Hurricane Maria devastated the infrastructure of Puerto Rico – including many schools. On the main island, there are three Wildflower schools within the commonwealth’s public education system: Alheli, Flamboyan and Girasol. From our school leaders there, we have learned that our schools, teachers and families, like so many other Puerto Ricans, are without roofs, electricity, food and fresh water.

We’ve been looking for ways to support our team, and so far have shipped three generators, fans, water filtration systems, batteries and lanterns. We are now starting to send non-perishable food for students to have at school.

Our Wildflower community, which connects to Puerto Rico from our schools and offices in Massachusetts, Rhode Island, Minnesota and elsewhere on the mainland, is eager to support our schools directly. We have been inspired by our teacher leaders who – in the face of near-complete destruction – have shared that they are eager to provide a safe place for students and families to learn and be together as many of them are currently without homes.

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Erin McKay is co-head of school at Wildflower Montessori in Cambridge, Massachusetts, the first Wildflower school. Erin attended a Montessori school from age 3 to 12.

For Montessori’s art-filled classrooms, back-to-school means also going back to the studio. We view our materials and presentations less as a curriculum and more as a way to cultivate the most aesthetically pleasing space that will invite the child to tap into her innate curiosity and work with her hands. Doing so leads to discoveries that define us a civilization, as Dr. Montessori wrote in The Absorbent Mind: “If we try to think back to the dim and distant past…what is it that helps us reconstruct those times, and to picture the lives of those who lived in them? It is their art… it is thanks to the hand, the companion of the mind, that civilization has arisen.”

Much as an artist enters their studio, a child walks into the Montessori environment in the morning, the whole day a blank canvas. In the span of our three-hour work cycle in the morning, the children have an open-ended invitation to create, manipulate and explore the materials that have been presented to them.
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As we prepare for a new school year in the wake of the tragic and hateful events in Charlottesville, we wanted to share some resources that we’ve come across to help parents and educators dismantle racism and foster a more peaceful world. We’re sure this list is incomplete and invite you to share informative resources we’re missing so we can help tools like these spread.

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Peace education—supporting children to live in harmony with all living things and to become agents of peace-making in the world—is the foundation of our work as Montessorians. The peace rose is a common fixture in Montessori environments, passed back and forth during conflict resolution to practice deep listening. Too often though, we focus only on the bloom, without looking deeper to examine the roots.

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Kari Frentzel has been a Montessori elementary educator for the past ten years following her first career as an engineer and manager in industry and healthcare. She is co-head of school at Wild Rose Montessori, a Wildflower school in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

The school year is winding down. Teachers feel it as we squeeze in our final lessons and encourage students to finish projects. Students feel it as they prepare for year-end special events and make plans for getting together with friends once school is out. And certainly parents feel it as they rush to finalize plans for summer camps, vacations, lessons and babysitters.

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“So, what exactly makes a Wildflower school unique?” a parent familiar with Montessori education asked recently. This is a difficult question to answer concisely, and it’s one we get a lot at Wildflower. Every day, we get inquiries from people across the United States and around the world who want to learn more about our unique approach. Continue Reading

This blog has also been cross-posted on the Today Show’s Parenting Community Page.

My dog and I took two kinds of walks. One was about taking care of business: The dog needed to walk and eliminate. I was in charge, and the goal was either to move fast and get exercise or to complete the walk as quickly as possible, because the weather was bad or I had a lot to do. The other walk was about making the dog happy. She set the pace, chose how long to sniff each tree and did her eliminating.

The other walk was about making the dog happy. She set the pace, chose how long to sniff each tree and did her eliminating when she was ready, with no pleading or commanding from me.

As a parent, many experiences with our children fall into one of these two categories. There are times when expediency and getting things done is essential to the success of the family. Getting out of the house and arriving on time at school and work is one of those experiences. Washing the car on an open Saturday afternoon can fall into the second category. For parents trying to build their child’s independence, we try to create environments and systems that allow many parts of the day to feel like the second type of walk while still getting things done.

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Among our most important roles at the Wildflower Foundation is to till any rocky soil that keeps schools from opening and thriving, heads of school from leading and teaching and students from exploring and learning. As anyone who works in education knows, you can easily get sidetracked or dispirited by the many operational tasks required to operate a school.

One of our goals at Wildflower is to ease the administrative tasks taken on by our dedicated Teacher Leaders by building tools and services that allow them to open and operate thriving school environments. Since teachers run Wildflower schools entirely, the tasks that administrators do in traditional school settings need to be handled especially efficiently.

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