I recently had the opportunity to read a great book by William Doherty entitled "The Intentional Family: How to Build Family Ties in Our Modern World." Establishing rituals or traditions is a key to building a strong family.  Doherty gives these four main reasons why families should develop rituals or traditions:

Today I am going to write about how the child's experiences in the areas of geography, biology, and general science in primary make the transition into elementary.

Choosing the best school to fit your child’s needs and strengths—whether it’s traditional, parochial, private or homeschooling—can often be decided only after internally answering dozens of questions in both qualitative and quantitative areas. To help narrow your decision-making process to select a school for your child, here are some options to explore.

Your Child’s Needs and Strengths

Perhaps the best outgrowth of watching a Montessori elementary school in action is seeing how peer-age learning helps younger and older students grow while preventing bullying.   

Montessori elementary school teachers engage and embrace two-way student partnerships by pairing children of various ages. That means kids are not all the same calendar year age nor possess the same knowledge level.

Sometimes, after an extended break, it can be challenging to get back into the routine of things.  The first day of school after a long vacation can bring about a re-occurrence of separation anxiety for some children. Sometimes, your attitude as a parent can play a deciding role in the child's outlook and approach to starting school.  Remember, separation anxiety is a phase, it is perfectly natural, and it will pass.

After the thorough preparation of the child's mind, hands, and attention through the work in the practical life and sensorial areas of the primary classroom,  the teacher will notice when it seems the child is ready for the more academic area of language study.  The child has learned sequencing with practical life work (among other things) and has used the sensorial materials to strengthen fingers and hands (again, among other things).  Almost fro

During our Parent/Teacher conferences, many of you were asking about how we deal with temper tantrums here in our classroom, so I would like to expand more on this subject. Toddlers and tantrums tend to go hand in hand, and it is important to remember that this phase will pass. A temper tantrum is usually a result of the child not being able to effectively express himself verbally, which leads to intense frustration.

I would like to share with you a thought on the development of independence in our classroom.  Dr. Maria Montessori defined the development of independence as follows:  "The natural development of independence can be defined as the gaining of successive levels of independence.  The urge to become independent is so strong that nothing can be stopped." -M.Montessori

As a Montessori parent, I can imagine you have heard numerous times the importance of independence. I hope that you see how, inside the classroom, independence is encouraged and fostered. Maybe your child is asserting his or her independence at home too.

In a Montessori classroom, we give our children "real work". This work consists of what we call "practical life skills". Practical life skills are the skills that your child uses to care for themselves and their environment. They can, and hopefully do practice these at home as well.  These skills also help to keep your child constructively busy when you are busy.