Homeschooling Siblings Together? Montessori Was Made for This: The Montessori Power Hour

You can homeschool more than one child, even if they’re different ages, have wildly different interests, and constantly interrupt each other. The secret? Stop trying to teach them the same way and start thinking like Maria Montessori.

In this Power Hour, Aubrey and David unpack why multi-age learning isn’t just manageable, it’s ideal.

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Episode Transcript

(00:01):
Hey there friends, I'm Aubrey Harkis.
Today's episode is a replay fromthe Child of the Redwoods live
show that I host with my husbandin Montessori Homeschooling,
partnering crime, David Harkis. You can watch the full episode
on the Child of the Redwoods YouTube channel.
Here's the clip. You can homeschool more than one

(00:24):
child. Even.
If they're different ages, they don't have to be twins and they
have totally different interests.
It would be following two totally separate children and
they never stop testering each other.
In Montessori having kids of different ages isn't a problem.
No, in fact multi urge learning.Learning is what Montessori was

(00:47):
built on. Exactly.
Multi age learning is essentially A Montessori
concept. And I think in a lot of ways,
even though the one room schoolhouse came far, far before
Maria Montessori, you know, it is a concept that really
Montessori and leaned into and totally embraced and that came

(01:11):
right out of Maria Montessori's legacy, her tradition.
That's right. So today we're starting a
three-part series on how to homeschool with multiples.
We actually had this question a lot.
By multiples we don't mean like twins or triplets, we mean like.
More than one, yeah, more than one kiddo in the house that
you're homeschooling. And actually, we wanted to

(01:32):
address this because we just spent a week in Texas and where
we're from originally. And part of that time we were at
a really nice homeschool conference.
Oh yeah. Hundreds of parents from the
Dallas Fort Worth area, including some members.
Thank you for stopping by. It was really great to see you.
And one of the questions that they asked, one of the most
frequent questions that we received was what do I do if I

(01:57):
have kids at different ages? Do I have to buy multiple
curriculums? Like do I have to split them up?
There's just lots and lots of questions about this.
And we get this question a lot in our own community.
And I know we've got a nice group out there.
Hello, welcome. If you're enjoying our show,
please hit the thumbs up. It really helps us.
And be sure to ask any questionsyou want in the chat if you have

(02:19):
questions about having homeschooling more than one,
because we know that this is a common question.
And as you said, it's actually or as we said, it's not really a
problem if you have the right mindset and Montessori is the
right mindset. Yes, we had so many parents come
to us and they were like, well, I'm looking for curriculum, but
I've got a 2 year old, a three-year old and a five year

(02:44):
old, or I've got a three-year old and a 7 year old and a nine
year old, you know. And, and so I think that when
homeschooling parents like, eventhough, like it is common to
have more than one child, it's just the way we have structured
the traditional school system that we have at least school

(03:06):
system that we have here in the United States and in many places
worldwide. We think that children need to
have a lesson per subject per day or, or that you have to at
least teach each specific age child differently from the next
age child. Like your child's born between,

(03:29):
you know, September and May of this year.
Then they can be taught one way.And if your child is like a
month older, then they need to be taught a different way or
they should be on a more advanced level or, you know,
something like that. And it's this false idea.
Yeah, where does it come from? Well, I mean, I think my, my gut

(03:53):
says that it comes from the ideathat we're constantly wanting to
mold children into a very specific type of being with
very, very specific skills. And so I don't know, when you
think about the kind of, I don'tknow, think about like building
a house or something, you're like, we live in a house that is

(04:16):
like one of the little boxes that was made famous in that
song, little boxes. And all the houses look the
same, right? Like they're all.
Housing. Development.
It's a housing development, right?
They all look the same. They're only in our neighborhood
in specific. I know that they're only like 2
models, like two floor plans andso you can walk into any house

(04:39):
in our neighborhood and there are 80,000 people who live here
in our neighborhood in San Francisco and like you'll kind
of. Invariably you'll be either A.
Or B yeah, it's going to be likethe bathrooms on this side or
the bathrooms on that side or like.
The atrium in the middle. This one has it in the front.
Yes, one's a little smaller, one's a little bit bigger, but

(05:00):
essentially like it's the same floor plan, it's just
reduplicated. And how did this developer do
that? They created a workable plan and
was able to just like start fromthe beginning and like have a
really simple mapped out system,you know, where the houses would

(05:20):
be built. And it was so sequential so that
like they just built this whole neighborhood in a very, very
short amount of time, right? And we have the same mindset in
the school system, like that children can be built in this
way and that if you do these things, then you will end up
with a good, hard worker. Yeah.

(05:41):
As an end result, as an adult, you know, what do we, even as
teachers tell each other? And we work in the public school
system. We were told constantly, we're
creating the future citizens of America.
We want to create good hard working people, Right?
Sure. And so I think our school system

(06:01):
like was developed with this mindset.
Yeah, it was a mishmash of ideals, right, Like you'd had.
It does come out of and we won'tget too far into like the
history of education because that would be probably a little
arcane for our power hour. Although I.
Think people are interested? Give them the Reader's Digest
version. I mean, what you've hit on the
main point, you know, it's, there's a balance between the, I

(06:26):
guess it's what is politics is the art of the possible, right?
So in a sense that's also what we have in our educational
system now. I think it's gotten worse as
other factors have joined in, but essentially it was how can
you deliver the most to the leadwith the least amount of cost,
right? That's kind of a big part of it.
So the reason that you know yourexample about the Doldr houses,
which is what they call. They're cheap too, right?

(06:48):
It was like a cheap. Yeah, or any kind of the
Levittown that was invented after World War 2, right.
Any or any mass productive ModelT could get any color as long as
as long as it was black. Right, right.
And cars, do you still do this today?
Right. We don't have limitless options
with. Yeah.
So it's mass production. It was developed in the 20th
century and it became such an important component of thinking

(07:10):
that they developed all kinds ofpsychology and socio social
psychology around it in the early 20th century and it really
influenced so much. And so that's why you see now
you don't see it in the way, butforever you saw what it an
office look like. It looked like rows of desks,
right? And that's because it was easy
to monitor, easy to regiment, easy to develop.

(07:33):
And, you know, they've kind of tried to break a little bit away
from that. But at the end of the day, it's
not really about what's good forthe worker or in this case, the
child. It's about what's most
expedient. And so if you want to educate a
large and diverse population, but you don't want to spend
really any money on it, the bestway to do it is to try and come

(07:56):
up with the most common denominator.
The most efficient way to get children from point A, which
would be traditionally like first grade kindergarten, all
the way to the graduation point,Yeah.
So how do you prepare them for high school graduation, college
or career right, right. And the way you the most basic,
the simplest way to do that is the group the by age, right?

(08:17):
You say, here's the starting point and here's the end point
of a year. And it's not the calendar year,
it's it's a year based on the school year.
You're exactly right, because like if you were to mix the age
group, you're introducing a lot more variables in the.
It's just much, much harder. Becomes more experimental.
Because in general, and we're going to talk about this in just
a second, but in general, a 5 year old or let's say 5 is kind

(08:40):
of a bad example, but let's say A7 year old, A7 year old has
more in common with other 7 yearolds than they do with a four
year old. That's true.
Yes, so or with a 10 year old. So if you are going to try and
figure out how to group people together in general, because of
planes of development, a 7 year old is more like other 7 year
olds than not. However, a child is not a

(09:03):
widget, a human is not a widget.And so even there are real
serious limitations very, very quickly when you start to group
people together by age, because the chrono, your chronological
age is not necessarily your developmental readiness.
It's a process that unfolds overtime.
Some people, we used to call them late bloomers, right?

