I am going to take a minute to pat myself on the back. I recently bought a couple of Montessori-based books for how to structure the home environment and design simple Montessori-like activities (one book by Tim Seldin, the other by Maja Pitamic). Anyway, even though I have just recently discovered Montessori, and our home is by no means a "Montessori home," I found that a lot of what they said are things that I naturally do - like minimizing the use of "No" and focusing on the positive (which I've not been as good at since he's been 3), keeping structured routines, having him help around the house, fostering respect and courtesy, and encouraging a love of nature.
My approach to teaching ds has typically followed his lead and I've been aware of his readiness for different skills and encouraged him to run with his interests of the moment (like geography, right now), although my approach to helping them develop has maybe been more "traditional," I guess, because he attended a traditional preschool. But then, as I kept reading, I realized that some of the things I do with my students (I'm a Speech-Language Pathologist) are very Montessori-esque.
With one of my echolalic, autistic students, I worked on a system of assembling his own sentences and color-coded the words (nouns green, verbs red...). I always justified it to people as not being grounded in research that I knew of, but that it seemed to make sense to offer a visual code for the language. It worked! And now I just read about that for early sentences and writing activites with M. I also work on developing my students' use of senses to understand their world, even if it doesn't seem directly language-based...but some of that has come from other sources, so I can't take 100% credit.
Anyway, more than to just pat myself on the back, I guess I just think it's neat how some people innately follow ideas of a philosophy. Someone Waldorf mentioned that a couple of weeks ago - it just fit with how they already lived their lives. Now I find it's true for me, too. I guess when you find the right fit, you just know it. Anyone else with experiences like this?
My approach to teaching ds has typically followed his lead and I've been aware of his readiness for different skills and encouraged him to run with his interests of the moment (like geography, right now), although my approach to helping them develop has maybe been more "traditional," I guess, because he attended a traditional preschool. But then, as I kept reading, I realized that some of the things I do with my students (I'm a Speech-Language Pathologist) are very Montessori-esque.
With one of my echolalic, autistic students, I worked on a system of assembling his own sentences and color-coded the words (nouns green, verbs red...). I always justified it to people as not being grounded in research that I knew of, but that it seemed to make sense to offer a visual code for the language. It worked! And now I just read about that for early sentences and writing activites with M. I also work on developing my students' use of senses to understand their world, even if it doesn't seem directly language-based...but some of that has come from other sources, so I can't take 100% credit.Anyway, more than to just pat myself on the back, I guess I just think it's neat how some people innately follow ideas of a philosophy. Someone Waldorf mentioned that a couple of weeks ago - it just fit with how they already lived their lives. Now I find it's true for me, too. I guess when you find the right fit, you just know it. Anyone else with experiences like this?
