Program of a Montessori School

Pictures of the Day] Montessori school setting! This is the classroom that they work in.

Mood] Aware

Weather] Sunny and cold!

Currently] In my room

Quote of the day: "Our deeds determine us, as much as we determine our deeds."

So our studio's project this semester is a Montessori school. We visitted one up north in Lake Forest to get an idea of what the school and its philosophy promotes. Basically the Montessori way of learning to envelop a student in a living working environment where they have free reign to complete what is known as "work cycles". Basically the classroom is packed with tools for students to research on their own, beads to learn mathematics, play kitchen materials to practice life skills and more. The child is expected to find some point of interest and to work for three hours before breaking and then if the child does the whole day, then they will complete another cycle after the break. The Montessori school that we visitted looks like the classroom is divided into little pockets. Each small portion of the classroom focuses on one thing, like art or reading, etc... I think it's actually an awesome idea. What the teachers we talked to really emphasized was the ability of students to really jump in to things on their own without being prompted. The teachers act more like guides and just provide the materials that the children need to learn with or desire to play with.

The Montessori school program that we were given in class is divided into classrooms, administrative areas, and possibly gardens. When we visitted though, we found that this was not the case. There were classrooms, but like I said, they all had the different subjects within them. So instead of having one library for all students, each classroom had its own library inside. It was very in teresting to see their interactions.

We started focusing on how to design and organize the spaces differently to match with an idea that we wanted to explore. I thought that the philosophy of learning interested me the most, so I began to develop a way to organize the space based on the different learning types. Kinesthetic, visual, and auditory learners need to have different environments to be able to work in otherwise they can not be very productive. By taking that into consideration, I was able to look at the site that we were given and start to isolate factors and create conditions that would respond to these different portions of the site. What I wanted to do was to create a set of rules based on how the site effected the way of learning that I wanted, how it would be detrimental and how it would be beneficial.

I made a TON of models, so there are way too many pictures. They all describe program and site ideas. Here are some of them:


I really enjoy visitting the sites because it gives me an idea of what I could be working with and what examples there are in the real world. :)

That's all exciting for now
~Jaye