If you are looking for Dublin Montessori preschools for your child, you may well be wondering if Learn And Play Montessori is Irish or if we are Italian. The fact is that we are neither. Or both.
Oh, all right. It works like this. Dublin, CA, as many people know, is named for Dublin in Ireland which is where many of the original settlers here came from. Many of our inhabitants still have Irish roots.
However, at Learn And Play Montessori we teach children using the Montessori method – hence the name – and Maria Montessori was, of course, Italian.
Now add in our incredibly wonderful and diverse student body, and you have a wonderful potpourri of cultures here in our best-in-class Dublin Montessori preschool. In fact, the diversity of cultures here in the East Bay area is probably greater than many other places in the US, and we are proud of that fact. It gives us all a chance to learn and explore things that we could never do if we were all descended from the English, Spanish, Chinese, and so on. So, as far as we are concerned, diversity is a good thing.
The Child Knows Best; That’s the Montessori Way
So is the Montessori method of learning, because it works on the principle that the child knows best what he or she wants to learn about.
Think about it this way: can you remember when you were at school having to sit down and listen to a teacher talking about, for example, US history? Or math? Or Geography? Any of those might have excited you. Yet they might also have bored you to tears. Suppose that you had been able to learn about the things that INTERESTED you. Maybe you liked painting? Maybe you liked biology? Maybe you liked learning French?
This is the way that the Montessori method works. In our Dublin Montessori preschools, the children are allowed to roam the classroom and explore the huge choice of Montessori materials that are available. The teacher doesn’t tell them what to do. They CHOOSE what to do. They find something interesting (to them) and pick up the materials, wander off, and explore them.
The result is that they start to learn because they want to learn. This very quickly gives them a love of learning about things simply for the sake of learning. They are not learning by rote, for example the Latin “Amo, Amas, Amat, Amamus, Amatis, Amant” (which is “I love, he loves, she loves, we love, you love, they love,”) being spoken by a teacher, and having to repeat it, but could be learning about trains, teddy bears, trees, in fact anything at all which takes their interest.
Isn’t that a far better way for a child to learn about the world in which we live?