How to use Montessori at home – part 1
Recently during Parents teachers’ meeting, I have been asked about how Montessori can be a based of curriculum. She seems to think that it is a bit strange to based an educational system on everyday’s life. I smiled at her thought, but I could relate to that. It’s exactly how I used to think so too. Maybe it’s the culture thing too, to believe that education should be something serious and far from home. That it is something to be done in special place, certainly not at home.
, the thing is, it is so simple to try to educate our children ourselves. And education can start at home. It is of course not necessarily important to teach reading, writing or math at home the way school is, but we could actually start to introduce them at home. Many ways can be used to do so. Let me give you example on how to use everyday’s activity to engage our children in learning.
- Reading material
Every child is most certain to be attracted to reading material with pictures on it. Magazine, comic books, story books and newspaper should be put where they can see it and becoming their daily routine. Introduce them to different reading; story books with colorful picture as a source of story, magazine as a source of knowledge and newpaper as a source of news. Let them see a picture on the magazine or newspaper and try to tell their own story on it. Bedtime story is one perfect way to introduce reading to them.
Nowadays it is impossible for anyone to not have at least one communication technology at home; cellular phone, tablet pc , smartphone are something very common for any household to have. We can actually use this to introduce literacy to our children. You can involve your child when writing emails or text message. Let them see the keyboard and what you write, and read to them. Even when they aren’t able to read yet, they can start to recognize letters and words. They’ll also learn the many purposes of writing.
Have fun exploring your surrounding! Take time to read road signs, labels on supermarket’s items, menu in a restaurant (especially the one with pictures on it) . They will learn to recognize letters and sound. They can start to match pictures with the words or certain clue and in return will have rich vocabulary basic.
Basically there are so many ways to introduce reading to your child, and by introducing it doesn’t always mean we really teach them about phonic and reading, unless we want too. And parents should not be afraid to engage themselves in their child’s learning process, that we should not just stop at a point simply cause we think it’s the school’s job to do so