Reading Comprehension

Two weeks ago I took a little vacation and visited with my daughter, who is studying in Edinburgh.  In pursuit of seeing more of Scotland, we stayed for a night in a lovely, ancient B and B, really more of a hotel, near Ft. William. From the massive windows and through persistent rain, our view was of snow-covered mountains, drifting clouds and the blue-gray mist that marks locations where the land hits the sea.  This was a little hotel that had no one at the desk until they were called with a satin bell ringer.  After storing our bags, we wandered into the library, now referred to as “the Library at Craig Mohr”.

This room was graced with three couches and a multitude of chairs, a fireplace with wood burning and two walls of books. Wall sconces shed just a little light and the seats of the leather chairs were concave from years of body weight. I must add that this charming place also had a full whiskey bar tucked in another corner, locked tightly in a cage during daylight hours, adding to the charm of the place.  But the real story has to do with my observations of the library during the next 24 hours. This room was a Sanctuary to the Written Word.  Everyone who entered the room paused and then wandered to the books, found one or two and chose the perfect place to snuggle in, and opened the doors to another world.  A pleasant hello or an exchange of history, “where are you from” and usually “oh I have been to The States,” followed by a return to the books. The adventure into other worlds included the history of climbing in the Highlands, stories of English naval conquests, mysteries set in castles, and gardening books filled with botanical wonders. This room enticed you to these adventures, perfectly designed to choose and read without rush or distraction, to reflect and to share.

For many months now I have been pondering the issue of students and reading comprehension.  I am discovering studies about how American students are losing comprehension skills at an alarming rate. I see many Childpeace students who read well but do not understand the context of what they are reading.  The Library at Craig Mohr offered me a reminder that it is hard to find, outside of public libraries, reading sanctuaries like the magical places in the Scottish countryside.  In fact, one source on this topic suggested that the foundation for reading comprehension is the student’s awareness that reading is like having a conversation.  The effects of heavy “screen time,” use of electronic reading tools, and the shift to truncated communication (like texting and tweeting) on the development of passionate and engaged readers are being seen by educators and employers.  I don’t envision the construction of a reading sanctuary in every home like the library at Craig Mohr, but I know we can focus attention on increasing the time we read to our children and to model and encourage face time with a book.  We can have dinner table discussions about what we are reading and give time for our children to share their thoughts and explain their actions.   

This work is family work as well as schoolwork and even better, it is portable work.  When you travel this summer you can find a special reading sanctuary (or library) and hopefully spend a few precious moments touching a book and hearing the voice inside.  Here are a few tips from the experts about how we can make opening a book a pathway to adventure, understanding, and the expansion of our life experiences.

1. Monitoring Comprehension: Students who are good at monitoring their comprehension know when they understand what they read and when they do not. Your reader needs to:
1. Be aware of what they do understand
2. Identify what they do not understand
3. Use strategies to resolve problems in their comprehension
2. Metacognition can be defined as "thinking about thinking." Good readers use metacognitive strategies to think about and have control over their reading. During reading, they might monitor their understanding, adjusting their reading speed to fit the difficulty of the text. After reading, they check their understanding of what they read. A simple example: "I don't get what the author means when she says, 'Arriving in America was a milestone in my grandmother's life.'"
3. Help students read and understand textbooks and picture books. Ask what the child sees in the picture or graph to understand how they approach the material. Use comparisons of different pictures to help the student see differences in context: Ask about the relationships within the pictures or photos. What does the student see? Ask the student to go back and tell the chronology of events—discuss what happened first and what happened next. Discuss how different characters reacted to an event.
4. Help the student ask questions—questions require students to use what they already know, with what they have learned from reading the text. Students must understand the text and relate it to their prior knowledge before answering the question. You can guide the child to ask the right questions by modeling with your questions.
5. Know the parts of story structure: characters, setting, events, problem, resolution. Who did what, when, where, why? Talk about these structure parts and have the student “think out loud” about the answers to these questions.
6. Have fun—when the skills of knowing how to think about and talk about what you read are set, the fun begins.

I hope you all have a chance to find something akin to The Library at Craig Mohr this summer. The time will become family history and the discussions will help you see into the unique and special vision your child has on their world.

Sue Pritzker, Head of School

Childpeace Montessori School

Building the Activists of Tomorrow

We are a community of revolutionaries. Each day as I watch families walk through the front doors and the children enter their classrooms I start the day with a genuine moment of inspiration. We come together in our courageous choice of an alternative model of education, motivated by a deep desire to honor the best within our children and find the best within our adult selves in our roles as parents and teachers.

