Language - Montessori Materials

There are a lot of differences between the materials being used in the regular Danish folkeskole and the materials developed especially for Montessori schools. During the month that I’ve been studying in Ireland I’ve been following a material class, concerning the language materials used for pupils of the age from 6-9, which I found very interesting.

Most of the materials for this age are for teaching the different parts of speech are colour-coded, so nouns have the colour black, verbs have red, adjectives have blue etc. Later on they also get shapes, as they also do in Denmark when we learn to put commas in the sentences, but not the same ones as in Denmark.

When the pupils start in the class 6-9 they have already gone through the most basic parts nouns, verbs and adjectives, so they know what parts of speech is all about.

They start out by learning about the noun. There are some noun boxes full of small laminated notes. In the first box there are laminated notes (black, of course), each with one noun on it.  This is for the children to learn what nouns are.

The second box has the headings of masculine and feminine on white notes and then nouns on black notes. Here the pupils have to divide the nouns into sexes.

The third box contains the headings singular and plural so the children can learn that.

When the nouns are all done the pupils go over to the verb box, which works in the same way but contains the tenses past, present and future.

The boxes go on like this and whenever you finish one group of words you put one of those words in a sentence. It’s really interesting that you can see the sentences building up. Ex. When the pupils learn the preposition there are also 2 small figures, a cat and a horse, in the box. The pupils are asked to put down the two figures on the table. Then they have to put 2 nouns (the same two as the figures), 2 articles and 1 verb (in form  of the laminated notes). The sentence could become “A horse is the cat”, which would make no sense to the pupil, so they could see that the preposition is needed. So if the figure of the horse is behind the figure of the cat the preposition would be “behind”. Of course the pupils could build on the sentence with adjectives if they want to.
I think this is a really good method as the pupil is allowed to see the sentence being built up, and he is also allowed to build it up himself, which is really good for the learning process!

The greatest goal for a Montessori teacher is to teach her pupils to be independent, so when introducing a new material, she always starts out showing the pupils where to find the material is to be found. The goal is to make the pupils interested in the materials, so that they will work with them independently.

I really like these materials as they are very tactile and it beats writing and erasing several times in a booklet.

Nice classmates and long lunch breaks, but where are all the hot Irish men???

I was nervous but excited standing outside of the classroom at St. Nicholas Montessori College on my first day! I was nervous about seeing what my peers were like and how they would welcome me. I was also excited starting at a new college in a different country and especially the Montessori Method, which is new to me, was appealing. I hadn’t got a timetable; I just knew what date to be there so I showed up at 10am and was told that the class had already started.

Opening the doors to the classroom I got a shock. I was standing in the doorway looking at a room full of girls; there was not a single guy in the classroom! I had heard that there were only few guys in the college but I hadn’t expected that there would be none. I have never tried being in an all-girls class so this is an experience for me too.

The girls were nice and made a great deal out of making me feel welcome. They all talked to me and I was even invited home with some of them to eat during lunch. That’s how long the lunch breaks are here, we have time to go home and eat! And I have Fridays off!

Getting into the class the last week before exams, there was not much time to filling me in on things, but I found out a little more about the Montessori Method than I already knew. In Montessori colleges they don’t teach differentiation as one thing because a Montessori teacher always plans his teaching around the pupils so that every pupil has an opportunity to learn.

They also have their own Montessori materials that they use for teaching and the students get courses in using the materials. In order to pass the “material-subjects” the students have to pass an exam at the end of the year.

My first week here was unfortunately afflicted with illness and the two following weeks were exam-weeks at the college so I didn’t get there much, although I had to do a presentation during exam-week called peer teaching. All the students had to teach something to the class in 10 minutes, and it didn’t matter what it was we taught. This was done in order to get some experience in teaching. I taught my peers how to dance the Faroese national dance. I tried to use different strategies, doing a presentation on the history of the Faroe Islands and the dance and then getting them up to do the actual dance (that’s how much I could manage in 10 min).

My peers did it very differently. All their lessons were done in presentation form; weren’t very active lessons and we didn’t get to try to do what they tried teaching us.

Being in classes during the last week I noticed that the teachers also do their lectures differently than they do at home. At home, we usually get to try out the strategies that we are supposed to use when teaching; here everything is done in presentation form and the only time we get to do activities is in the material classes. There we get to try out the materials.

We have learnt how to use their language materials, and they are all very tactile. You don’t write a lot, but rather cut out and put together words. When learning the word groups they put cut out black triangles over the nouns, big red circles over the verbs and so on. Everything has its own colour and shape. When we learn how to use the material, we don’t learn the theory of why it is good to do it this way and how it helps the pupils learn better, which I find strange. That’s very different from how it’s usually being done in my regular classroom at Blaagaard/KDAS back in Denmark.

It is also different at what stage you learn what things. As we started the second semester of the second year her, Gardner’s 8 intelligences and cooperative learning were introduced to us. This is one of the things we started learning at the beginning of our first year at Blaagaard/KDAS.

Unfortunately I haven’t been in college enough to figure out how everything is being taught here. All in all I think it seems very interesting and I’m looking forward to learning more about their methods!