What’s on the menu today?
Fresh greens and vegetables from the garden, hand-picked and prepared by our very own Kiwi toddler students. Complete with fresh lettuce, parsley, basil, radishes, grape tomatoes, hand-tossed in a vinaigrette dressing. This, along with fresh, steamed carrots, complemented the pizza perfectly!
It is our duty as educators to inform our staff and parents on child abuse awareness and prevention. However it is EVERYONE’S duty to be aware of signs and symptoms of child abuse, the proper way to report such incidents, and how to practice safe interactions with children. April is nationally recognized as Child Abuse Awareness Month. The Blue Ribbon Campaign is a community wide effort to recognize our collective responsibility to prevent and confront all forms of child abuse and neglect.
Although this topic is very sensitive, it needs to be treated with the seriousness it deserves. In some cases, adults may not know they are harming a child, or they don’t know the signs that a child shows when they’ve been physically, sexually or emotionally abused.
Every year, more than 3 million reports of child abuse are made in the United States. Even 1 is too many. The United States has one of the worst records among industrialized nations, losing on average between 4 and 7 children every day to child abuse and neglect. Continue reading
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/sugata-mitra/2013-ted-prize_b_2767598.html?utm_hp_ref=education-reform
Montessori students working on their lessons at Green Hedges School, Vienna, Virginia. (Photo credit: Michael Branscom)
It’s always interesting to see studies being conducted on the success and work ethic of Montessorians vs. Non-Montessorians, or rather those who had the opportunity to be influenced by the philosophy versus a child who attended a conventional daycare/grade school. It’s neat to see the facts when lined up next to one another; the entrepreneur who attended Montessori as a child typically has stronger work ethics, strong leadership skills, initiative, and so forth. Not to say that one is better than the other, but these entrepreneurs certainly had an advantage by getting an authentic Montessori education from an early start.
It’s never too late to cultivate a Montessori-friendly work environment, one that promotes the “Montessori mindset”, capitalizing on and emphasizing each of your employee/coworker’s talents.
Check out Corporate Kindergarten: How a Montessori Mindset Can Transform Your Business for ways to incorporate this business model into your work environment!
“By creating a corporate kindergarten culture where Montessori mindsets are cultivated and rewarded and we can unlock the full potential of each individual in your organization from top to bottom and every level in between. It may just be the answer to propelling America’s emerging innovation economy to the moon and beyond.” -Justin Wasserman, Managing Director at Kotter International
A true picture of pure, raw concentration. Such a beautiful thing to witness this little one stacking wooden rings. There are so many hidden lessons in this small work!
“You can test as much as you like, but if you aren’t cultivating the basic principles of teaching and learning — the central part of the reform movement — then the tests will just keep telling you you’re failing. Because you are.” – Sir Ken Robinson
Article Credit: The Dallas Morning News
Sir Ken Robinson is a British education expert and author whose 2006 TED talk “Do schools kill creativity?” is the most watched talk in the history of the TED program, with more than 27 million online viewings. One official TED blog called him the “sneezing baby panda of the TED ecosystem.”
Partly, his presentation and its sequels continue to attract an audience because he’s an academic with the delivery of a standup comic. Partly, though, he hits a nerve: “My contention is that creativity now is as important in education as literacy, and we should treat it with the same status,” he said. “…[W]e’re now running national education systems where mistakes are the worst thing you can make. And the result is that we are educating people out of their creative capacities.”
Robinson was in North Texas this week keynoting EdShift2016, a national conference of school officials seeking to come up with better ways to make public education more successfully engaging. In his speech, Robinson offered this observation:
“We know what good teaching looks like. We know what’s wrong with assessment.”
Afterward, he sat down for a conversation. Here are some excerpts:
One of our primary community members spent the last 3 weeks writing every number from 1 to 1,000. The scroll of paper expanded across the entire classroom! This is a great example of the concentration, focus, diligence, and hard work that goes into each work that our students participate in. How neat is it that he actually gets to see the “length” of counting from 1 to 1,000; further internalizing just how great of a number it truly is. The child also learns place value as the numbers progress. Montessori allows children to understand the quantity of a number, to feel it in their hands, and to understand the weight of the increasing amount, rather than just memorizing how to write from 1 to 1,000. Thank you for sharing your special project with the entire school!
Healthy Beginnings Montessori 