Recently, I had the good fortune to buy some wonderful Montessori materials from a colleague who is leaving the Montessori school world. Montessori materials are beautiful; they are satisfying to the eye and the touch. They help children learn concepts about  size, shape, and dimension. Beautifully crafted of wood, they invite children to handle them and explore how they fit together to make steps of graduated size or towers that go from biggest to smallest. Everything is created in base ten; our number system is embedded in all of the tasks.

In a traditional Montessori school, children use these materials by taking them down as tasks from the shelf , use them to create the proper arrangement, and put it back.  Then they pick a different task.

At Children’s Center Preschool, we will invite children to choose the materials, and sit with us and one another to discuss the materials and find the pattern or arrangement. But then we encourage them to see what else they can do with them.

For example, last week I was working with a boy who was laying out the dark wood “stair” blocks. Piece by piece, he decided where each piece should go in order to create a stairway.  When he was done, he felt a sense of masery and compreshension, but his next question was ” What else can we do with these?”. Indeed that is a question we love to hear from children.

He then experimented with the pieces, creating pathways and towers, each incorporated the stair theme. We know from brain research that a child more fully understands a concept or idea when he elaborates on it and uses it in different ways. That way, it enters long term memory not as a rote piece of learning but rather as a concept that can be applied in many ways.

At the preschool, we encourage children not only to use materials in their intended ways but also to use divergent thinking to imagine  the many possible ways  something can  be done, what different strategies can be applied. In that way, they expand their analytical and critical thinking skills. Throughout the school, we seek to create an environment that encourages children to explore and experiment, to ask questions, and to use both  convergent and divergent thinking to find ways to make the world relevant,  meaningful, and educational to them.Tweet