(09:24):
And then some who are really advanced and they get to the,
they get to a certain stage of development.
They're reading really early, for example.
It doesn't mean that they're brilliant in all ways or they're
delayed in in all ways. It just means that every human
is different. But when you group them all
together into a grade, you are unable to address those
variances. You're forced to treat everybody

(09:46):
the same to some degree, Obviously not quite reality.
And that's where you start to get to this idea where parents.
But ideally. Yeah, but ideally, but this is
where you start to hear people complain about teaching to the
middle. And I would say as I, having
studied and worked in education for my entire life, my entire
professional life, more or less,I would say that educate that

(10:07):
the way we do education doesn't work for anybody, but some
people are better at surviving it, right?
That's the way that we generallydo mainstream education.
And in fact, when they look at who succeeds in school, it's
people who come from often wealthier families because they
have resources to supplement. They teach their children how to

(10:27):
do school, like how to go along and follow the rules and fly
under the radar or take advantage of the system to get
ahead. And the people who struggle the
most, the kids who struggle the most are those who you don't
necessarily have the family or other resources to support that.
What does that tell you? It tells you it's not about
academics. It tells you it's not about
intelligence. It tells you it's not about
creativity. It tells you that it's about a

(10:49):
system that you can master. You can master the system to
succeed better or worse. And grades like age based grades
I. Would.
Say that neurotypical children tend to succeed in this system
more than. Well, that's because you're like
whoever fits closest to the middle, like whatever the, the

(11:12):
stamp is, right? Like they've stamped out.
This is what student, 4th grade student looks like.
The closer you fit or the closeryou can pretend to fit into that
mold, the better off, the more successful you'll be.
I mean, that's just, that's justwhat the research tells us.
And I think all of us have experienced that to some degree

(11:33):
or another. What's interesting and the
reason kind of this kind of preamble is important is that we
as a people have gotten so used to this that we assume that it's
the way it should be, right? We think that grade levels are
so that way because it's the right way, not because it's the

(11:54):
most expedient way. We forgive all of the problems
that we and many of us experienced in traditional
schooling. We just forgive that because the
grass is always greener, becausehindsight or.
Maybe we succeeded in the end. Yeah, because we made it
through. And hey, if I made it, you can
too. You're just being lazy or
something like that. And maybe that's the case, but

(12:14):
maybe it's also that despite theodds, you kind of made it
through. And what a missed opportunity
anyway, to spend 18 years in a system that really didn't care
much about you as a person, as aperson.
Now the teachers, I'll say they.Care.
They care, Yeah. And most administrators just
will care, too. The problem is the system.
Yep, the system grinds everything down and it makes it

(12:37):
really, really hard, maybe impossible for people to rise
above it because it's just so gigantic and so oppressive.
That's where homeschooling can make a difference.
Not right for everybody. We would say actually
homeschooling is anybody can do it.
We know that there are various circumstances in your life.
If you can homeschool, though, if you're in the position to do

(12:58):
it, this is a reason you might, because you're able to meet to
the child your child's specific needs, and you can do that even
if you have more than one. In fact, because of what
Montessori teaches us, it's actually even better in some
ways if you have multiple kids learning together at different

(13:18):
ages. That's right, magic.
It really is. I think that because so much of
so many of us grew up in the factory model approach to
education. And even if we we recognize in
our hearts that like this is notwhat we want for our children,
like the parts that did not serve us, we're still in a

(13:41):
culture where this is the norm, you know, and where our children
as homeschoolers, you know, we go out in the world and we're
constantly hit with, you know, strangers, nice strangers,
usually coming up and they're and they're like, what grade are
you in? Well, you know, how old are you?
You know, what are what is your favorite subject?
What are you learning about thisyear?

(14:03):
And so these are all like leading questions that go right
back to that. Woven into our culture so deeply
that it's hard to extricate ourselves from.
It yes. So then here we have a
homeschooler, let's say that homeschooler who has like a
three-year old and a five year old and maybe a 7 year old.
No, they say, well, how am I going to do this?
Because now I've got a preschooler, I've got a

(14:27):
preschooler, A kindergartener and a second grader.
How can I teach all three thingswhen it takes three teachers at
school with those children in completely different classrooms
to teach those kids in like an all?
Day. Program or at least let's say
for the preschool, maybe it's 1/2 day program.
So you've got like 2-2 full day programs and 1/2 day program,

(14:51):
and how can one person do all ofthat, right?
So this is so, so common. And I think that it's the reason
that when we were at that conference, we often were hit by
excited homeschoolers, but also a little bit anxious.
Homeschoolers, you know, a bit wary of.

(15:11):
Yeah. The idea that you could do it, I
mean, it's understandable. I mean, yeah, you the truth is
you won't be able to teach to the level of an expert in every
domain unless you're some sort of, I don't know, like a super
genius or something like you. Like you probably don't know all
the works of Shakespeare and allthe insurance and outs of

(15:35):
algebra, plus all of the physics.
And you like, it's just you're not going to know all of that.
And that's sort of the model, especially in high school, where
I think it becomes more obvious that you have these
specializations, which is older than most of the kids that we
work with, you know, in our in our programs.
But parents are thinking about that like, well, what comes

(15:55):
next? I mean, that's because the high
schools are modeled after college.
And so you have a specialist in English and a specialist in
physics and a specialist just like you do in universities.
But the fact is that you don't actually need that.
That being a domain expert is good, but it doesn't actually
make you a good teacher. OK, that's true.
But I want to stop you. I want to bring us back to the

(16:17):
age group that we're talking about.
We've got a three-year old, A5 year old and a 7 year old.
This home school parent. Maybe they're great at
Shakespeare, or maybe they're not.
What they're at least thinking is I've got two kids who are
technically in school, right? The kindergartner and the second
grader. And I've got one kid who's 3,
and I know I should be teaching them, too.

(16:39):
But what usually happens with this kind of family dynamic is
we'll say like, you know what, Iknow I should be teaching the
three-year old, but I'm not gonna right.
Like we, I could go out and buy a curriculum, but Nah, like it's
just too much, right? So we're going to like take that
kid off our plate and just say we'll call it a day with some

(17:00):
play dates and we'll just read to them, OK, Which is, I'm not
saying that's not fine, but thatoften is what happens.
And then we'll say, OK, now we've got the five year old and
the seven-year old. What do I have to do?
At the very least, at the very least, I got to teach the five
year old to read and keep the seven-year olds reading skills
going. That 7 year old really needs to

(17:21):
learn how to write. By thus age, our brains say the
five year old needs to be learning how to write and they
both need to have math. And so I've got now I've got
three lessons for the five year old and three lessons for the
seven-year old that I'm thinkingin my head I need to cover in

(17:41):
one day. That's right.
OK. And that leaves no room for
geography, life science, physical science, you know all.
You know humankind. Cultural Studies.
Geography like they. Call it or.
The arts, right? And so our, our typical
homeschool parent is thinking, OK, like if I'm gonna do this, I
can't conceive of like teaching all of the subjects to all of my

(18:03):
kids. Even if there's just like 2 that
I'm focused on, it's a lot of subjects.
So I'm just going to pick and choose.
And the ones that I'm going to pick and choose for curriculum
are going to be reading, writingand math, right?
Because those seem like the essentials, right?
But what we're going to tell youis that you don't have to take
that approach at all. You don't have to just focus on

(18:26):
reading, writing and math. You can have all of the
subjects, but the key is to embrace this multi age learning
model and throw out the factory model of education.
And it's a big ask for. Parents, yeah.
I mean, all of that stuff we just talked about the like why
schools look the way they do, the way it's woven to our

(18:48):
language. What we're asking you to do if
you want to embrace this multi age approach or homeschooling
more generally A Montessori homeschooling in particular is
to delete a lot of assumptions and habits that might be really
comfortable to. You that's right to deschool
yourself. Right.
You have to take that concept out of your mind and say I want

(19:11):
to educate my children. My goal is for them to be
educated people, literate people, people who can go out
and be creative and successful and happy, productive in the
world. And that's my goal.
My goal is not to replicate the traditional approach in my
house. Like you can do that if you want

(19:32):
to try. It's not very fun.
It's not the best method, but itmight make you feel comfortable
because it's like a warm blanket.
It's familiar. Asking you to sort of say throw
that off and leap is hard, but there is plenty of research to
back this method up. It's not just sort of sort of

(19:53):
like a fly by night idea. The methods that Montessori
discovered and innovative over 100 years ago have been infused
and then watered down in our educational system.
And so basically what we're asking you to do is go to the
source, right? So don't think of it as like I
have to delete all of the stuff that I thought we're saying,

(20:14):
like actually. You've got a beautiful garden.
It's just overgrown with weeds. You just got to get those weeds
out there and it will come back to life because the things that
Montessori and other educationaltheorists like Dewey and so
forth discovered early on in the20th century greatly influenced
it. They've just been watered down
in the pursuit of mass. Do the most for the least

(20:40):
instead of do the most with you know, and not worry about the
cost, not worry about you know. It's that big, big, big business
mindset. Yeah, like if we really think
that children are the future, then what?
A price tag would be too high. Like it should be the Sky's the
limit and it's not. And it should tell you something
about your priorities, right? There's something about the

(21:02):
treasure in the heart being right as it goes, where your
treasure, your heart will be found.
So where do we put our treasure?Currently we are asking you to
put that your treasure, your children, and that you can give
them the very best by going to the source, which is what
Montessori created. So we found three things, right?