This week as I listened to NPR, a farming family in China shared the heartbreaking story of losing their 14-year-old son to cancer as a result of the severely polluted river that supplies water to their village. The water that flows into this particular village comes from a leather tannery which produces manufactured goods. This Chinese village uses much of the river water to farm rice, which finds its way to tables globally. This small story matters to all of us because it highlights our inescapable interdependence.

In the Elementary, we have a set of economic geography lessons around this idea of interdependency. One set of cards invites the children to discover “Who the farmer needs..” to do his work. The cards highlight the transporter, miller, grocer, and others who collaborate with the farmer. It was this lesson I thought of as I listened to the NPR story and envisioned that the farmer now also needs the environmental regulator, the lobbyist, the journalist, the activist, and the global political will to safely continue their work in the modern economy.

The tragic events of Boston and Newtown alongside this specific story bring focus to the challenges facing humanity and the planet our children are inheriting. There is big work to do throughout the world. Work that requires compassionate, dedicated, hard-working adults. In Montessori schools around the world, children are gifted with an experience that offers appropriately challenging work and activities which allow them to practice and perfect their skills, to feel the satisfaction of concentration, to learn to constructively manage conflict, to practice grace and courtesy, and to connect with the essential need to be in community and collaboration with one another.

The foundational partnership between school and home supports the work of the children and elevates the purpose of knowledge beyond the individual to the interdependent whole. When given real responsibility and work at school and at home, the children see themselves as active, important, and essential members of their communities (the laundry will not fold itself!). Our students leave us understanding that it’s not just about passing tests or one’s class rank but about connecting to our essential humanity. They leave us with what Montessori termed a “cosmic task”, or one’s unique work and contribution based on the individual’s skills and interests within an interdependent community. We are building the activists of tomorrow.

In the words of Nelson Mandela: “Education is the most powerful weapon which you can use to change the world.”

In the words of Maria Montessori: “If help and salvation are to come, they can only come from the children, for the children are the makers of men."

Dawn Cowan, Assistant Program Director
Childpeace Montessori School

Impact of the Home Environment on Outcomes

A radical aspect of Dr. Montessori’s work was her assertion that “nurture” is every bit as important as “nature” when it comes to a child’s potential outcome. Scientific research is proving this over and over—and making all of us parents take serious note of the many things we do that shape our child’s potential, from our vitamin levels at conception to the family discussions that encourage critical thinking skills. Our children’s school environment is important, but the child’s home environment is even more crucial to development than the hours spent at school. And that begs the question, What are the most important aspects of the home environment that impact our children’s outcomes? If we could limit this “to do” list to just a very few things, what would they be?

The foundation of our children’s needs, as Maslow pointed out, are the physiological—including diet, sleep, and physical activity. If your child is struggling with cognitive, social, or emotional skills, the first thing to pay attention to are these three aspects. It is not unusual for Childpeace guides to strategize with a parent to help a child get more sleep, with another parent to pay closer attention to the nutritional value of what is in the child’s lunch box, and with another parent to inspire a child to engage in more physical activities after school.

Reading aloud, and modeling the joy of reading, is also on the short list. “Research has shown that the single most important thing that a parent can do to help their child acquire language, prepare their child for school, and instill a love of learning in their child, is to read to them.” (Russ et al., 2007) For most Children’s House and Lower Elementary parents, reading is a part of the evening bedtime routine and a lovely, snuggly moment of connection. When your child outgrows the need to have you guide the bedtime process, and begins mastering the reading process alone, it is still important to keep reading aloud, using the opportunity to introduce different genres and more advanced texts. By Upper Elementary and middle school your child benefits from being the reader as often as the listener.

Quality conversation merits being on the list. Even from the very youngest ages, there is a qualitative difference between “business talk” (when we tell our children what to do next) and open-ended conversation. The baby needs to have the verbal dance of babbling back and forth with the parent; the toddler needs to be asked what she thinks, followed by the listening gaze of the parent; the young teen needs to be heard and the pros and cons acknowledged even if the parent has a different opinion. This kind of language dance at all ages begs for eye contact and full immersion of each participant’s mindfulness. In our jam-packed days, it is too easy to have this replaced by “business talk” called from one room of the house to the other.

The family meal is one of the perfect places to make a habit of quality conversation and limited technology. A recent Time Magazine article reads, “Studies show that the more often families eat together, the less likely kids are to smoke, drink, do drugs, get depressed, develop eating disorders and consider suicide, and the more likely they are to do well in school, delay having sex, eat their vegetables, learn big words and know which fork to use.” These are important outcomes for the teen years, and it is much easier to have a consistent family meal time if the expectation is established from the youngest ages.

