Child Development Posts

Is Dramatic Play the Best Way for Children to Learn?
A few days ago, I stumbled across a parent asking for information at Yahoo! Answers about the benefits of Montessori education. One of the replies they received echoes a concern Montessori teachers and parents are very familiar with...

Are Competitive Sports Essential to Survival in this World?
The outcome of most children's sports, intended or not, is that kids discover their place in the pecking order of their peers. A few will be held in high regard as star athletes, the majority will be unobtrusive in the middle ground, and the very unlucky ones will be treated as outcasts - the ones always chosen last for team sports.

Helping Kids Find the Artist Within
Art programs are invariably the first to go when funding cuts happen in public schools, and a friend of mine who is an award-winning artist tells a touching story of being invited by a teacher to visit such a school to give a presentation. As the artist walked onto the campus, carrying beautiful, colorful canvases, she was swarmed by curious little children who begged to be allowed to look at the paintings.

Are Kids Harmed or Helped by Computers?
I sat down to research this topic with the hope of providing you with some concrete answers. Instead, I discovered a world of contrasting opinions on the effect computers have on young children. Doctors, scientists, teachers, and parents have published scores and scores of articles on this subject, but few of them seem to agree...

Meaningful Self-Esteem: Is It Okay for Kids to Think They're Special?
"You're special, Joey, you're really special." How do you feel when you hear a parent, a teacher or a TV psychologist sending messages like the above? Does it strike you as the very best self-esteem builder an adult can tell a child, or has a sentiment like this taken on the tone of have-a-nice-day meaninglessness to you as a result of overuse?

Sleepless Kids in Serious Trouble
Modern medicine prescribes doses of daily sleep for children in increments along the following lines: Infants 0-12 months - 13-15 hours per day; Children 1-5 years old - 12-15 hours per day; Children 6-12 years old - 10 -12 hours per day; Teenagers - 8 - 9.5 hours per day.

Fine Motor Skills and Montessori Materials: A Perfect Combination
We tend to throw around the phrase "fine motor skills" a lot without really thinking about what it means. What are fine motor skills? How are they best developed? To start, let's define fine motor skills as commonly used in educational circles...

Do Logical Consequences Really Work?
Parents and teachers in today's world seem to be diligently seeking ways to teach kids discipline and self-control. A quick look at any bookstore will turn up hundreds of books about discipline, child-rearing, and behavioral issues.

Real Work for Real Kids
It's a quiet afternoon, and I have been looking through a Michael Olaf Company catalog with a sense of thankfulness that this business has dedicated 25 years to giving us such fine choices of real tools and implements for our children. From cutlery and cleaning equipment, to basins and buckets, the offerings are simply beautiful.

Does Jessica Seinfeld Ever Take Her Kids to McDonald's?
The recent publication and Oprah coverage of Jessica Seinfeld's cookbook Deceptively Delicious has stirred up a kettle of buzz in the kitchen and across the web as curious parents test recipes, seeing if this cookbook's methods really work with their kids.

How Children Benefit from Adult Conversations
We hear so much about the importance of talking and singing to babies - and how it aids in their brain development - but not as much is said about talking to children three years and up, even into the teenage years. Older children actually need as much direct adult communication as babies do, but for different reasons...

On Planting Fall Bulbs and the Montessori Method
Across the United States, we are feeling that nip in the air, watching skies darken, watching trees take on glorious hues. It's a time of old things and new things. Many of us have had a delightfully mild autumn so far - giving us plenty of time to plant some bulbs for next spring. While planting some Pheasant's Eye daffodil bulbs in my garden, a parallel occurred to me between what I was doing and the basic tenets of the Montessori method.

Television and the Montessori Child: Part 1
Television has always been an option - never a life requirement, but you wouldn't know this from the following statistics: The average child spends nearly 4 hours per day watching TV. If there is a TV in the child's bedroom, add another 1.5 hours to that total.

Television and the Montessori Child: Part 2
As I mentioned in the first post of this series, television today seems like a "must" for most households. Since it is ever present, we become habituated to it - we don't notice the commercials, the violence, the sexuality, and the manipulation. It's important to take a step back and be honest about the possible effects television is having on the children in our lives.

Television and the Montessori Child: Part 3
If you've read Part 1 and Part 2 of this series, you'll know that television can be very good or very bad, depending on the content, but that we as parents and teachers do have quite a bit of control over what our children see. However, there are times when children end up seeing inappropriate subject matter - or they really wish to! How do we deal with those situations?

What's in a Game?
Most of us remember playing games as kids; I had my favorites, and it's a lot of fun to introduce them to my own kids now. Sometimes we forget, though, just how much is going on when kids play games. Behind the fun, kids are learning life strategies and sharpening their aptitude for thinking and reasoning.

Discovering the Potential in Every Child
Children have enormous potential. There's almost no limit to the things they can do. One of the wonderful things about the prepared Montessori environment is that it makes every kind of task accessible. It can be a chore, like sweeping, or a complicated math concept, like the binomial equation; in every case, our goal as educators is to enable the child to do something successfully, with increasing levels of independence...

The Benefits of Hands-On Learning
Recently I've been pondering the way in which humans assimilate information. I've been observing my own kids, and in so doing, learned a lot about, well, how we learn...