(21:23):
Yeah. So we wanted to highlight three
things in particular from Montessori that you will find
kind of woven in other contemporary systems that but
have been lost, watered down, soforth.
And so this would be like we're wedding at the garden.
We're going to see the we're going to see the beautiful

(21:43):
pristine beauty below because we're going to the source.
Here's the head, the head Falcon.
OK, so three things from Montessori #1 is planes of
development. What are the planes of
development? I love you so much.

(22:04):
Well, I could talk more, but I was trying to, you know, OK.
All right. The planes of development, Maria
Montessori. OK, this is not how I was going
to lead into this. So like you just lead.
In well, the planes of development are, is the idea
that the child will develop. As the child develops into

(22:25):
adulthood and beyond. There are periods of development
where sensitivities to certain kinds of order or certain kinds
of concepts will emerge. And so you can more or less see
relative similarities, let's sayfor a child who's in the
second-half of the first plate of development, ages 3 to 6,

(22:46):
right? So a three-year old and a six
year old or a 5 1/2 year old arein the same plane of
development. The 5 1/2 year old is exiting
it, the three-year old is entering it, that second-half of
the first plane. And so they have commonalities
like a sensitivity to sensorial learning, a need for practical
life, a growing awareness of language and math, which will

(23:09):
emerge around age 4. This this kind of commonality is
how we can then understand that a three-year old and a five year
old really can work together. It is kind of the underpinning
of why we might group people together by age, because in
general, a 10 year old is more like other 10 year olds than
they are like a 15 year old. Of course, part of that is
explainable because of the idea of the planes of development,

(23:33):
but it's not so fine that you can say it's only going to be
these 9 and 10 year olds. You're looking for something
broader. And so Montessori, by
identifying that there are planes of development, really
gives us a chance to explore andput group kids together so that
their actual natural strengths, their sensitivities can emerge

(23:54):
and they can begin to work together.
OK, thank you for explaining. Montessori decided to group
children by these planes of development when she created the
classrooms. And I think that she started
with that very original classroom with children who were
ages 2 to 6, two and a half, two, 2 1/2 to 6, just because

(24:20):
that was the grouping of children that she was given to
work with. But as she noticed, she watched
their development, she noticed abig shift happening just before
children would go off to 1st grade.
And that a lot of people don't know.
Like the reason that she wasn't working with 7 to 9 year olds or
7 to 12 year olds to begin with was because those kids were

(24:42):
already in school. And she wasn't thinking of they
were. No one was thinking that this
little community of children in Rome that she was going to 1st
work with that became the Casa de Bambini, the House of
children was going to be a school.
It was only later, after she hadstarted to prove that these

(25:02):
little children were educable, you know, that they could learn
and and grow and that they should be treated as worthy as
older children, You know, that they could call it a school,
right? That's really where we get the
concept of like a preschool today.
Also came from the idea of a kindergarten in Germany.
But Maria Montessori was really like right in there with the

(25:25):
creation of the first preschools.
So it's traditional in Montessori.
I think partly because that was the original grouping.
We started with that ages 2 1/2,three to six year old age group.
And then we kind of started to incorporate other age groups and
the, the original, you know, I, you know, I have my lower

(25:47):
elementary training and ages 6 to 9.
But in the original Montessori elementary classrooms, I believe
it was from 6 to 12 as a grouping.
So it would be the whole second plane.
And when you think about how those children kind of relate to
each other, it does make sense that they would be more In Sync
with each other. However, what we noticed with

(26:10):
our own children was that our kids were three years apart.
And so sometimes they would be in the same plane of development
and sometimes they weren't in the same plane of development.
And what we noticed was that their interactions changed as
one would enter another plane and the other was still in the
the the former plane. We noticed like there

(26:31):
interactions would change and their perspective on life was a
little bit different, but they were we were still like
embracing this whole family mindset of home schooling so
that even though our children were in these different planes,
they still were able to receive a lot of the same lessons.
They would just get different things out of them.

(26:53):
Yeah. No, that's, that's right.
Yeah. So I think, and what I think is
interesting about what you just said is that Montessori was a
scientist. She went in, she had a group of
kids who were of a certain age. She didn't pick that group.
It was the group that was that existed.
And through her careful observation and study, she

(27:14):
realized that there were these developmental milestones
happening. And from that grew our
understanding. Now what I love also about what
you said is absolutely right as you're in, because we hear that,
you know, that was also brought up a lot.
So I have a three-year old and afive year old, maybe a four year
old and a 7 year old. Like they are in different
planes right there. 1 is in the first plane, 1 is in the second

(27:37):
plane. That doesn't.
But because we can understand the planes of development, we
can individualize the lesson, the same lesson to appeal.
So more sensorial and practical life oriented for the three or
four year old, more research, creative, big work, ethical,
moral dilemma kind of stuff for the older.

(27:58):
The same topic can really work for both.
Just understanding those planes of development, you, the parent,
understanding the planes of development can empower that
that ability to differentiate. OK.
So this is one of the crucial aspects of mixed age learning

(28:19):
that you really need to understand pretty deeply in
order to effectively teach children in different planes of
development. So if you've got that three-year
old, the five year old are both in the first plane, the
seven-year old would be in the second plane.
And if you understand the needs,as David was talking about, of
these different, the different planes of development, like the

(28:43):
characteristics and the desires and the motivations that are
unique to each separate age group, then it's not going to be
a problem to have them in your same classroom at home.
With the one exception, if you're trying to use a boxed
curriculum, this is not going towork very well because a boxed
curriculum is designed to kind of really be individualized.

(29:08):
I don't think that's the wrong word.
The box curriculum is really meant to be here, Child A is
your material here, child B is your material.
So it's not individualized to the learner, but it is sort of
personalized to the specific human.
And so if you're not taking a thematic approach, you're not
going to be able to do this. So yes, you're going to have

(29:30):
trouble if you set up your home school environment where you
have your seven-year old workingthrough a workbook and your 4
year old doing something else that's also kind of workbook or
box curriculum driven. They aren't going to work
together because your mindset iswrong.
You're not actually thinking about the planes of development.
You're sort of relying on the boxed curriculum to
differentiate for you. And it's, it's essentially

(29:52):
replicating what you're seeing in a traditional school.
But if you put a kindergartner and a third grader in from a
traditional school together, like they're going to have to
sort of deschool their minds before they'll start to work
together because they've been regimented into that.
So if you continue to replicate that at home, you're going to
get the same kinds of mixed results.
So the planes of development requires you to treat those

(30:17):
children as on a journey. And it cannot just be here's
here's your binder and here's your binder.
Or you can work in the same roomtogether.
Now you're Co learning. That's right.
If you're interested in going further into talking about
Montessori theory in those planes of development, consider
joining our community because this is the kind of stuff we

(30:38):
talked about. And in the Montessori, the
foundations of Montessori primary and the foundations of
Montessori lower elementary courses, you get all the
characteristics of each age child.
So, you know, there's just a lotto learn here that we can't
share in this one little episode.
But I encourage you and if you're a member, but you have

(31:00):
forgotten some of the characteristics of each aged
child, go and dip into those courses.
You have access full access as acomplete or unlimited member.
Absolutely. The second thing we want to talk
about to bring into this conversation about having
multiple aged children at your house is the concept of the

(31:20):
spiral curriculum. So in Montessori, I know this is
very unusual, like this is the spiral curriculum is actually
it's used in many different education models.
All right. It's even used in traditional,
the traditional education system.
You might remember a little bit of this or it might be a little
bit noticeable to use that concept that like, I think I was

(31:44):
in 7th grade by the time my mother tells the story all the
time. If you're watching Wow, I love
you mom. And hit the like.
Button and hit the like button right.
So the the story is like by the time I entered public school in
4th grade, by the time I got to 7th, I kind of had this epiphany
was like, it's just the same thing over and over and over

(32:06):
every single year we just learn the same thing.
But like there's just only like a little hint more and then the
next year starts over and then like it's the same thing again.
Like every single year you're you're teaching math, like you
spend the first six weeks reviewing the previous year, you
know, before adding any additional math year to year.

