A Day in The Life at Aroha Nui Montessori

“Offer the child an environment rich in motives for activity, in which he can choose what he will take and use. In this choice he is free from any teacher’s control or, indeed, from adult control in general.” - Maria Montessori

One of our wonderful parents gifted us this video of her child’s morning at Aroha Nui Montessori and Beyond - of course we were so delighted! Not just with the video but of how much she was able to capture of her child’s exploration.

We especially loved, and intentionally chose not to edit it out, his creative use of materials in the environment.

For those of you familiar with Montessori environments you will know how much thought and effort that goes into the planning and maintenance of an environment that is just right for the children to explore.

Montessori adults can sometime cop a bit of flack (aka receive criticism which may or may not be constructive) about how obsessive we are about maintaining order of the environment, so we love any opportunity to show just how flexible our environment can be and this is so wonderfully clear when Master 2 washes his shoes in the hand-washing set up.

When this happened we could have easily jumped in and kindly redirected, perhaps saying “this is for washing hands” but instead we observed! We noticed that his impulse is entirely constructive - his shoes had mud on them, he wanted the mud gone and he knew just how to accomplish his goal - this is precisely the kind of intrinsic motivation we want to keep alive in the child.

The dirt can easily be cleaned from the hand-washing set-up but if we had intervened Master 2 might doubt his problem solving skills next time, he might instead look to us to solve the problem for him. Our work then is much harder - to rekindle what has been extinguished takes much more effort than to clean a muddy bowl.

We hope that you too will be able to stand back and see all the creative ways naturally children problem solve if we can just let them.

Aroha Nui

Carli

*we are also planning a specific shoe/gumboot cleaning as Master 2 showed us we definitely need one in our muddy Tāmaki Makaurau/Auckland seasons.