Montessori Videos from New Zealand
Watch videos from Montessori early childhood centres and schools in New Zealand.
Young Children Preparing Community Lunch
Children aged two and a half to nearly six years prepare lunch for their Montessori community in New Zealand. Slicing fruit, grating cheese, making sandwiches, setting the table and cleaning up happens as part of the daily routine. The menu changes daily and includes pizza, rice and vegetables, fish pie and sandwiches over the week.
You will see children organising the classroom with very little intervention from the teachers and many examples of young children helping each other and collaborating to do tasks for the whole community.
Perseverance with a new skill
A two-and-half year old girl shows us what perseverance looks like as she learns a new skill – using a pair of tweezers. She is the youngest child in her Montessori class in New Zealand.
Learning about the number four
See how an almost six-year-old boy, in a Montessori class in New Zealand, learns about the number 4, counting in multiples of four, finding the squares of four and ultimately discovering the answer to 4x4x4 or four cubed.
Adding Numbers in the Thousands
A five year-old-girl completes an addition problem using the Stamp Game, a Montessori math material used to do all four math operations – addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The stamps are green (one or 1000), blue (tens) or red (hundreds).
Montessori materials become increasingly abstract as the child becomes familiar with the concept. The stamp game is preceded by the Golden Bead material, where the ones (or units) are small beads, and the thousands are large cubes. This gives a strong sensorial impression of the difference between units and thousands. In the Stamp Game, the units and thousands are the same sizes, but the child knows thousands are bigger than units from exploring with the Golden Bead materials.
The stamp game is used by children from around 4-5 years and may be seen in both 3-6 and 6-9 classrooms. Adults love this math material because they finally understand ‘carrying’, ‘borrowing’ and ‘remainders’.
Skills for Living
Two young girls use the Montessori dressing frames. The dressing frames are used to figure out how to manage the variety of fastenings found in clothing — from buttons to buckles, to laces, snaps, bows and zips.
The dressing frames are an example of how Montessori appeals to the young child’s need to repeat and repeat and repeat an activity — the child can do and undo the frame as many times as they want. As with many other materials in a Montessori 3-6 year classroom, the child develops hand-eye coordination, the ability to concentrate and the skills of independence.
Successfully finishing the bow frame is a big moment in the life of a Montessori child! The dressing frames are used by children three to five years old, starting with the large button frame and moving along to bow tying and lacing.