(32:30):
The traditional education systemdoes use a spiral curriculum,
but guess what we do in Montessori too.
And you can use this to your advantage when you have more
than one child at home. How?
Well, by repeating our subject areas and lessons over time.
And I'm going to make an exampleby showing you, I'm just going

(32:52):
to pull out one of our themes and we've got like we've got
giants, the concept of big things and we've got wheel here.
If if you teach these lessons here, let's say the cityscape
collage is an arts lesson, your 3 year old is going to get
something different out of this lesson than your five year old.

(33:15):
I'm going to head to that, that you're a three-year old probably
isn't great at using scissors yet.
And so one of the primary thingsthat they might be learning
through this activity about making a cityscape might be
cutting skills, just learning how to hold the pair of
scissors, open them and close them.
Maybe they have the strength to close them but not open them.

(33:37):
That physical interaction is going to be the purposeful part.
Or maybe your 3 year old is going to be really interested in
this sensory sensation of like the gluing process.
And so maybe they don't even care about the scissors at all.
They're just interested in the gluing.
And all you need to do is you'regoing to cut all the pieces for
them. They're going to take the pieces

(33:59):
and glue them on. OK and a three-year old many 3
year olds don't even care where those pieces go on the paper.
You know, they're just going to the ACT is just like I glued it,
I glued it, I glued it right I'm.
Interested in the aesthetic? It's not even going to look like
a cityscape. It's like, who cares?
What we were interested in is that practical, that practical

(34:20):
activity, right? Like the purposeful activity.
We're going to learn about glue and how to do this process.
We're learning about the textureof paper, properties of liquid,
you know, viscous liquid, but stickiness, those sorts of
things. Or like how to hold scissors?
And these are all actual lessonsfrom the Practical Life

(34:41):
curriculum. And.
There's a variety of kinds of like gluing techniques that you
would learn dot gluing glue sticks that you could go and
reference because what you're. And then if you wanted to then
combine what you're seeing your your child naturally want to do,
which is apply the glue and put it down and kind of maybe a
helter skelter way. Then you can combine that with a
foundational lesson to sort of understand kind of the

(35:03):
progression. So that's your 3 year old.
What about your seven-year? Old Well, let's talk about the
five year old first. Five year old is probably going
to have better cutting skills. I, I, I say probably because not
all kids develop at the same rate.
Having taught kindergarten, I can tell you some of them were
really great with scissors and some of them needed the whole

(35:24):
year and lots and lots of practice before they were able
to cut on a straight line. And it's just because they, you
know, just little hands develop at different rates.
If you give them more practice with them and they're younger,
they're more likely to get thereby the time they're 5 or 6.
But not all of them will. That's OK.
But a 5 year old they would be more interested in like the

(35:48):
choices that are involved choosing the colors like Dwight
and so some 5 year olds might decide to choose all Blues or
all the same size rectangle. They might be like sorting the
sizes of. Because in this activity, you're
creating a cityscape collage. That's right.
So you're going to take, Yeah. So we have right.

(36:09):
So this is 1 possible outcome that it could look like and
you're right. So for that five year old, maybe
they're still working on some ofthe cutting.
And oh, definitely right. Definitely.
And the different techniques, but they're started to emerge
into kind of an aesthetic. This is the beginning of an
aesthetic appreciation. What?
What do I want it to look? Like right, right.

(36:31):
And you know, even if they don'thave a great idea at first,
you'll notice like they will be transitioning from the take
something and just like slap down the glue into more of a
curation, right? A conscious conscious art is
developing in them your 7 year old with your 7 year old, you

(36:52):
actually can really they might be really interested in looking
at real life cityscapes and someof them will want to replicate
them as they as they appear. Those perfectionist tendencies
are probably coming out a littlebit you or the extra messy
tendencies. I, I find that with the second
plane group, the second plane ofdevelopment group, those 6 to 12

(37:17):
year olds, some of them like lean really perfectionist and
some of them lean really like scattered, messy, bigger, never
ending project type of thing. And it kind of just depends on
your child, but your seven yearsgoing to have a completely
different completely different experience with the same really

(37:42):
simple cityscape collage activity.
And so there's absolutely no reason why you can't teach these
three children together. Now, in this single lesson,
we're teaching children about skyscrapers.
We're showing them examples of what cityscapes look like.

(38:04):
We're teaching a little math. We're talking about like how
many floors buildings can have, how tall.
They are, Yep. Right.
And a little bit about like city, I don't know if you call
it like city architecture, what do you call a city planner?
Planning and. All, yeah, yeah.
So there's lots of concepts to go in there and your children

(38:26):
just at these different ages aregoing to have different
experiences, but they're still going to have an enriching
experience with it. Yeah, that's absolutely.
Right. And so there's no reason that
you have have to say I'm only going to give the, the cityscape
collage activity to my 5 year old, you know, and, but not the
seven-year old or the three-yearold.
You can teach all of these ages together.

(38:50):
And so this is the approach thatwe took with our own children.
It worked really, really well. What we noticed, you know,
actually what I noticed when I started teaching our three-year
old and or our two year old and five year old or three-year old
and six year old at home was that our youngest always wanted
to be doing what the oldest was doing.
For sure. And at first this kind of bugged

(39:11):
me a little bit because it did, because I had this mindset, even
though I came from a monastery background, I had this mindset
that like I was going to be teaching my older child these
big lessons and that the little one would probably go and play
with his blocks instead of sit. But what I found was like when
my 6 year old got down with thatclipboard and was taking notes,

(39:33):
you know, on the lesson or interacting with whatever I was
doing, the little one's behaviorwould just rise to the occasion.
He was so proud wanting his own clipboard and pencil to, even
though his he wasn't writing words yet, he was just
scribbling on the paper. There was like an empowerment

(39:55):
and then I was always surprised that he got so much out of the
lesson. I'm curious for those of you who
are watching live, if you have more than one child and more
than one plane of development. If you have found that as well,
I'd be curious to hear from you.Yeah, we have a great question
too. But I wanted to because I think
sometimes people say, well, sure, an art, an art lesson, but

(40:16):
what about something more serious?
Oh, good. So I was just, I was looking at
wheel. And so one of the activities we
did in Wheel was the the lunar zodiacs, right?
And so they're actually large pieces that you would cut out

(40:37):
and then you would make a big wheel, a big work.
Now the full work has the child put all of it together like a
puzzle. They have to match the picture
of the dragon to the piece that says dragon.
There's also the years that go around.
So it starts in 2025 and it goesall the way to 2048.
And so there's a numeric patternthat they can see.

(41:00):
They can do calculations, they can figure out how old they
would be when it is next, let's say the year of the dog, which
is going to be 20-30. And so they can do some math.
Not a three-year old though, right?
This is not something a three-year old do.
What would a three-year old do? How would you modify this?
How do we, how would we say to modify this kind of lesson for a

(41:22):
three month old, for a three-year old?
Well, actually it's inside the packet itself.
Can you find a lesson? Well that wasn't a leading
question, but you're right. So it says with your toddler,
just work with Oops, that's the Ferris wheel one.
Also a good one. Also a good one, yeah.
Do you remember offhand? Which one it is?
It's in there. You find it.
If you find it, the ages are. Oh, here it is.

