Community
Although this brings to mind the physical neighborhood in which one lives, at RPMS, you can feel the many meanings of community and how it lives at our school. For the toddlers, it’s the classroom with 11 other students and two teachers. They don’t see much beyond that (except when walking wide-eyed through the halls to the gym or playground). The Children’s House students experience more children of different ages in their classroom.
Adapting to Today’s Students
Almost all public schools use buzzwords such as SEL (Social Emotional Learning) and differentiation. Whole curriculums are built around these ideas. In Rogers Park Montessori School Children’s House (ages 3-6) classrooms, independence is built into the foundation of our environments. For instance, a three-year-old student was cutting cubes of cheese, placing toothpicks in them, and then walking around offering pieces to their peers.
Valorization
Maria Montessori’s concept of Valorization is the term for an adolescent’s process of becoming a strong and worthy person, when they realize they are useful and capable of effort. But when do these concepts begin forming in a child? For Siobhan Moffitt, Children’s House Teacher, these roots form as very young children in the Montessori Education as they are continually in the cycle of independently watching, trying, and mastering in the classroom as a very young child.