Hey there. Steve Whewell with ExcellED Montessori. Today’s topic is Exploration and Experimentation in the Montessori Classroom.
Children are curious creatures. They are born with a desire to touch, taste, feel, and experience the world around them. If you want to wipe out a child’s creativity, put them in a room with a lot of interesting things and then tell them “sit still and stop touching everything!”
Truth be told, I became frustrated in my early years as an elementary principal. Children were being sent to my office because they couldn’t sit still. Let me ask you something…is the problem with the child that can’t sit still? Or is the problem with us because we aren’t designing lessons that require children to explore?
Here’s a public service announcement…”Children aren’t designed to sit still!” However, children will sit still and will focus when they are engaged in activities that involve all their senses.
In our classrooms, everything is made for the children to touch and explore. When children do Montessori lessons, they are developing skills in:
Hand-eye coordination, Concentration, and Problem-solving
Our students explore with solids and liquids. They sort and categorize. They create pictures and find out about color mixing. They explore size, sound, texture, and weight.
Our children are also encouraged to learn through trial and error. All of the greatest inventions today (hold up the light bulb) were only discovered after persevering through countless failed experiments.
Let me leave you with these thoughts. Early independence and exploration are the foundation for creative thinking and they are the basis for greater academic success in the future. This has been the Excellerator with Steve Whewell.
Before we can succeed, we need to experiment. Before we can experiment, we need to know we can fail. Before we can fail, we need to know we can learn from our mistakes. And before we can learn from our mistakes, we need a safety net of adults in our lives who love us unconditionally and prepare a learning environment for us to explore our hearts out.
Our programs: Programs for ages 10 weeks – 12 years
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Executive Function Skills with Children
Check out our youtube channel for more videos from the classroom:
https://www.youtube.com/channel/UCH24emN-ho8tBOevQg2MoYg