(41:45):
OK, work with the animals building the outside ring
together with your toddler. Don't worry about the years.
So the first one is you're just going to take you would take the
outer pieces. And what you're doing is you're
familiarizing them with the the animals that go with the
different years within the Chinese lunar, the Zodiac for
your primary child. So this would be, let's say a

(42:08):
four or five into 6. Let your private or child
assemble the wheel with you while discussing the animals,
practicing the names together. So in this case, you're going to
put the whole puzzle together and now you're going to be
associating the picture of the ox with the wedge that goes that
says ox and has the other information.
And then for your oldest child, you would challenge them to

(42:30):
research more about the origin of the Chinese Zodiac calendar
or as I was suggesting, start todo some math problems with those
years. So this is one example of where
the lesson is you're introducingthe idea of the Chinese Zodiac.
You give them this visual representation in the form of a
puzzle. All three children can enjoy

(42:50):
that puzzle activity, but what you do with the child with your
child will vary based on their age.
Yeah, I think that's a great example.
So in some good comments here before we go to our third
Montessori point. OK, so G Fan says, would it be
bad or confusing approach to do some book work when you go on

(43:11):
vacation just so you don't lose the routine of doing work?
What would be the alternative? Thank you.
All right, that is a great question.
It is so I have a thought, but what is?
What would you say? You have thought, but what would
I say? I guess I would say that that's.
What I was going to say. It's it's not.
It's perfectly OK to to play around with some worksheets.

(43:35):
Totally so. I, I mean, I, I, yeah, I mean,
that's my genuine response is like, first, I think you don't
have to. Your children are like when
you're on vacation, if you're travelling, you do not have to
do schoolwork, all right? And we found that out in a very
real way at first, you know, we were thinking of travelling and

(43:57):
like we would bring, who would bring home school stuff with us.
You know, usually it was me who's like stuffing stuff into
our vacation travel suitcases. But we decided to not do that
after, you know, an experiment. And what we just what we just
learned was that the experience of being on vacation, it was

(44:19):
just much better for our kids ifwe leaned into the educational
opportunities that were already present.
So something that was better, that was more effective for us
that, you know, we implemented instead, like in lieu of doing
regular work. And I do know a lot of families
will bring their golden beads, you know, with them to grandma's
house or whatever and, and have successful experiences with

(44:42):
them. But we just happened to not, you
know, our children were really wanting to do other things.
But what did work for us was bringing little piles of blank
books. Do you remember this?
So we would make them ahead of time.
I would actually make them out of scrap, like scrap materials.
You know how you cut out your parts cards and you end up with

(45:04):
funny shaped piles of paper? I know, I know some of you are
out there with little piles of paper around you right now.
Or even just like index cards, you know.
So what I would do is I would just staple them.
I would take my stapler. I would get some colored paper
and make a cover for them out ofconstruction paper, cut the

(45:28):
construction paper to size. And I wasn't a perfectionist
about it. They were always a little bit
off. Because you're using scraps.
I know that bugs some people, but they were scraps and so I
didn't really bother with makingthem perfect in any way.
But I would take the construction paper and I would
do this. I would cut a shape relatively,

(45:49):
you know, close. Let's say my paper was this
size. I would cut my construction
paper like this and then I wouldfold it in half around the
little pages that were inside, making it like a little cover.
And then I would staple it together.
And we brought many of these little books of various sizes
and shapes. Sometimes it's fun to cut them

(46:12):
into different shapes. I know David did this in our
last packet where he kind of made the little book a different
shape. But sometimes I would make like
heart-shaped books, you know, where it's like half of a heart,
you open it up and it's a littlehard.
You probably remember this from some of the notebooks they make
for elementary kids that are available on target and stuff,
right? So.

(46:33):
Sometimes like little heart. Books or other little shapes,
sometimes teeny, teeny tiny books that were just like a tiny
little square and a few little pages inside.
And we bring colored pencils or other art materials.
And that is what we, we use those a lot.
And we would just practice writing about our vacation.

(46:53):
You know, we would dictate sentences and we would write in
them and they would draw. Sometimes we would write little
books or jokes and then they would read them if they were
able to read at that point. So that was something that we
did a lot in in lieu of. And I think that for myself, I
had to be OK. You know, we leaned into like

(47:16):
we're year round schooling and so we're just going to go on
vacations throughout the year and we're just going to count
it, you know, in like sometimes we'll own school, right?
And that time, those times were like when we're on vacation and
during the times that we were athome, we leaned like more
heavily into our regular home school.

(47:36):
Rhythm. Yeah, I think you're.
Yeah, absolutely, absolutely. Much better than I would have
said. I don't know what was on your
mind. Well, just the same thing, like
First off, like if you're only going to be gone for a short
amount of time, it can be just agreat educational experience to
lean into it. That said, I think rhythm and
routine is super essential, evenespecially when you're
traveling. I think with little guys because

(47:58):
they can get so discombobulated right here.
Where's my bed? Where's my meal time when it's
bath time, the storage, whateverit is like you have a routine at
home of some sort. And then when you travel, it all
gets thrown out the window. Like I'm not sleeping in the
same room and I don't go to the bed at the same time and or
whatever. And I don't have my favorite
blanket. And so the more that you can

(48:19):
maintain a kind of consistent rhythm is often really helpful
with kids, as you know, right asof every mother and father know
and that can include schoolwork.So I think that you can use.
You can use. Mad libs or super fun?
Yeah, so you can bring. Posted that the other day.
Somebody wrote, yeah, so there'snothing wrong with using

(48:40):
workbooks. They're just tools.
I think where I would say I would caution is if your entire
home school approach is based on.
Workbooks is not. Well, no, it's not.
She's in our community. But that's why that would be
the, that would be the caveat. Like if your entire home school
approach is workbook based, I would say you're not really
taking full advantage of what itis.

(49:01):
But if you're using workbooks tosupplement, if you're using them
for fun, if you're using them, there's nothing wrong with them.
They're just tools and tools. All tools can have a a good
application. And if it's like you want to
maintain a homeschooling rhythm while you're travelling because
it gives a sense of consistency to your family's life, which is
super good, then do it. Do it, You know, use your mad

(49:25):
Lib. You know, use the little books
to use workbooks, whatever it isthat works for.
You nothing. I think we have.
You know, we give workbooks a bad name because they can.
If they are forced on children and their only source of
education is work books, then they're really boring.
I mean, honestly, that's how ourschooling was at school.

(49:46):
I think hopefully schools are a little better about it these
days. You know, it seems like by the
time, right, they're just doing those worksheets on the
computer. Exactly.
No, for real. I know it's been a little while
since. It's just the same with tests.
Tests are fine. We the problem is we overuse
them. We can't expect too much out of

(50:07):
them. We associate them with too many
punishments or extrinsic rewardsand punishments.
Workbooks are the same like workbooks can be totally value
doing flash cards can be really help.
Totally. There's nothing wrong with that.
Like we say, oh, Rd. is bad. Rd.
Education has a place if it's helping us to kind of synthesize

(50:27):
it, like we're not synthesize, but it's kind of store
information. But that can't be the end of the
education. Like you can put that in there.
Then you have to give them lots and lots of opportunity
authentically applied. Yeah.
So let's get out of the mindset that we have to constantly be in
charge of educating our childrenall the time.
Children educate themselves. Remember, Maria called this an

(50:50):
auto education. You know, education that is
ongoing, that is coming from within your child's inner guide.
And there is time and space for you to not be in charge of it
for a little while, to just let them be, let them enjoy the road
trip and be bored and look out the window.

