Whether you have a newborn or an older child, creating a safe home environment and ensuring the safety of your children should be a top priority. In this article, we have advice and tips on childproofing your home and understanding home safety basics. By implementing these measures, you can protect your kids at every age and stage.
It’s never too early – nor too late, for that matter – to start Montessori at home and witness the profound benefits of this time-tested and transformational approach to raising confident, joyful, independent young people.
When they think of Montessori, most people picture child-sized furniture that first appeared in Montessori schools over a century ago and those gorgeous hands-on manipulatives that make learning concrete and active in Montessori classrooms worldwide.
Children are capable of more self reliance than their parents sometimes think. With the right support your child can learn to meet many of their own needs, and will often joyfully rise to an opportunity convincingly put.
Practical Life activities in a Montessori classroom assist the child to control and coordinate their moments, and one of the earliest activities introduced in a 3-6 classroom is called “Walking on the Line”. Montessori saw this as a natural extension of something children liked to do (walking on curbs or tracks) and developed the activity not only to help them control their body, develop balance and perfect equilibrium, but to strengthen the mind’s control of its body’s movements.
Alumnus Madeline Cross-Parkin has braved mental health challenges on her journey to becoming a passionate classical pianist, Instagram sensation and physics undergraduate student.
Always top of her class in academics and piano, she reflects fondly on her time at Brisbane Montessori School, from the time she was eight months old to 12 years, and again from 15 to 16 years of age.
“Primary School was pretty good for me. I started learning piano at Brisbane Montessori School and had lovely teachers who started me off on a path of determination,” Maddy said.
In Montessori Education, the specially designed place that children come to work in is called a ‘prepared learning environment’. The first ‘work’ your child will do in the program is to orientate themselves to the new space in which they find themselves, which may take a couple of sessions.
The space will be arranged in exactly the same way each week in order to assist this orientation process. Each area in the ‘environment’ has a specific order and contains activities or ‘materials’ which serve different purposes for your child’s development.
The preparation of each Montessori environment includes the careful preparation of the Montessori developmental materials appropriate to that environment. The Montessori materials are sets of objects, each set designed to exacting specifications. In general the materials are designed to:
