The school is conducting a three-day seminar for teachers and staffs to enhance their skills and knowledge about the school's principle and to impart teaching strategies that they can use to our students. This is also to refresh one's knowledge and to add more, especially that the school is incorporating Dr. Maria Montessori's principle and technology which is the trends today.
In my own opinion, previous techniques and theories will never die, but we need to adapt to the ever changing environment.
To begin, yesterday, May 16, 2018, was the first day of the seminar, we started 9 A.M. and we ended 4 P.M. The discussion was all about 'The Montessori Pedagogy and Materials Presentation Refresher Course.'
The first discussion was all about the prepared environment. This may be simple to you and maybe self-explanatory. However, this is basically being prepared and planned very well. We'll take an example of our CASA school or kindergarten school. The school was magnificently designed, from its safety down to learning. In details, the school uses a sliding window to make sure that in case there will be an emergency we can let the children jump off at the window and proceed to a safe place. The design of the floor; upon entering the school, the first kind of floor you'll see is a carpeted floor, followed with a step of tiles, and followed by a step of the wooden floor.
The first floor noticed upon entering the CASA School:
The second floor which is the tiles floor and the third floor which is the wooden floor:
Why do you think that these floors implement safety? Simple, because the children will be able to recognize which floor is slippery and with that, they will be able to take precautions to walk carefully.
Other than that, furniture is carefully selected. It must have no sharp edges and smoothly polished.
Let's proceed to the highlight topics for this day. What do you think will be the main topic? Since this is a Montessori school, then it's the usage of the Montessori Materials.
There are five sections for Montessori Concept, these are the Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, Mathematics, and Cultural and Geography Section. The first one to be demonstrated was the area for practical life and take note this must be the very first thing to be introduced to the children to make them feel at ease. The materials used have objectives that can be developed to one's child capabilities, these are order, concentration, coordination, and independence. Aside from that, there are also indirect objectives that can be found in the materials, such as, while using the three fingers (index, middle finger, and thumb) this can prepare the child for writing.
These are some materials for Practical Life:
The next area is Sensorial (or training of the senses), this can be a preparation for mathematics and language. In preparation, because in every material there's code of error that will make the students be aware that the method used is impossible (some materials are in shapes) and language because on every material or activity implemented, there can be vocabularies that we can associate.
Take this as an example:
The Brown Stairs
Code of error:
The stick which speaker is holding, notice how it is going down, once you will put the stick above before the taller one, the two rectangular prisms would have an equal height.
Another code of error are the edges.
Vocabulary:
Thin, thinner, and thinnest
Thick, thicker, and thickest
There were more materials presented on that day. And to conclude everything, Dr. Maria Montessori, is not just preparing the students to be able to face the academics through learing from concrete things to develop abstract ideas but also she is preparing the students to develop their values towards on their society.
If you have questions feel free to post it on the comment box below.
Please look forward on the second day training post. Thank you.