(51:12):
Let them. You know, when our kids were
older, we're like, we're like atfirst remember how we were
taking long plane rides because we live far from family.
So we were taking a lot of planerides and I was really trying to
hold us to that like no tech. We're going to do everything,
entertain the kids for the wholeplane ride using just like, I

(51:33):
don't know, little games that I brought or having conversations
or stuff. But guess what?
There's lots of anxiety that comes with a plain.
Little ears hurt and you're going up and down.
Eventually, David was like, justlet them have the iPad and watch
something is not that big of a deal.
And I was like, OK, And even though I was nervous about using

(51:54):
technology for the purpose of, you know, having a child turn
out right, honestly, like once we just kind of relaxed with
things. It made it so much better as a
family, you know? So I empathize with that feel.
I really struggled a lot with that feeling like I should be
teaching all the time or in. Case of the should is yeah.

(52:18):
A couple other comments here. GPM says she appreciates the
idea about the little book. She says often it's hard for my
kids. She says I've witnessed that
with my boys. My little 1 is so confident with
letters and sounds because he's been observing his older brother
working hard with his phonetic work.
Beautiful. She also adds, it's hard for my

(52:40):
kids to get back into the routines.
Maybe it's just me. No, it's not just you.
And then she adds, someone told me, what are you doing teaching
the curse of writing? They need to learn keyboard.
That's hilarious. We could we could do a whole
episode about that too. Maybe we will.
And one other Caitlin as 18 month old always wants to be

(53:02):
involved in four year old brother's work lessons.
Yeah. Tail as old as time.
You're even talking about an even younger, my youngest
example was 3 in this episode. But yeah, an 18 month or what
are they going to get out of some of these activities?
You don't know. It could be a lot more than you
think. OK.
So we had talked about the planes of development.
We've talked about the spiral curriculum in that example of

(53:25):
how you can use the same conceptand sort of you're going to get
deeper and deeper. And because of the planes of
development, because of the individual needs of the
children, they're going to get different things out of it.
And if you're structuring your home school to take advantage of
that, you're really going to enjoy the process much more than
trying to segment them so specifically like you might see

(53:47):
in a traditional school. OK.
Our third concept, though, is learning together.
So both observation and teachingare essential parts of the
Montessori approach. So you are presenting a lesson.
You're not spending very much time on it, just a few minutes
at most. Depending on the age of the
child, it might even be less. And then you're letting them

(54:07):
explore the concept and observing what you're seeing.
So in this process, you're goingto give both children or all
three children, however many youhave, an opportunity to learn
and grow. And you're going to be observing
how they're each interacting with the lesson that you've
given them, right? So what you're going to find is
that older children are going totake on a leadership role,

(54:31):
especially kids in the second plane.
They're coming into this moral age and they want to sort of,
they have a real sense of right and wrong.
This is when you get into a lot of superhero worship or other
things like that in the second plane.
And so that sense of like being in charge or being the leader
often is very appealing to a child at that age.

(54:55):
And they're going to be reinforcing their learning.
So what we just heard from GFAM is this example, right?
So they're setting an example. They're reinforcing what
learning looks like with the younger one and they're kind of
embodying often a leadership role.
And that can be very inspiring. So Caitlin, your 18 month old
wants to be involved with the four year old.

(55:16):
It's hard to imagine, right? An 18 month old, they're so
little, but they are enamored with the Big Brother or sister.
They just want to do whatever because they see, they idealize
it. This is a natural.
This is just the natural way of life.
When we have a multi age classroom and a mindset that
matches to it. You allow that.

(55:37):
So even though your 4 year old is not quite in that, she's not
in the second plane, not thinking of that leadership
role, that dynamic is already there.
And it's a very powerful tool tohelp build cohesion within the
family, to help them have a healthier relationship with one
another, to lean into the natural developmental skills

(56:00):
that are present in a child. This is a power of the multi age
classroom. And when we home school, the
classroom is our home. We don't have to do anything
other than embrace it. OK, so that's, that's really,
that's really helpful, I think to a whole lot of families.
But I want to just give a littleshout out.

(56:22):
I know this is a lot about siblings, but there are some of
our members who are watching maybe who don't have a sibling
at home. And what happens here?
We've got just given you 3 reasons why the Montessori
method is all set up for multi age learning.
Oh no, I've only got 11 little 5year old.
What do I do? Is my child missing out on all

(56:44):
this, the whole spiral curriculum and learning together
and all these benefits? Of course not.
Your child is treating you as part of that multi age
environment. And I think this is something
that's totally foreign to traditional education, so we
don't consider it. But as your child grows and

(57:05):
develops, they are looking to you to represent the older
learner who is going to teach him things and they're going to
start teaching things to you as well.
You know, so if you have an older child and a younger child,
they're going to have a special dynamic that really is unique
and special. But all children seek these

(57:29):
opportunities to interact in a multi age away with other
people. And so your child is going to be
learning these skills when they're at the playground.
They're going to be learning these skills with grandma we're
going to or grandpa or aunts anduncles, cousins we're.
Going. To be learning it with you in
your own home. And I know that sounds silly
that you're both the younger sibling and the older sibling in

(57:52):
mindset, but you are like, and, and it is, it works really,
really well too. You're going to model for your
child, you're going to observe your child.
They're going to teach you things that you maybe you
already know how to do, but they're going to need to
practice that skill to like havethat kind of leadership role.
And it's going to be with you. So don't feel like you're left

(58:14):
out of this. It's all the benefits are there,
even if you just have one at home.
Absolutely. Right.
OK, well, again, if you would like to know more about the
Montessori method or you'd like to know more about the planes of
development or spiral curriculumor anything like that, please
join us at childoftheredwoods.com where you

(58:36):
can find all the information about our programs and how to
bring Montessori to life in yourhome.
And a special shout out to all the folks in the chat and
online. We're having some tech trouble,
so I can't see the total numbers, but I know there's a
bunch of you out there. And thank you for joining us
live on this beautiful June day.Lovely.
Well guess what? To my complete surprise, I

(59:00):
received a letter for Mr. Bunny.What did I hear?
My name I. Did I?
I was just in our community hanging out and I found this
little note address. Oh boy, let.
Me See. 2 Mr. Benny. 2 Mr. Benny.
That there was something specialthat I was to give you.

(59:25):
Oh boy. And here it is.
Is it Karen? It's not, it's a letter.
Oh, a letter. Yay, I love letters.
A&B&C&B. Oh, I love those letters.
Most specifically, those lettersare spelling out a joke.
A joke. A joke?
Oh boy. Comes from Lincoln, would you?

(59:48):
Like to do this joke, Mr. Bunny.Of course I didn't.
OK. Well, I'm going to read you the
question, and then you're going to read the answer to the joke.
Yeah. All right, so I'm going to cover
this part up, and I'm just goingto read this first part.
What is a frog's favorite? Candy Frog's favorite?

(01:00:10):
Let's see, I know a lot of frogs.
It's sure. I don't know what is a frog's
favorite candy. Are you ready to read the
answer? I am.
OK, let's do it. It's right here, Says a Lolli
hop. A Lolli hop?
Oh, boy, that's a good one. I love that joke.

(01:00:32):
Thank you, Lincoln. Thanks, Lincoln.
Gosh, I sure hope I get some more funny jokes.
I love funny jokes. Well, actually since I'm here, I
was wondering if I could ask youa question.
You seem to be very knowledgeable about certain
things. And, well, I heard.

(01:00:54):
Did you say it about, you know, having little pesky friends in
your life. And I have a pesky friend
myself. You do?
Yes. He's my cousin.
He's little, my little cousin. He's always getting in my
business. Let's say I wanted to draw a
big, beautiful picture of a carrot.
Yeah. You know what happens?
He wants to draw a carrot, too, but he can't do it.

(01:01:15):
He's just like scream, scream, scream.
Or let's say I'm reading a book.My favorite book?
Bunicular Chris. Bunicula.
Yes, I love that book. Well, guess what he wants to do?
He wants to read the book too. But I'm reading it.
I don't like it. No, no, no, no, no, Mr. Bunny.
So I want you to tell me what isthe best way to make him leave.

