4 Ways You Can Support the Montessori Method at Home

Montessori education is a form of whole-child development. In order to work correctly, middle school children should be presented with Montessori-style opportunities at home. To illustrate how you can do this at home, here are 4 critical aspects of Montessori that can be duplicated in the family environment.

1. A Prepared Environment

While a corner of the home is appropriate for toddlers and preschoolers, Montessori middle school kids should be integrated into the regular household environment. Provide your son with his own chair, a table space he can arrange as he wishes, and plenty of access to bookshelves, activity areas, and his own choices for decorations and styles.

2. Communication and Inclusion

Communication is at the heart of appropriate learning. Talk with your Montessori son about his day, offer to help him with troublesome projects, and invite him to join in home activities like cleaning, cooking, building, and maintenance. Inclusion is critical to establishing a firm sense of self-esteem, and that promotes an eagerness to learn and participate. When a middle school child feels like they make a difference, he will be more interested in participating.

3. Encourage Curiosity

Children begin life with a clean slate of knowledge and will spend the rest of their lives absorbing information about the world they live in. For middle school kids, that means being encouraged to study and compare, explore and discover. It may be tempting to rely on your local factories, visit museums, and go for explorations in nearby parks and other public spaces. In the process, observe how your kids react to different things and help them focus their interest on subjects they find the most stimulating.

4. Montessori at Home

It is important that the tenets of Montessori are allowed to become a way of life. Avoid using punishments or rewards to motivate your kids, use positive reinforcement instead. By helping a child become motivated for his own success, you give him the confidence and curiosity to attempt new things, interact appropriately with others, and feel good about his achievements. Ask your child's teachers for suggestions on how you can more accurately continue the Montessori Method after school lets out.

Montessori was carefully developed to recreate the natural way kids learn in a broader, more structured context. To be the most effective, the principles of Montessori should become a common set of ideals in the home itself. From grace and courtesy to discovering the bounty of nature in local parks, supporting the Montessori Method will benefit every aspect of your child's development.

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Authentic Montessori Schools Can Be Recognized By These Important Traits

Not all private kindergartens are equal. If you are considering a Montessori education for your child, look for these important traits that signify you are signing up for an authentic Montessori education.

Montessori Materials

Authentic Montessori kindergarten materials are typically made of wood or other durable materials and teach one or more important educational concepts. Montessori activities are self-correcting, meaning that the child can readily see whether the activity was completed correctly and make the necessary corrections without the intervention of a teacher or fellow student.

Specially Trained Guides

Montessori teachers are usually referred to as guides because they play a different role in the classroom than you would expect of a public school teacher. Instead of lecturing the entire class on a given lesson, Montessori guides observe how children interact with different workstations, and then guide children in appropriate directions to help them achieve goals or overcome obstacles.

Self-Directed Learning

Montessori children are free to move about the room, interacting with various activities, working alone, in pairs, or as part of a larger group. This is in sharp contrast to traditional schools where all children are working on the same lesson, which has been presented by the teacher and may not have any connection to the specific interests and strengths of the children.

Multi-Age Grouping

Children in traditional school classrooms are almost all the same general age, separated by only a matter of months. In the Montessori classroom, children are grouped in 3-year age ranges. Instead of some children always being among the oldest and others among the youngest, Montessori kids all spend time as both the younger and older children in the room.

Extended Work Periods

Another prominent difference between Montessori and the public school system is that Montessori children do not waste a portion of each day shuffling between classrooms and teachers. In Montessori, children remain with the same teacher all day-- and often for several years. This provides more time in the school day to apply to activities and gives children a better sense of consistency, factors that are beneficial to information retention, academic performance, and more.

Always verify that the Montessori school you are considering is certified by a major Montessori institution. The word Montessori is not trademarked, and many schools claim to be Montessori but do not fully comply with the Montessori principles that are vital to developmental success. Before enrolling, ask the school administration to see the certifications of the school and its staff.

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What Can I Do At Home to Promote Developing Fine Motor Skills?

Preschool is a critical time for childhood development. Children learn skills that are necessary for performance, critical thinking, and future development. But developing those skills occurs during specific growth phases, and is not limited to classroom activities. At home, children can do a number of things to help them develop appropriately, including helping them with fine motor skills.

A Child's Space

The Montessori preschool environment is created around the needs of children. This includes furnishing and decorating from the children's perspective, and providing a similar place at home helps children be more engaged and interested. You do not have to child-size the entire home, but making the child's room-- and perhaps a corner in the family room-- makes them feel more like part of the family. Even more to the point, research has shown that children develop more readily when they feel comfortable in their own spaces.

Touchscreen Technology

The Digital Age is here to stay, and children need to have exposure to the basics of using electronic devices. Tablet-like toys are inexpensive and offer a digital experience for children that requires them to use their fingers and hands to accomplish tasks. In addition to fine motor skills, this type of device also teaches a very wide variety of concepts. From counting and sorting to digitized versions of popular Montessori activities such as the Pink Tower, children's computers use game-like programs to build vocabulary, teach basic math skills, introduce animals and plants, and much, much more.

 

Big Helpers

Children want to feel like an important part of the family, and including them in household tasks and projects provides the sense of inclusion they crave. There are no limits to what children can assist you with, from yard work to building birdhouses, and from housework to making delicious meals. Lifting, grasping, measuring, and cutting soft things are all excellent activities for developing fine motor skills. In the process, you will be exposing children to practical life skills that will benefit them for life.

