What about Homework?

I hear this question about Montessori homework all the time.  Most of us grew up with it and expect it to be part of school.  Montessori homework requires a shift in thought because it does not involve worksheets, book reports, or assignments with deadlines; it is actually work in the home.  It is part of a child’s successful orientation to life and requires the child’s active engagement with the day-to-day life of the family.  Just as the education in our classrooms does not merely result in a list of topics learned, but in a skill set for our children to successfully navigate all aspects of adult life, so this kind of learning  continues after school.

 

So what does this work in the home look like and how can you support it?  First, there is the child’s active involvement in the family’s communal life: sweeping, setting the table, folding the laundry, drying the dishes, feeding the pets, taking out the trash, making salad, unpacking the groceries.  How do you help your child successfully engage in these activities?

• Prepare your home: The prepared environment is one of the hallmarks of Montessori; it enables the child to function independently by making available what they will need to accomplish a task.  Some of these ‘works’ will require having some child-size tools and making them accessible to your child. (The For Small Hands Catalog sale each fall is a great resource!)
• Break it Down: Learning how to do these tasks requires careful guidance and modeling by the adults, so children can progress from shadowing the adult to taking on tasks independently.  Teachers break classroom tasks into multiple steps from gathering supplies to wetting a sponge to wiping the table to putting everything away.
• One task at a time: Choose one activity to introduce and assist your child with it over a couple of weeks until they are independent.  This will prevent both you and your child from feeling overwhelmed.
• Process not product: A 4-year old is not going to sweep as well as a 10-year old who is not going to sweep as well as you.  But they are learning what it means to care for the home and be part of the family.

 

The other form of homework supports projects of the child’s personal interest.  Here again we rely on the Montessori prepared environment. You can prepare a special space with paper and pencils for writing; a shelf with materials for art and craft activities; board games that develop memory and number sense; a CD player with an audio book for listening. Beyond the physical environment, there needs to be space for the child’s mental and intellectual development, especially for the elementary child. How can we prepare this kind of space?

 

• Don’t ask many questions. Expressing our interest in the child’s work through direct questioning often results in one-word or content-empty answers. When a child comes home and wants to further explore a lesson she has received at school, you could lightly mention something like, “I see that you are looking at our book about planets. I saw that there are regular star gazing nights at the nature center. It may be fun to go there sometime.” This will provide space for the child to respond, - or not.
• Make space for conversation. Developing the art of conversation with our children is the pathway to keeping the channels of communication open, which will be even more important as they enter adolescence. Seeing your child constructing a paper model of a seed, you may not necessarily be enthusiastic about plumules, radicles, or cotyledons. But you could start from your own experience and say something like, “I remember when grandma put tomato seeds in the ground every spring and how much I loved eating those juicy tomatoes. I was always wondering about what was in those seeds that made the plant grow.” Finding a perspective from our own experiences can help us connect with the child’s project in a genuine way and create space for a conversation starter.
• Space for the child’s own project management. As adults, we naturally have a much larger reservoir of information and experience. The child, however, is still developing that inner sense of independent work in the classroom and, in a similar way, the different ways to nourish her passions. Sharing the magnitude of information we have to support our child’s project can be overwhelming. Provide the space for your child to be his own project manager and see where they go.

 

In our family homes, where down-time is often filled with electronics, it is not always easy to allow for the reflective insights needed to develop appropriate physical spaces for our children and the mental and emotional spaces where conversations can naturally evolve. But it is this homework that is essential to completing the child’s Montessori education in the classroom.

 

Inga Sieminski and Wendy Shenk-Evans