(01:01:38):
Oh, to to make him go. Away.
Yeah, that's right, Mr. Bunny. I'm not sure.
Do you? I'm not sure that's the kindest
thing to do. Well, it would be kind for me,
Mr. Buggin. Well, let's, let's talk about
some of the strategies that we talked about with our friends

(01:01:59):
today in this little episode of the Power Hour, OK?
And let's see if those things help you.
One, we talked about understanding the planes of
development. Now, you said this little cousin
of yours is younger. Not that kind of plain Mr.
Funny, OK, But we're talking about like developmental stages.

(01:02:25):
Now this cousin is younger. Than yes, she right, he's a very
pesky little guy. And you?
Said that he scribbles a lot. Oh boy, he always scribbling.
He. Really wants to be with you all
the time. I know and he.
Wants to read the books you're. Reading.
I hear ya. That's right.
Well, it sounds like in his developmental stage, maybe he's
trying to learn from you. What?

(01:02:47):
Do you mean like what? What could he possibly?
He just wants to bug me, that's all it is.
He wants to learn how to bug me even more.
I don't think so, but I think he's wanting to learn how to do
the things that you're doing. Like what kinds of things?
Well, you said that you could draw a carrot and you can't draw
1 yet. Sounds like maybe he's trying to

(01:03:08):
learn how because you can. Really.
What do you think you could do to help him learn how to draw
his own carrot better for him? I don't know.
I could. Well, I guess I could show him
how to hold his. Is he, is he, you know, crayon?
Yeah. Because sometimes he just grabs

(01:03:29):
it with his big fist and goes, that's not how you do it.
That's you got to hold in your hand and then carefully raw.
That's right, you could show himhow to hold a crayon and he
probably would learn a lot if you gave him a lesson on that
and taught him. What do you mean?
Like say, hey, you got to hold your crayon like this.
Not like this. Well.

(01:03:50):
Maybe just just showing him how.Show him how you hold it and let
him watch you OK? Yeah.
That's kind of a bad idea. Fun thing to try.
You could ask him to teach you how to do something that he
knows how to do. He's going to teach me

(01:04:10):
something. Yeah, maybe he could teach you
how to scribble better. I.
Guess that's possible. He is really good at jumping.
Well, maybe you'd like to ask for a lesson on jumping.
You think you think he gave me alesson?
I mean, he's a little guy. He doesn't know anything.
I mean, I guess he knows how to jump.
But. Well, sometimes that's the.

(01:04:30):
Role of the older person is to learn how to teach and let a
younger person teaching you something too.
All right, well, all right. You know what, I want to try it.
It sounds, it sounds crazy to me.
Personally, I think that we should just cover them with
stamps and put them in the mailbox.
That's what I would have guessedfirst, but.

(01:04:55):
Try it, try it and let us know how it goes.
All right, I'm going to try it and then I will let you know.
You know what, I'm going to try it because I actually like him.
He's a nice, he's a nice Bunny. Just maybe it'd be fun to play
with him instead of him, like scribbling.
Maybe. Maybe you're right.
You know what? I'm going to try it.

(01:05:17):
All right. Thank you, love.
It bye, bye bye Mr. Bunny. He seemed a little skeptical at
the end there, but I think he. Was a little skeptical, but
maybe. You want him over?
I don't know. I would really be curious to
hear what he has to say next time he comes.
Yeah, because I think if he tries it, you know, it's not

(01:05:39):
going to be like, an instant experience, like a successful
experience. But, you know, if he opens his
heart, Yeah, it's pesky when youhave little guys around the
house. So, you know, my sister when I
was a little, always bugging me.I bet your brother what?
I've been hearing. OK, well maybe I was the bugging

(01:06:01):
1. Well, it is a big challenge, but
it is a part of the madness thatis the joy of having children
and homeschooling too. So the Montessori method will
give you techniques to like leaninto that.
But at the end of the day, part of it is about talking with your

(01:06:23):
kids and helping them understandwhat's going on as well and
empowering your older kids to feel like a part of the
solution. So not just telling them to, you
know, stop complaining or something like that, but instead
acknowledging that it is frustrating and then, you know,
problem solving on what you might do together.
That's right, that can often be a good solution.

(01:06:44):
Well, guess what? We got some mail too.
We did, We did. This one comes from.
Melissa and I want to answer. This question because this whole
episode I hope gave was would give Melissa some good ideas but
I want to respond specifically to some of her concerns.
She writes OK here's a question I've been struggling with as

(01:07:08):
I've been planning for my 3 kidsand her kids are three, five and
almost 9. She says the foundational card
system that we have our Montessori planning cards, says
to pick 2 cards for my two and two to three-year old practical
life and sensorial. This is true.
She says in one year with my twoand two to three-year old

(01:07:29):
working on level one will only address whatever level 1 lessons
and the other 6 units are in ourmonthly thematic packets.
Right. OK, but a year's worth of theme
may not cover. All.
Of the 25 reading and writing lessons, that's true.
That is 100% true. She says yeah.
My 3 to 4 year old may be ready to move on to level 2 work the

(01:07:51):
next year, or would have been ifI had covered the prerequisite
lessons from level 1, she says. I know it's not supposed to be
rigid like IE we shouldn't be covering every lesson in the
lesson. Numbers follow the child, not
the year. I don't feel the pressure to
complete all of the science, humankind, or art lessons from a
given level, but it does feel like I should be striving to

(01:08:13):
complete all of the reading and writing math for each level
according to my child's readiness, as each level is
really foundational and prerequisite to the subsequent
levels. Also true.
Also true. She says maybe this is my
traditional education shining through, but I do feel that need
to have my child be exposed all the concepts presented in the
math and reading units through level 6 at some point as well as

(01:08:38):
grammar and geometry. The other 4 units I feel more
relaxed about covering them all in lower elementary.
I recognize my child may not be ready to complete all these
lessons by age 9. What I don't know is how would
even find time to present all ofthese lessons by age 9 for my
child who is ready for them but is limited by me and my ability

(01:08:58):
to cram it All in all while trying to balance this with
group meetings outside the home,time in nature, open play,
sports, extracurricular, etcetera.
It sounds like the life of a typical homeschooler, I'll tell
you, she says. I haven't found the magic
balance yet. There's a lot of good questions
in there, so many. Good questions.

(01:09:19):
So what kind of advice would yougive Melissa just off the top of
your head? Home school, mom, 3 kids at
home, multi age learning is going on but it's just all kind
of overwhelming. Yeah, though it's really common,
I mean. So, a couple ideas.
First off, you're absolutely right to emphasize reading and

(01:09:40):
writing and math and the relatedsubjects Grammar and Geometry
for the L'Oreal, right? For L'Oreal especially.
Yeah. And that's because they're
really first amongst equal. They are a pathway to any other
learning. If you can read, you can read
about any topic. If you could do, if you could do
math, you learn the computational skills, you'll

(01:10:02):
learn logic and reasoning that will help you problem solve,
right. So they are doorways into a
wider world. And on top of that, if you're
doing the constellation themes, you will cover those other
subject areas of the sciences, humankind, the Rs, right?
You're not going to cover them every single lesson in them, but

(01:10:25):
that's OK, right? You're going to cover them well
enough to give your child a really broad experience.
Now that being said. Your child might developmentally
not be ready for the same paper letters for quite some time.
And it's OK. In fact, we say not to teach
writing with the the metal in sets.

(01:10:46):
A lot of Montessori schools willnot introduce those until age 4,
you know, at the very earliest. And we have had members
introduce them at age 2. And so you do you.
You follow your child the way your child is growing and
developing. But just in general, we say that
that sensitive age for being interested in learning how to

(01:11:09):
read and write and do math, it comes later, not earlier.
And that the emphasis on the practical life and sensorial, as
David mentioned, is setting thatgroundwork.
But it might take longer than you think, yeah.
Yeah. The other thing that comes to
mind is you mentioned that your child said something like, it

(01:11:30):
feels like, yeah, they may be ready to move to level 2 next
year. What I have it would have been
if I covered the prerequisites from level one.
That's not the right approach. So you don't need to complete
level 1 to move to level 2. You want to follow your child
and push them to whatever level is right.
And this goes back to the whole like age and grade level thing

(01:11:52):
that we started with in the episode.
It doesn't matter if your child is 3, If they're ready to do
level 2 work, give them level 2 work.
It's not age 4 work, it's level 2 work.
If your 4 year old is not ready for level 2 work, they're still
working on level 1 work and something else, that's OK too.
It's not 4 year old work, it's level 1.

