HOMESPUN MONTESSORI- A Senior Thesis Project
print story
April 18, 2011
Last summer, Sofia Weir and I volunteered together at the Hilda Rothschild Foundation School in a small village outside of San Salvador, El Salvador. Last fall, we returned to school to start our last year of high school. At our school, the seniors are required to complete a yearlong project in order to graduate. Sofia and I had such a great experience working at the Hilda Rothschild Foundation because it is a Montessori school. (Check out the classroom resources that Sofia and I have posted. They give a brief overview of the Montessori style of teaching, if you are unfamiliar with it.) We both had attended Montessori elementary and middle schools. Volunteering and teaching at a Montessori school brought us back to our early childhood education. We each have very fond memories of our early schooling experiences. We chose Montessori education as the topic of our thesis project, so we would be able to continue doing work with Montessori way of teaching. The purpose of our project is to extend Montessori education to people who aren't likely to come across it. To those who wouldn't be enrolling their children in Montessori schools, either because the shortage of grassroots and public Montessori schools or because of the expensive tuition at a private Montessori school. For our project, we created a small booklet containing 8 Montessori lessons for the kindergarten classroom. The lessons cover arithmetic, sensorial, and practical life. In each of the lesson descriptions, we also provided instructions on how to make low-budget materials necessary for each lesson. We tried to use trash materials and other common household items when making a complete set of the materials for all 8 lessons. We had to purchase a few things for the materials and spent a total of $21. If the materials used in these lessons were ordered from a Montessori material distributor, like Nienhuis (http://www.nienhuis.com/index.php), the cost would be over $450. Besides posting the pdf version of our lesson booklet on Omprakash’s Classroom Resource Section (http://www.omprakash.org/images/userfiles/volunteers/310/0.909955001302566206.pdf) , we are also distributing the lesson booklets to Dallas-area daycares and learning centers, as well as to the Home Instruction for Parents of Preschool Youngsters (HIPPY) program. We hope that parents and teachers in low-income neighborhoods and volunteers abroad in developing countries will use our booklet as a spring board to a world of Montessori education. We presented our project to a panel of local Montessori professionals last week. We think it went really well and we have high hopes for the Montessori connection that we will be making with these Dallas-area schools.
Please log in to post a comment!
| 
