Maria Montessori Essay

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HOME > ABOUT What is the Montessori Method?Early in the twentieth century, Dr. Maria Montessori, Italy's first woman physician, developed educational materials and methods based on her belief that children learn best by doing, not by passively accepting other people's ideas and pre-existing knowledge. It was an innovative learning idea and means the active personal pursuit of many different experiences: physical, social, emotional, and cognitive. With the materials Montessori and her followers devised, an environment in which such learning takes place can be created.Montessori believed learning should occur in multi-age classrooms where children at various stages of development learn from and with each other. Her developmentally appropriate approach was designed to fit each child instead of making each child fit the program. Its success with children from all social strata, and even those with special needs, has attracted wide interest.Montessori teachers know that children learn more by touching, seeing, smelling, tasting, and exploring than they do by just listening. Under the Montessori theory, teachers are prepared to create dynamic, interactive learning environments that encourage each child to reason, create, collaborate, negotiate, and understand. The goal for teachers as well as students is the development of an autonomous individual, competent in all areas of life, not merely someone with the "right" answers.Who Was Maria Montessori? (Content courtesy of the North American Montessori Teachers’ Association. © NAMTA. All rights reserved)Maria Montessori was, in many ways, ahead of her time. Born in the town of Chiaravalle, in the province of Ancona, Italy, in 1870, she became the first female physician in Italy upon her graduation from medical school in 1896. Shortly afterwards, she was chosen to represent Italy at two different women's conferences, in

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