Montessori classrooms contain hands-on manipulatives to help children understand tactile, physical objects before tackling abstract ideas. In fact, Maria Montessori made the discovery that tactile exploration is essential for cognitive understanding. Thus Montessori’s concept: The hand is the pathway to the brain.

At McGuffey, older children learn to extract information from all kinds of sources beyond manipulatives; glossy text books, workbooks, and original folders put together by teachers. Those folders might can original scientific articles along with more modern explanations of scientific discoveries. Here we see Upper Elementary students using workbooks for ELA to hone in on proper nouns and adjectives, glossy textbooks to study social studies, and pin maps for geography. 

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Science can be messy! Students applied scientific ideas and principles that we have been learning about over the past few weeks to design, construct, and test a game based on Newton’s 3 laws of motion. They had to include a “trick” that would make others want to continue playing (but not always winning) and they had to include a way to make it inclusive of all people.

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In the Primary classroom, students ages 3 to 6 learn math through hands-on, concrete materials that allow children to physically touch and manipulate objects to deepen their understanding of mathematical concepts. This gives students a concrete understanding before moving to symbols on paper. The Montessori curriculum follows a clear, natural progression moving from sensory exploration to abstract ideas. This pathway to abstraction runs through classrooms so that instead of students memorizing formulas or abstract symbols, they have physically built, combined, and split quantities, thereby gaining a true understanding why a mathematical operation works. 

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In science, Middle school students used a new ramp setup to help  find out more about the forces between things during a collision thus learning Newton’s Third Law.

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Lower Elementary students have been measuring. Using hands-on materials, they are exploring the length of big and small items using both rulers and other units of measurement. Measurement plays a crucial role in practical life activities like sewing as well as building structures.  

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At McGuffey Montessori, Specials refers to Art, Music and PE. Students attend Art and Music twice a week and PE on Fridays. Academic classes are of course wonderful for learning and so are Specials. These three classes help build cognitive, physical, and social skills that academic classes don’t cover. They also support language and literacy, focus and discipline, and both gross and fine motor coordination. 

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At our recent Town Hall, students answered the question: What are you grateful for at McGuffey? After a round of joke telling, mixed-age groups got busy brain storming ideas. Friends, recess, teachers, art, and field trips were popular answers. Town Hall is a tradition here at McGuffey both to bring us together as a school and provide an opportunity to think about bigger questions. 

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Middle School students created carnival games to explore how the weight of an object affects how the object moves after a collision. We then shared our creations with Upper Elementary to have a mini-carnival in the afternoon. 

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Middle School is continuing the exploration of the Scientific Method. Students put glow sticks in various places to determine how temperature would affect how long they would last. Glow sticks were put in hot water, cold water, outside in the sun and in the freezer. While the ones placed in the cold lasted longer than the hot places, the control group that left on the table stayed the most consistent.

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The Lower Elementary classroom is a registered Monarch Waystation. Due to declining sources of milkweeds and nectar along with widespread use of herbicides, monarch populations have been adversely affected. McGuffey students learn how to identify the egg of a monarch caterpillar. Those eggs are brought inside and cared for through the stages of egg, caterpillar, and chrysalis. When the green casing and gold flecks of the chrysalis transform over roughly 10 days, a monarch butterfly emerges. Before the butterfly is released to migrate 2,000-4,000 miles, a tracking sticker is gently placed on the wing to help scientists better understand and protect the Monarch. The awe and wonder is evident in the faces of our students and there is also pride in the part they are taking to help this important species. 

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