At this time in history, it is imperative to include limited technology as one of the major home environment aspects that impacts a child’s outcomes. Television has been around enough years now that there is hard data to support having a TV-free home for children two years and under. We know that TV trains the brain to a passive learning mode which makes it harder for children to initiate self-direction. While we can see the positives of a screen game that requires creativity, planning ahead, and critical thinking skills, there are negative impacts such as dependence on instant gratification, higher risk of attention problems, and difficulty falling asleep after a length of time in front of a screen. Our recommendation is that families carefully choose particular moments for technology, rather than welcoming this powerhouse into everyday life as if it were another family member.

Plentiful sleep, healthy diet, physical activity, enjoyment of reading, quality conversation, the family meal, and limited technology; if you bathe it all with the deep and abiding expression of parental love, you have a home environment that promises good outcomes for your child.


Merri Baehr Whipps, Assistant Program Director
Childpeace Montessori School

The Outcomes We Really Want

Last week, we had our yearly parent education night focused on Outcomes of Montessori Education. This echoes the public hour we offer to families on our interest list focused on the same topic, Outcomes. In both venues, our first exercise is to pose the question to parents, “Imagining your child as an 18 or 21 year old person, you would say their education has been successful if.....what?” We then begin building our lists. In the two years I have been facilitating this exercise the list of characteristics that would indicate a successful outcome usually looks something like this: Confident, Passionate, Creative, Hard Worker, Responsible/Accountable, Joyful/Happy, Resilient, Critical Thinking and Academic skills, Communication and Collaboration Skills, Sense of Humor, Community Minded, Time Management, Emotional Regulation and Self-Control ….and so forth.

I am always impressed by these lists, both the content that is prioritized by parents and how similar these lists are between groups of parents. It seems that when we pull back and think about this question, think beyond the present moment to the bigger picture of our children as adults, we have a shared understanding that these qualities support a healthy and happy life. Though the question is open ended, never has a parent added ‘excellent test taker’ to this list of big picture outcomes. Test taking is a piece of our educational journey, a skill to learn, and for some careers a piece of final certification, but it is hardly the place where we spend the majority of our work or social energy as adults. The lists generated by parents are echoed in the work of Harvard Economics Professor, James Heckman and his research on what he terms the ‘soft skills’ of self-control, motivation, punctuality, problem solving, logic and deferred gratification. Heckman’s work indicates that it is these non-cognitive abilities are predictive of future economic success.

Currently, there is a wealth of thinking and research around this idea of outcomes. In the workplace, the landscape is shifting constantly and it’s difficult to imagine what types of jobs will be in demand in 20 years. Daniel Pink and Sir Ken Robinson are just two of the writers addressing this topic. Pink, whose main audience is the business world, hypothesizes in his book A Whole New Mind that “artists, inventors, designers, storytellers, caregivers, consolers, big-picture thinkers will now reap society’s richest rewards and share its greatest joys.” Sir Ken Robinson, who writes extensively about the importance of creativity in his book The Element, describes the ideal outcome as “the place where the things you love to do and the things you are good at come together.... If we can each find our Element, we each have the potential for much higher achievement and fulfillment.” Looking at a joint research study put out by the Partnership for 21st Century Skills, the skills listed in the top five are: Critical Thinking, IT Applications, Teamwork and Collaboration, Creativity/Innovation, and Leadership. Over and over, the shared thinking and research indicates that though important, cognitive skills alone are not enough. The soft skills and ability to synthesize the wealth of data available in the information age into something meaningful are the outcomes most needed by society and desired by employers.

Within our Montessori environments, we strive to support the development of both cognitive and non-cognitive skills. The children in our classrooms are encouraged to take risks, relate to one another, collaborate, and most importantly to connect with their own interests and sense of purpose. The Montessori Guide is there to connect the children to their work, to support their developing work ethic and help the students to learn to self-manage their time, to offer additional help with areas of challenge and to model gracious behavior and an enthusiastic attitude toward learning. At every turn, the children are given the opportunity to give their best and celebrate the work of one another. We encourage collaboration over competition and the students are able to work without the anxiety of constant graded evaluation and testing. In this way they are able to connect with their own internal source of motivation and feel the freedom of autonomous exploration, the joy of mastery and the satisfaction of purposeful work.

