Hands On Learning for All Ages

The child gives us a beautiful lesson – that in order to form and maintain our intelligence, we must use our hands. - Dr. Maria Montessori

As a society, finally (and thankfully!), we seem to have come to an agreement that small children learn through doing. They need blocks to build towers, dirt in which to dig, paint to splatter into masterpieces. Abstraction is impossible for a small child. They need tactile experiences – TOUCH comes before understanding. Maria Montessori knew this over a hundred years ago, so it’s about time everyone else caught on! 

Do you know what else she knew? That thirst for tactile experience doesn’t disappear just because a child has entered into “formal” education. Humans don’t suddenly turn five or six (or even sixty) and lose the need to have real experiences to learn effectively. 

This is what makes Montessori elementary special. If you’ve never been in a Montessori elementary classroom, allow me to describe it for you: stuffed to bursting with all manner of different materials for math, science, language, art; children working on rugs on the floor in groups, perhaps using the brightly-colored trinomial cubes to learn algebra or making models to understand geological structures. The Guide is presenting a lesson to a small group based on topics that the students have chosen from a selection carefully curated by said Guide in order to learn about a certain law of physics or moment in history. In every activity, reading and writing are involved, with the characteristic control of error that is built into Montessori work. Classmates read one another’s papers and suggest edits: is this the correct participle? Would the essay flow better with a different synonym here? 

At Forbes, we take this spirit of hands-on learning even further in our Discovery Zones, special environments within the school where students can go to do in-depth research on a certain phylum, or learn about technology by producing their own podcast. 

Think back to the lessons you remember most clearly from your elementary days. I remember making a pinhole projector to view an eclipse and making paper mache trees for a project about the Amazon Rainforest. Simply, I remember the act of making. What do you remember? How much more might be etched into the corners of your brain, if only you’d had the chance to experience things before leaping into abstraction? Now imagine your child having the opportunity to learn things in whatever way works best for their own unique learning style! 

The Montessori way is to ensure that no one ever loses the love of learning that all toddlers and small children start with. At Forbes, our goal is to make sure that spark lasts a lifetime.