Montessori environment facilitates the child’s creativity
Creativity refers to mental and social process involving discovery of new ideas or concepts as well as associations of the creative mind between existing ideas or concepts. Creativity is fueled by the process from such conscious or unconscious insights and the act of making something new and everyday creativity of children in the Montessori school can lead to exceptional creativity and imagination of the child wherein she/he can explore things in a lot of space and will integrate creative ideas not similar to other children. Creativity can imply to traits that children are born with others say it can be taught with the application of simple techniques. For instance, creative imagination is distinguishing feature between culture and nature, origins of creative imagination in manifestations of play, and explained that it goes through process of integration and evolution following the development of concepts and reasoning of children and adults. Take this situation, child’s play being conceptualized as arena for the expression of creativity and for the facilitation of creative processes, play fosters the development of cognitive and affective processes that are important in the creative act. The use of imagination is important in creative sense of a child, natural form of creativity because so many of cognitive and affective processes involved in creativity occur in school play.
The creative areas of the classroom assume creative thinking is asserted and a plan for creative behavior of ways the intermediate environment rewards creative behavior; aspects treated include applying principles for rewarding creative thinking, creative and critical evaluative attitudes of teachers, creative activities as rewards for creative thinking, and differential rewards for children in the Montessori school. The evaluative discussions about creative productions and cultural differences in evaluating creative characteristics as the school helping children value their ideas. Teaching guide provides teachers of children with philosophy and guidelines for teaching that address childrens social, emotional, cognitive, and physical development offer guidance, support and freedom for the children to be creative and responsive with children and provides children with carefully organized and rich Montessori environment of how children develop and learn, learning environment in the classroom and what children learn focusing on creative nature, in the areas of literacy, arts and so on.
Montessori materials that meet developmental needs of children and enhance learning and teaching in each of the following interest areas such as blocks, dramatic play, toys and games, art, library, discovery, music and movement, computers, and others. Montessori leads to creative drama activities that reinforce content material across creative stature allowing skill strategies for developing creative thinking as the process adheres to freedom and philosophy of the Montessori environment support the process of creativity. Thus, children were more creative on measure of non-verbal creativity as well as socially oriented and task oriented. The Montessori children used significantly more physical characteristics to describe commonplace objects, whereas significantly more functional terms were used by the nursery school children in their descriptions.
Montessori children’s drawings had people present significantly less often and geometric forms significantly more often than the nursery school children’s drawings. The generative thought processes that give rise to original ideas appear to be very different to those analytical thought processes required to refine children’s creative senses. For example, the use of creative art to effect cognition, achievement, motivation and self-concept in Montessori students covering creative thinking, self-concept, competence motivation, and creative arts in the classroom utilizing movement, music as well as dance for successful Montessori learning cycle. Indeed, Montessori freedom and philosophy support many of goals to foster children’s creativity and imagination skills that will account for effective cognitive abilities on the part of the children.
The Montessori classroom organization is critical in promoting collaborative educational environment that allows for easy movement and freedom of choice in selecting learning activities (Lillard, 2007). This environment includes the children, teacher and a carefully organized physical space with specially designed Montessori educational materials, for art, music, mathematics, language, and science. Rather than using textbooks for learning, as done in traditional schools, children learn abstract concepts in subject areas through manipulation of these materials with their hands.
Maria Montessori believed that children developed concentration skills and that movement assisted them in their learning (Lillard, 2007). Children spend three years in each classroom, allowing teachers to develop good understanding of each child and her learning style. Each classroom is also required to have continuous three hour work cycle during the day allowing children to develop concentration and self regulation skills. The different features of the classroom setting and multi-age groupings create an important back drop for children to be motivated doers in an environment that encourages choice and collaboration (Lillard, 2007), children create a work plan which may include lesson periods, work periods, and time for follow-ups to have their work reviewed. Each morning children review their plan and decide what they would like to work on.
During their work period children select work based on their own interest and work plan. Therefore, possible that every child in the class may be working on something different, Montessori materials for language, math and science are designed to allow each child to work at her own level. Within this environment teachers are able to assist individual children at each child’s level. This set-up allows children to work at their own creative pace (Lillard, 2007) as such developing advanced language skills is important objective in early years of Montessori education, one of areas in the classroom is devoted to special language materials, children make extensive use of language materials to learn reading, spelling, grammar and comprehension skills.
Reference
Lillard, A. S. (2007) Montessori: The science behind the genius. New York: Oxford University Press
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