Dawn Cowan, Assistant Program Director

Childpeace Montessori School

A Childpeace Conversation about Outcomes

This week’s Montessori Message kicks off a series of Buzz conversations about outcomes of Montessori education. What exactly do we, as Montessori professionals and you, as Montessori parents, hope will be the outcome for a child who spends years in Montessori environments across the age levels? In preparation for tonight’s “Outcomes” parent education offering, I hope to lay a foundation on this topic with a few words and a little musing about the intentionality that comes with the implementation of Montessori principles.

I was startled over the past few days when I received a message from my daughter, Robyn, who is studying in Edinburgh this year, saying she thinks she wants to take the Montessori training. I NEVER expected this and in my surprise I queried: WHY? The response from this young adult who was in a Montessori environment from ages four months to twelve years: “I want to be in a place where kids are truly excited about knowledge and passionate about what they want to know and I can keep learning myself”.

In a book by Daniel Pink, Drive, The Surprising Truth about what Motivates Us, Pink talks about how to “keep the light of intelligence” burning brightly in children. He finds exhaustive research, establishing that traditional strategies of motivation (like rewards, praise, grades, ranking, and monetary awards) simply don’t work. Says Pink, “Intrinsically motivated behavior depends on three nutrients: autonomy, mastery and purpose. It is devoted to becoming better and better at something that matters”.

These “nutrients” are foundations in a Montessori environment. Autonomy is the freedom to choose and the opportunity to choose how to choose! Autonomy is about choosing when and how to work on something, to decide on the scope of work, setting the pace and challenge of the work and discovering the tools that are needed to do the work successfully. Mastery, according to Pink, is “getting better and better at something that matters”. In Montessori terms, we offer the work and then the repeating, perfecting, being exact, and controlling the work. Pink describes that when work exceeds a child’s ability it creates anxiety, and when it falls short of their capability it causes boredom. When work is successful in matching interest and ability, it creates mastery. The deep concentration that comes with mastery is seen regularly in Montessori classrooms at all age levels. Purpose, for a child, means that when they are developmentally ready, their work becomes a beacon in the social life of their classroom or school. Their work matters to their group and the individual enjoys the satisfaction of seeing the impact their effort has on their peers. Maria Montessori suggested that “prepared environments”, designed specifically for the changing needs of children and adolescents as they grow, allow meaningful engagement.

At every level, in every classroom, the intention is to offer experiences that allow for Autonomy, Mastery, and Purpose. If Daniel Pink’s research is accurate, then the true outcome for Montessori children is that motivation to do more, know more, and care more, will carry them successfully into adulthood. The Montessori environment nurtures students who are accustomed to the sense of contentment that comes from internal motivation, students for whom autonomy, mastery and purpose feel “normal.”

Sue Pritzker, Head of School

Childpeace Montessori School

Childpeace Math at the Middle School Level

By the time students reach MMM (Metro Montessori Middleschool), they have discovered a wealth of mathematical knowledge. The foundation laid in Children’s House, Lower and Upper Elementary foster a curiosity which the middle school teaching team strives to maintain.

Mathematics can have a fresh excitement for our incoming adolescents simply because of how the outer trappings (materials) change from the younger ages. Middle school students encounter a more traditional atmosphere in their math education. Students have math classes with daily lessons and assignments, and TEXTBOOKS that have familiar yet adult-sounding names to them: Pre-Algebra … Algebra ... Geometry. They use calculators, take notes and chapter tests, and there are no more manipulative materials that are stored in the room. They work with variables and equations, expressions and inequalities. It is a transitional time for students, one of exciting new opportunities.

Math at the middle school level also exists outside of the daily math class and textbooks. Students experience activity-based math learning in the interdisciplinary projects, trips, and life of the community. Some simple examples: On the Odyssey trip, students measure cups of water in proportion to the oatmeal for breakfast crew. In Occupations, they calculate the mechanical advantage of using three pulleys. In Humanities they create the platonic solids and recreate the proof that the world is round and that the planets orbit in an elliptical pattern. In Micro Economy, they compare the expenses and income of the products they make and sell for their Metro Shoppe. During the yearly theatrical production, they take measurements to construct the set and use patterns to make costumes. They actively work together to get from the concrete need to the equation or mathematical perspective that will lead them to the desired accomplishment. Mathematics is truly a language students spend years working to master, and as with any new language, it must be practiced — both in isolation, as in the daily math lessons, and in application to real-life situations.

Our middle school teachers, who bring their public middle and high school credentials along with their Montessori training, take note of Oregon State standards and make a conscious effort to best prepare the students for high school. Most test out of freshman algebra and begin with what is typically sophomore-level geometry, and much of that geometry feels simple and familiar. This is partly due to all the concrete and applied math experiences they have had at Childpeace throughout the years, and partly due to the small-group nurturing they have in their math classes (groups of ten students with the math teacher) at the middle school level.

