Maria's House
By Bob Waite
Can you imagine a school for ages three to six where little preschoolers work for three hours in the morning and two in the afternoon and think they are playing? That they increase their fine motor skills, learn math, reading and writing and even learn about other cultures, foreign languages, and fencing? And that they do all this and learn how to be courteous, clean up and put things away, and treat other children with kindness?
Well there is such a school in Doylestown and it is called Maria’s House. It is a Montessori School where teachers are called guides and children can make guided choices about what they want to master. It is a place where children are allowed to develop according to studied stages of development, where they are not talked to in a dumbed down way and where they are treated with respect and learn to respect others.
Maria’s House is based on the approach of Italian educator Maria Montessori. Director Laine Walker, MA, NBCT found her way to the Montessori approach after a fruitful career in public education. “I’ve been an educator since my early twenties,” she says. And her teaching career taught her many things about the beauty of learning. She taught orchestra in Texas and then moved to Pennsylvania where she did the bulk of her teaching. Thinking about when she taught the string section, she says, “There are beautiful things you can do with an orchestra that are not just about music but are about larger things as well.” This led to her becoming a principal.
Laine says that she was always looking for a way to be better at what she does and how the school system itself could be better. She had dreams. She thought there has to be a more authentic way. And then she learned about the Montessori approach. “I read a book and I never looked back.” In fact, she says she devoured book after book and decided to spend a summer at the Princeton Center for Teacher Education to get her AMS (American Montessori Society) certificate for primary ages.
Maria Montessori, who founded this developmental approach to learning, began as a medical doctor in Italy. Her work took her to a tenement in Rome where she encountered poverty and what we would call deprivation. To eke out a meager living for families, both parents had to work, and the children were running wild. They were even defacing the building and causing damage. As she worked with these families she started making observations about children and how they developed. She observed that children, despite cultural differences, all developed in certain stages. As she observed, she began to develop educational principles and put in place educational tools.
Montessori also worked with children in a psychiatric hospital. She gave them educational tools that she developed, and amazingly they were able to test at the same level as children in the public schools. Montessori began studying other didactic books in education and went back to the university to study anthropology and psychology. And thus the Montessori Schools, following the principles of Maria Montessori, sprang up all over the world.
Laine commenting on Montessori’s discoveries says, “Children can do remarkable things, given what we call the prepared environment. So our children come to Maria’s house and they think that they are playing all day. Everything that they do, we call work, but there’s no difference at this age between work and play. For this part of early childhood it is all the same.”
Childhood development at these early stages has to do with what Montessori called the absorbent mind. For ages zero to three they absorb everything around them unconsciously and they do it at an incredible rate. From ages three to six they are still “absorbing like a sponge,” but at this stage, they do it consciously. They are now beginning to put all the pieces together.
“What does this look like at Maria’s house?” Director Laine Walker asks. “At our house it looks like how you talk to children. We talk plainly to them, In words, we don’t dumb anything down. You preempt things and it’s how you treat the child with respect. And you want them to give you respect as well. If you go a daycare somewhere you may see a child screaming. If you come our house and you see a child being unkind to another child, you would see a guide get to that child and try to see what happened, and it may not just be that the child is being unkind. A child can have something in his or her hand and have a reaction to it, so it is important to get down to that child’s level and then talk with them about it.”
At Maria’s House a child learns by going from concrete to abstract. And when the guides teach and show children something, they also teach them how to show it to other children. This social development is seasoned with what Laine calls grace and courtesy. “It can be as simple as opening a door for someone or helping another child who is having a hard time handle his or her work. Or it could be putting materials back on a shelf neatly so a peer can use them easily. “Small things,” Laine says, “all add up to incredibly large things. Children respond magnificently!”
At Maria’s House the children are all on the first floor with the guides. They eat lunch together and they use materials that are prepared to help them develop and learn naturally. “Children are hard wired to develop and to do, so what we can do is provide a prepared environment. It’s our material, it’s the language that we use, it’s the training of the guides,” says Laine.
The amazing thing is that children at this age love long work periods, especially when they think they are playing. This is a prepared environment but it is based on guided choice, which is vital to their development and to the what Laine calls “genuine intrinsic motivation.” So children are guided to what is appropriate in their development. And unlike the cookie cutter approach of other methods of education, where they are in their development does not have to be dictated by their age. Everybody in the Montessori house has an individualized learning plan. For example, if they are moving faster in a mathematical concept, the guides keep that prepared environment ready for what’s next. And the children are going to learn concepts through games, sometimes with peers and sometimes by themselves.
Laine explains, “And they will come back to it when they are ready. They are progressing toward mastering it, and then they may put it aside. And then they will get to the next level—all the way until there is mastery. Children can jump around from one subject to another all through work day or stay on one thing.”
Laine gives an example of a child who is about to turn six and has been with Maria’s House since she was four and a half. She has been progressing through the math materials steadily. She had been working on something called the hundred word, which moves from the concrete to the abstract, in which a child has to layout a hundred tiles. For an adult this task is simple but for a child it is overwhelming. Laine says, “She kept going back to it day by day until she mastered it. Well this week, she had another challenge, but she needed to go back to the number board and do something she already did that was successful.” She wasn’t quite ready to go on to something else, so she went back to what was familiar, so she can be ready to do something that is more challenging.
Longer periods of time to work give the child time to concentrate, which is vital. Laine explains, “You can’t build these things if you don’t prepare or give them time. Why is it important that my child wash a chair or get an hour of hand sewing? They are getting concentration—executive function. You can’t build these things if you don’t prepare or give them time.”
Children in this age group need a simple task to be broken down into many steps to develop executive function. “Executive function is about understanding the steps and the order. A child understanding that if I do these five steps, this is what happens is important. It is like getting dressed in order of what goes on first, then second and so on,” Laine says.
Life at Maria’s house is fun. Both the children and guides are motivated to do the best they can. With the help of people from the community, children learn about other cultures, art, the Lenape, fencing and even foreign languages.
The advantages of a Montessori education are clear. If they stay at Maria’s House for three years they will most likely be ahead of their peers in reading, writing, math and cultural understanding. Differences will be seen between children who go to Maria’s house and other children in the way they speak, how they occupy their time, their ability to entertain themselves, and in kindness and grace. Parents often tell Laine that they wished they could go to school at Maria’s House. People who know the children before and after they attend Maria’s House notice the significant changes in their development. Laine says, “Children want to learn and if you show them with kindness they will do magnificently.”
The ratio of guides to learners is small, about one to every eight children. And the maximum capacity for children is 25. The guides are not assigned to specific children but are fluid in their guidance. Laine, who herself is a guide, says, “We all bring different strengths.”
Maria’s House is on the fast track for accreditation for The American Montessori Society. They have much support from Chestnut Hill College and the Princeton Center for Teacher Education. They also have a very accomplished advisory board. They are not out on their own.
Director Laine Walker says, “Maria Montessori said that children are our future. They are going to grow up. They are going be our leaders and who define what’s next in our society. You should treat them with the same amount of respect and dignity that you treat everybody else. And that is such a critical principle that we put in place at our house. It is very important!”
Maria’s House is located at 601 New Britain Rd, Doylestown, PA. To find out more about Maria’s House or arrange for a visit, call 610-290-5019 or visit www.mariashousemontessori.com.