. So 5 months later, here is what I was able to salvage. I didn't feel like (and still don't feel like) re-doing it all :( 

They mostly focused on Fibonacci and on fractals. 

The whole day led to lots of follow-up work and discussions. 

Alleged fractals in painting: 

Which calls to mind our awesome hallways: Elsa's Frozen palace!!!

Waiting for the other kids to arrive - he was the only one there ON TIME. Hm. 

Image of the swirl

Later we enjoyed this website: 
Fibonacci Numbers and Nature


Google these phrases!!!!

• swirl in pinecone
• swirl in pineapple
• Fibonacci sequence image

Making Space for the Child

Fore-note: This is a draft post from when we were still living in our tiny apartment. Some interesting tidbits still in here ;)

I don't even remember ever having the maps in that location! Ha!

Oh! This article at Maria Montessori blog sums it up SO nicely!

The article (go read it!) briefly describes the difference between a home that welcomes children by making them part of the family dynamic and a home that separates child/adult spaces.

Is it good for a child to have a "children's space" to go to? Sure. It can be. But if that is coupled with "you don't belong where the adults are", it's not well-balanced.

My son's toys are in the living room. I want him to LIVE in the living room. Yes, he has school and Legos in his room - and a 3 year old tomato plant - and some personal effects.

Playing with the materials ;)
These were set up in the small bedroom for a long time. 

He wants to keep his clothing in my own walk-in closet - he has a lower clothing rack for hanging his clothes; and the bottom 3 dresser drawers. I only need 2 of the drawers anyway, so it works well to have 1 dresser and share it.

His food is my food - we don't have "mom's stash", though we might have certain foods that he likes that I don't and vice-versa (he has some peppermint extract that he uses in his own recipes that I don't care for, for example). When he was younger, he had his own pitchers for milk, juice and water with appropriate daily servings - yes, they were his "own" but he had free access to them in the main/only refrigerator in his house ---- I provided ways for him to access the family dynamic of the home without entirely separating him out.

Some of us have separate school spaces - classrooms in our homes. These are great for those who have the space! And when we have that well-balanced with the children still learning and exploring in all areas of life, and the family spending time with the "Montessori school" supplies together, having fun - then the children have a fantastic Montessori homeschool!

Setting up the bead cabinet in the hall of our new home. 

In our small apartment, we've had to take the very, very integrated approach - by necessity. I keep saying "I want a separate classroom" - and maybe part of me still does, especially for things like math supplies; and to have a dedicated science shelf again (had one; transitioned to co-op; transitioning back home with a full key-board in the science shelf's place doesn't work so hot! Time to get projects cleaned up in my room so we have more space in there ;) ).

Multi-purpose the bead cabinet ;) 

Botany Illustrations

Neat side exhibit at our local museum recently:

Zoom in on this one! Look at the letter s in sassafras! It looks like "saffafras"!
This led to more conversations about the change in handwriting over the years.
And how necessary it is to maintain cursive writing - personalized writing - so that
we can continue to communicate with your ancestors.  

Such beautiful illustrations!

Even as recently as the last century, we were publishing books
in both Latin and English.
And I thought Latin was a dead language !?

We bought this one.
LOVE it! 

Dictionaries and Thesauruses in the Montessori Homeschool

It is important to NOT just have one resource - one dictionary, one thesaurus, one atlas, one encyclopedia set. No ONE resource is complete - no one resource will meet the needs of every child (or even every need of ONE child). There are different types, different focus for each one, different style that will appeal to different ages and personalities.

So don't be afraid to have a few on hand - thrift stores and library sales are great places to hunt down such materials; and utilize the library for its resources (and visit a few different libraries!). Explore what each one has; if you find a particular resource that is used a LOT in your home or school, that would be the one to invest in ;)

Thus, what follows is a(n incomplete) sampling of what is in our home for our family's purposes and our co-op/tutoring purposes.


This is not a definitive list.

In fact, this isn't even all that we have here - it is simply the ones I could find still on the bookshelves and not buried in the stacks of books that my son reads through on a *daily* basis. ;) But these are all used at least several times a year, if not weekly. When we moved, we culled some books; and last year I culled a LOT of books that we just weren't using. So this is what we have :)

2 sets of Science Encyclopedias - one is OLD but still pretty good.
The other is newer (ok, it's from my childhood, but my childhood isn't old ;) )
The newer set even came with a project book. 

Found in the basement when we moved in. Interesting stuff.
Taber's Cyclopedica Medical Dictionary

These are atlases and maybe need their own post???
The Kingfisher People's Book of Oceans
ChildCraft's Whole Wide World

More atlases
My World - Globe
Activity Atlas
Picture Atlas
Reader's Digest Children's World Atlas
(these were all Goodwill finds)

Webster's New Explorer Dictionary of Word Origins

Huh. More atlases. I was looking for dictionaries and thesauruses!
Where in the World is Geo?
HarperCollins Concise World Atlas (we LOVE this one!)

Scholastic Student Thesaurus
Encyclopedia of the Animal World
(the project book from above)
American Heritage Student Thesaurus

Random House Webster's Unabridged Dictionary

 Go here for a picture of my then-3-year-old reading the above BIG red dictionary. 

Legoboy's First Dictionary
NO dictionary is "too old" for a child! 

My First Encyclopedia
(we also have "My First Dictionary" around here somewhere)

The Lincoln Writing Dictionary for Children