Sometimes there are young adolescents who experience a lack of confidence in math. To help such students regain confidence in their innate mathematical sense, the small group math format allows the teacher to engage them in more hands-on math activities and approaches that help them regain their positive attitude. Keeping alive the joyful thinking process of math is half the battle of math accomplishment. These students usually benefit from the routine of the daily math hour and the small-group format of lessons. It is impossible for a student to be "lost" in MMM math without the teacher being quickly aware and able to give a responsive lesson.

Most importantly, for both the precocious mathematician and the hesitant one, a key strength of our Childpeace math program is that we encourage problem solvers, not just problem doers. We nurture students who see math as a handy, elegant, precise tool to solve the issues that present themselves in all areas of life; math is not just a school subject that your parents want you to do well in. And isn’t that the most important outcome we want for our students? This is the foundation from which our students move on to mathematics in high school.

Merri Baehr Whipps, Assistant Program Director
Childpeace Montessori School

The Story of Numbers

The Five Great Lessons are a group of impressionistic stories that are meant to provide elementary Montessori students with a “big picture” of the world and life. At this stage of development, children are becoming aware of the world and their place in it. For a child, the Great Lessons are more than just educational and inspirational stories. They spark the imagination and lead students to contemplate not only the past, but the future. These lessons are bold, exciting, and are designed to awaken a child's imagination and curiosity. The child is struck with the wonder of creation, thrilled with new ideas, and awed by the inventiveness and innovation of the human spirit. It is through the telling (and re-telling) of these important Cosmic lessons that students are motivated to further research and work in the Montessori classroom.
Each of the Great Lessons serves to initiate student exploration and discovery. While children develop an awareness of the natural world and its laws, they are also moved to explore topics such as history, geography, math, science and language. Most importantly, the Great Lessons develop in Montessori students reverence and gratitude for those who have come before us.

The Five Great Lessons are traditionally presented every year so that children see them more than one time. Unlike the 3-6 environment, where the child is introduced first to "small" ideas that gradually widen into larger concepts, the elementary child is introduced right away to large concepts —the largest of all being the beginning of the universe. Then they can be shown how all the smaller ideas fit into the larger framework. The Five Great Lessons are used to paint a broad picture before moving to more specific study. They are: 

• First: Coming of the Universe and the Earth 
• Second: Coming of Life 
• Third: Coming of Human Beings 
• Fourth: Communication in Signs (Story of Language) 
• and the Fifth Great Lesson is The Story of Numbers.

The child who enters the Lower Elementary classroom already has a breadth of experience with mathematics materials. Some are even moving from the use of manipulative materials to more abstract work (working in their head or on paper and able to understand the math processes without materials to manipulate). The Story of Numbers explores the evolution of mathematics; it offers the elementary student a context for working with numbers. This lesson begins with the earliest civilizations, who often only had "one", "two", and "more than two" as their numeric system. It continues with a look at different numbering systems throughout the centuries, culminating in the decimal system that we use today. The children will hear the story of the Egyptians and how they used additive notation with numbers. They will hear the tale of how the Hindus invented the zero but the Romans used zero to be a place holder in their number system. The Mayans used a vertical place value system. Of course, history is being explored through each of these supporting tales. And then perhaps some side stories: Our calendar has twelve months, but this is not true of every culture. Different cultures keep track of time in different ways. A Chinese child is one year at birth while a European child has to wait a whole year to be one. Time zones help us keep track of time. If we did not have time zones, some people would have light at 8 PM and some would have night. The Story of Numbers and follow-up work can cover all of the following:

• Mathematics: operations, fractions, decimals, multiples, squares, cubes, percentages, ratio, probability, intro to algebra 
• Numbers: origins of numbers and systems, bases, types of numbers, scientific notation, mathematicians 
• Geometry: congruence, similarity, nomenclature of lines, angles, shapes, solids, measurement, theorems 
• Application: story problems, measurement, estimation, graphs, patterning, rounding, money concepts 

The Great Lessons link these tools back to the bigger picture. Because of the importance and wealth of information that can be discovered in each lesson, the Montessori Guide gives ample time in between for research on the topics presented in the lessons. The story becomes the springboard but not the focus. The stories can be referred to throughout the year when new topics are introduced, as a way of providing unity and cohesion to such a wide variety of studies.

Our upcoming Elementary parent night on February 7th will focus on the Story of Language and the follow up work of the children.

We hope to see you there!

Sue Pritzker, Head of School

Childpeace Montessori School