3 minute read
Keeping It Real
Dundas Valley Montessori School (DVMS) is hidden in the middle of a residential neighbuorhood just a few blocks from Downtown Dundas. It sits on a beautiful natural playground.
“I remember when I first came to look at the building that now houses DVMS,” recalls DVMS Director Tony Evans. The future school had a river behind it and a beautiful copse of trees. “It had over a hundred broken windows and was completely boarded up. But I knew bricks and mortar can be fixed, and this natural organic playground was the perfect place to put a school. Children need to be connected to nature in order to succeed.”
Advertisement
There was a great expanse of degrading asphalt in the playground. A paving company generously offered to repave the area for several hundred-thousand dollars. Instead DVMS contacted Andrea Hall with Seeing Green Creative Landscaping. An active parent in the DVMS community, she transformed the area right next to the school into a natural garden for children to learn, explore and connect. Super cool ‘Hobbit Doors’ were built so that the garden would feel like a natural extension of the indoor classroom.
Dr. Maria Montessori recognized children under the age of six love to do ‘adult jobs’. She called these practical life activities – weeding is actually fun when you are four-years old. In fact, the miracle of watching a seed develop into a plant is truly magical. Research shows people with less access to nature show relatively poor attention or cognitive function, poor management of major life issues, and poor impulse control. One study even showed improved IQ’s for those children whose windows looked at nature over those whose windows looked out on pavement and buildings.
DVMS knew the landscaping was only the first step. An Outdoor Education Teacher was hired for the elementary students. The children are taken out in small groups everyday, and given lessons on the wonders of plants.
Evans recalls, “I knew it was working when a child pulled out a huge weed and a grade two boy enthusiastically exclaimed, ‘It’s a fasciculated root.’ Children this age love to classify. In Montessori classrooms we inspire them with the structure of taxonomies and relationships found in nature.”
In the Adolescent Program affiliated with DVMS, The Montessori Adolescent School of Hamilton (MASH), nature becomes the heart of the classroom. Montessori’s vision for the adolescent child was to locate their schools on farms. Mother Nature is unpredictable – she teaches resilience, problem solving, responsibility while she teaches biology, math, science and history. At this age, children need to know their work has a purpose. The consequence of not milking a cow is more dire than if homework isn’t done.
Keep in mind it was only a little over a hundred years ago that children started to go to school. It was during the rise of factories. In the spirit of the times, educators chose a factory-based model. Elwood Cubberly (1916-1929), then dean of Stanford University’s School of Education, put it bluntly, “Schools are factories in which the raw products (children) are to be shaped and fashioned into products to meet the various demands of life.”
The Montessori model asserts if we want our children to work on the factory lines for their whole lives, the Cubberly model is a sufficient model of education. However, if we want children to succeed in today’s world, and in the future, they need to learn their lessons from nature – and they will grow up to be creative, diligent, passionate and capable.