(01:12:13):
Everyone starts at level 1 and progresses forward.
So you don't have to complete every lesson in a level before
you can move forward. It's not required.
What you'd want to make sure is that they have the underlying
skills that are that are represented in the level.
And if they could do level 2 work, then they obviously have a
level of knowledge. We would say that it's at the

(01:12:34):
building level. The Deb system that we have,
they're at a building level already and are ready to add on,
build on top of it at the next level.
So just move them forward. It's important to remember that
Montessori is a spiral curriculum.
So you will notice this most specifically, like in our math

(01:12:55):
materials where we introduce phase 10 with the golden beads.
We reintroduce it again with thestamp game, again with the bead
frame, and then we go back to the golden beads, you know, to
teach another concept and we canjust keep using the same
materials to teach the same mathconcepts.
Why do we do this? We do it over and over and over
and over. Even in the sensorial area, the

(01:13:16):
practical life area, you'll be repeating, your child will be
repeating the same skills on thesame concepts.
And it's to give children enoughtime over years, not, you know,
in a specific one year time frame, but over a long time
frame to practice concepts. And to, you know, we don't

(01:13:36):
really like to use the word master of them, but like to have
that internal mastery. You know, it's not our analysis
of the mastery, it's their self analysis of mastery.
And it comes through lots of repetition and practice.
Now here's the catch. Some children will need so much
practice that they will need allof the lessons in every single

(01:13:57):
level. Right, they might need to repeat
the multiple. They might need to repeat those
lessons multiple times before they're ready to move on to the
next level. And some children are going to
to jump, you know, so we noticedthis with our own kids too, in
certain subject areas. Sometimes they would it's in
fact, it's not unusual at all tosee kids race through specific

(01:14:19):
lessons during a, a particular time period.
Let's talk about those sandpaperletters again with early
reading. You've got 14 year old, right?
You give this child 3 sandpaper letters at a time.
You're playing the What's missing game.
You're playing the knock knock game with them.
You're you're revisiting them every day.

(01:14:41):
And your child looks at those 3 letters and every time you show
them, maybe it says and you showit to them and they're like, I
don't remember, is it like days go by?
You maybe add one extra letter. After they've learned those 3
letters, now you've got 4 you and introduce another 3.
So maybe now you've got 7 and they're just working through

(01:15:04):
them so slowly. OK, another child, same 4 year
old, you give them 3 letters in minutes later they've memorized
all of them, right? And they're ready for another
three. You give them another three.
They've memorized all of those and they're doing so well.
You give them five more and theymemorize those and before you
know it, within like 2 weeks they've memorized the entire

(01:15:26):
alphabet right back to that same4 year old who was going so
slowly. Another six months later, they
could be doing the same thing. And then you're just like
skipping through. So children do not grow in
development, develop in a in a very rhythmic way, in a

(01:15:47):
prescriptively rhythmic way thatwe expect.
And you mentioned already like, you know, it's not supposed to
be rigid, but you're fighting against that nature and
yourself, the expectation that your children are going to be
progressing sequentially and linearly through.
We talked about this often that we expect learning to go like

(01:16:07):
this, right? We expect it like you start here
and then over time it's like a perfect little graph and
eventually you get up here, but actually learning looks more
like this, it looks like, and then stasis for a long period
and then another jump. You know, it's just erratic.

(01:16:29):
Learning is erratic, it's unpredictable, and it's per
subject area. It's completely unpredictable.
And so in our curriculum, we give you the six levels for
every single subject area to give you a general guideline of
where you're going so that you're never at a loss for ideas
for what to do. But your child's development,

(01:16:49):
like it is going to be starting,stopping and plateauing
normally, you know? So it is really important to
remember that the levels one through 6 are not grade levels.
They are not even in a Montessori classroom.
Even if you know there's ages, if there's like 1st through 3rd

(01:17:10):
graders in one room, that's great, but it still should not
be prescriptively per age, right?
That's just not the way Montessori.
I mean, we created the six levelguide to help guide
homeschooling. That's right.
However, I will tell you that itis not hard to find the
benchmarks for your local schooldistrict, especially if you live

(01:17:32):
in the United States. They are all published online.
We were just in Texas and like when we worked in Texas and we
were teaching in Texas, we were super familiar with the Teeks.
You know, it's not hard if you're, if you know your child's
going to take a star test in Texas in a certain grade level
or that they would take it. I don't know if it's required

(01:17:52):
for homeschoolers or not. Maybe it is, maybe it isn't,
don't live in Texas anymore. But like it's not hard to find
the practice tests. It's not hard to find the
standards. You want to talk about the
Common Core standards that they're not hard to find.
And so you can find them. You know, if you've got an
almost 9 year old and you're worried that your child isn't on

(01:18:14):
level per the public school district that you're, you know,
you would be going to. It's something that could give
you Peace of Mind because Montessori, the whole curriculum
of Montessori is high level. It's really high level, you
know, and it's on purpose to give children who are very
interested in one particular subject area a long runway, you

(01:18:40):
know, but if your child isn't particularly interested in that
subject, then maybe like, you know, they kind of stop it, like
the basic knowledge of it. And that's fine.
You know, we would say that's perfectly fine.
What we're looking for is to children to find that spark,
that joy of learning, to want togo deep in the lower elementary

(01:19:00):
curriculum into one topic. And so your almost 9 year old
should be at this point startingto kind of specialize in their
interest or their skills. You're probably really seeing
that emerge in one way or another.
It might just be like, this is akid that is tends to be more
interested in this kind of thingthan this kind of thing.

(01:19:21):
So it doesn't have to be super specific, but if you're worried
about just like, are we meeting the minimum guidelines for grade
levels, it's not hard to find that out.
And I guarantee you, like, whatever the standards are,
they're going to match to what we're doing in Montessori.
In fact, it's probably likely that the level 6 material is

(01:19:43):
beyond what? Way beyond Yeah, your.
Typical third grader. For sure.
Would be expected to know. For sure.
And in fact, when we went to theconference in Texas, we had
parents come up to our booth andthey were looking through our
materials and they were asking about it and we were telling
them this is very high level. You know, so your children will
learn a lot about it and. Go through pre algebra if you.

(01:20:04):
Want that's right. And some of those parents that
came up, they did have like maybe a 5 year old at home, but
I remember a few of them also had teens at home.
And when they looked at our lessons, you know, the lesson,
the same lessons that we showed you earlier today from Wheel or
a Giant, they were like, Oh yeah, my teenager would love
these. And I think that that really

(01:20:25):
says a lot. We hear that in our community.
Yeah. So you're, you know, I think
what I would tell you, Melissa, most of all is to try to have
some confidence, get get a little more confidence in what
you're doing. You're already doing a great
job. You've got three kids, you're
working through the foundationallessons, and you're doing the

(01:20:47):
themes as well. Like your children are growing
and learning in leaps and bounds, and more than likely
like they're perfectly exactly where they need to be, even if
you were looking at your state benchmarks.
The goal isn't to cover the lessons, the goal is to educate
the child. The lessons can be a pathway to
that. They don't have to do all the
lessons to be educated. Trust in your child and yourself

(01:21:10):
and you will go far. That's right.
All right. All right, friends, I hope that
was helpful. Now wait a minute, hold on.
There's a very special day out there, friends.
I know we have a few of in the community, but not only was this
a day of muted technical problems and also of bio breaks,
it is also a very special day inthe Hargis home.

(01:21:34):
That's true. It is our 25th wedding
anniversary and so I want to sayI love you and it's so good to
be on our journey together. We've been together for well
over 25 years now and I'm so glad to be your partner.

(01:21:55):
And on that note, we will say have a great day.
We will see you next week for Part 2 of our series on multi
age children. That's right all.
Right. Love you all.