September 21st we celebeated the International Day of Peace. It was very joyfull to listen to the kids voices when they read theis messages of peace and then sent them to the blue sky.  Children are always looking for happiness, that is their natural way of living in harmony and peace. It is us, the adults who complicate the situations.

In this post we want to share a text written by Catherine McTamaney.  A beautiful reflexion to see that everytime is a good time to take good opportunities.

How complicated are the children. Really? We can track their development, predict emerging skills, judge their growth spurts, and chart their progress. Doesn’t it all look pretty much the same in the end? Children come to us, they learn with us, they move on. Three-year-olds become four-year-olds. Four-year-olds become five-year-olds. And so on.  And on.  And on.

Over time, over children, we grow more comfortable in what to expect, and so can better understand the child whose development is surprising. But in that comfort, we can sometimes project on to children what we expect of their development, when we should be responding to it because we have seen it concretely in each child. Don’t the children all become wild in the spring? Isn’t December always a difficult month? Doesn’t the best work of the year happen in January and February? Perhaps, Maybe not.

Remember the secret of childhood? What is the secret? That inner drive that push that we cannot perceive, that we can no longer understand because we are no longer children. In our loss of words, we seek other ways to demystify children. We track and predict and judge and chart. We put children’s development onto clearly defined, carefully laid-out spread-sheets for their parents to understand. We justify. Checklists are easier for teacher to complete. They are easier for parents to understand. But what about the details that don’t fit into the boxes? We overlook the unique wonderment of each child by focusing instead on the predictors that we have chosen. We come up with our list of the individual traits that we value, and we check off when the child has shown them, and so abdicate our duty to continue to try to perceive the uncountable galaxies within each child.

If we are unable to easily give details, if It is too difficult or time consuming to describe the unique wonderment of each child, we are not paying close enough attention. Montessori is based on the attention to each individual. Children come before our manuals. We should know, at any moment, the endless ways in which two children are different, or we are not watching carefully enough. Using a checklist for its simplicity has its merits. But don’t pretend that children are simple. Leave space for the unexpected, and know that every child is unexpected.

The secret of good teaching is to regard the child’s intelligence as a fertile field in which seed may be sown, to grow under the heat of flaming imagination. Maria Montessori.