It is critically important for children to develop good fine motor skills between birth and 6 years of age. By kindergarten, your child should be able to grip a pencil correctly, use a pair of children's scissors, and manipulate small objects. These skills are a big part of the Montessori Method, but children need to be practicing them all the time, and the home environment is where most of that development will take place.

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4 Tips to Get the Best Results From Residential Laundry Service

Residential laundry services offer several benefits for busy professionals that do not have the time to do laundry and even if they have the time, find doing laundry to be an incredibly boring household chore. In addition to saving time, outsourcing your laundry also saves you money. Instead of paying for the energy required to power a large washer and dryer, you push the costs of energy on a business dedicated to providing superior residential laundry services. Professionals who clean clothes for customers provide a higher quality result because of the experience and skills acquired over the years to wash and dry clothes.

Now that you know about the benefits delivered by using residential laundry services, how can you get the best results by outsourcing your laundry?

Let Us Do All the Work

You might have read other articles that recommend completing a few tasks before dropping your laundry off for professional cleaning services. At Laundry Care Express, let us do all the prep work that other laundry services ask their customers to do. We sort clothes to match the right types of wash and dry cycles. Our team of laundry professionals prepares your clothes thoroughly, such as not mixing delicate and dry-cleaning fabrics with regular apparel. We remove all stains before the first wash cycle, as well as wash and fold laundry to allow our customers to store their clothes immediately upon arrival.

The reason why you chose residential laundry services is to remove every task involved with laundry from your weekly chores list. Let us do the work for you.

Make Special Requests

Maybe you have experienced poor customer service in the past that makes you reluctant to make special requests. Perhaps you never have thought about seeking extra services from a business that provides residential laundry services. When you sign up for our residential laundry services, we encourage special requests to ensure we meet every one of your laundry needs. Ask for the use of a specific fabric softener or request that certain clothes go through the air drying process.

Making special requests in advance of an appointment helps your clothes come back to you in mint condition.

Take Advantage of Discounts

Many customers that use residential laundry services do not take advantage of discounts. Either they forget to ask about receiving a deal or the business where they drop off their laundry does not advertise discounted services. At Laundry Care Express, we publish updated discount specials on our website. You might be able to save money on dry cleaning one week and the next week, enjoy savings because of a bundled special that discounts the price of delivering your laundry.

Confirm the Cost

The last thing you want is to fall victim to sticker shock. You should get what you paid for, not receive a bill that is substantially higher than what you expected to pay for residential laundry services. Confirm the cost of using residential laundry services before dropping off the first load, as well as ask for an itemized invoice to ensure you do not get charged for a service you did not request.

The Bottom Line

Residential laundry services offer several benefits such as cost savings and a higher quality of apparel after a wash and dry cycle. Make sure you do your part to enjoy the benefits of residential laundry services by knowing the four tips to get the best results.

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Will Receiving Child Therapy Improve My Daughter's Self-Esteem?

As a parent, there is nothing more heartbreaking than detecting sadness in a child. Many factors drive the mood of children and young adolescents, but one factor stands out as the most common reason why children feel down in the dumps.

It is called self-esteem.

The self-esteem of your daughter is about the value the child places on feeling worthy of love, acceptance, and compassion. If your daughter possesses low self-esteem, it makes it difficult for the child to navigate life’s often difficult journey.

How do you help your daughter build self-esteem or restore previously strong self-esteem? One of the most effective strategies is to enroll your daughter in a highly-rated individual child therapy program.

Why Does Child Therapy Matter?

Children face many difficult life issues that often result in confusion at best and intense emotional pain at worst. The more a child receives negative feedback, the more likely the child eventually shuts down because of reduced self-esteem. Child therapy pairs an empathic and experienced therapist who builds the level of trust required to get your daughter to open up about the issues that have damaged her self-esteem.

Improving self-esteem is about building or rebuilding confidence, and one of the proven ways to achieve enhanced self-esteem is through play therapy sessions.

What is Play Therapy?

Taking your daughter to a therapist can trigger an inordinate amount of stress for the child. Although adult therapy can trigger stress because of the stigma attached to undergoing therapy, for a child, the stress often derives from confusion and the uncertainty of what lies ahead. One of the best ways to eliminate confusion and uncertainty is by introducing your daughter to play therapy techniques.

Play therapy centers around activities your daughter should consider fun. It allows your daughter to relax and eventually express what issues are troubling her. Children, especially young ones, have difficulty verbally expressing their emotions. Play therapy provides them with an opportunity to act out the challenges they face that have diminished their self-esteem.

Implementing play therapy techniques can provide emotional support for kids that face academic challenges, deal with a traumatic event, or live with an acute mental health issue such as anxiety and/or depression. Two types of play therapy play a pivotal role in boosting the self-esteem of children and young adolescents.

Child-centered play therapy allows your daughter to take the lead when communicating with a therapist. The therapist working with your daughter pays close attention to non-verbal cues, and then encourages your daughter to share what is on her mind. Directive play therapy involves the therapist directing your daughter by asking questions or encouraging her to act out different scenarios that trigger positive emotions. The techniques used to foster the development of self-esteem include sand play, pretend play, and creating art.

The Bottom Line

Poor self-esteem can spill over into every area of a child’s life. It can produce irrevocable damage to your daughter’s mental and emotional development. Child therapy offers your daughter the opportunity to build confidence by sharing information with one of our experienced therapists.

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