Teaching Montessori in the Home: Pre-School Years: The Pre-School Years

This is a great resource book to help parents in learning and teaching the Montessori way. The book came in great shape and very quickly.

If your looking for a good simple book to teach you how to homeschool the Montessori way this book is great! Simple but informative.

I was completely ignorant about the Montessori method when I bought this book. My son is almost 3 and as I had become tired of playing with cars and trucks and saying "no" all the time. I was looking for a more engaged kind of play-with-learning that we could do at home. This book is fantastic - outlining many activities and giving a taste of the Montessori approach that will let you decide whether you want to know more (I did!). Many Montessori programs are expensive but this book equips you to do the activities with home made equipment. It also inspires parents to teach their children about everyday activities in a more formal way - eg. my son loved the 'lesson' on how to open and close a drawer properly. He quickly 'taught' his panda and Maisie how to do it noiselessly and showed a great deal of pride in his new ability. What a change from throwing Hot Wheels cars at the wall!

This is a follow-up book to E. Hainstock's earlier work, Teaching Montessori in the Home: The Pre-school Years. She emphasizes reading and mathematics exercises in this book, and also specifically says that she intends these exercises to supplement children's learning experiences in a public school environment. As she did in her previous book, Hainstock displays the materials needed for the exercises and shows how to make them with items that are easily obtained. She again goes through the exercises in great detail, showing each level step by step. This book could be useful for someone teaching a school-aged child at home, but it lacks many items which are present in an elementary Montessori classroom, such as geography materials, botany and zoology materials, and art and music materials. For this reason it is best used as the author intended, as a supplement to a child's traditional educational experience.

Although there are more and more chartered and public schools using Montessori methods of teaching, most Montessori schools are private enterprises and must charge considerable tuition in order to stay open. If you are in favor of Montessori methods but are not able to send your child to a Montessori school, this is the book for you. The author of this book gives a brief history of Maria Montessori and how she discovered how children learn. It then goes on to describe the methods used, and gives detailed instructions for all the exercises and demonstrations which are used with preschool-aged children. The author also gives instructions for making many of the Montessori materials at home, with common household items or easy-to-obtain craft supplies. Throughout the book she offers many alternative suggestions for the materials which are typically used in a Montessori classroom. For instance, she mentions that a muffin tin can be used very effectively to sort buttons, and that a handtowel may be used for the workmat. Although this book was orginally written in the 1960's, most of the information is still useful today. The cover mentions that it has been updated and revised, but it is not clear what information has been changed in this edition. Still, overall this book is a wonderful resource for frugal parents who are able to teach their children at home, and who want to use Montessori methods to do so.