Your Own Little Schoolhouse
I'm Aubrey Hargis, Montessorian and mom of two. Montessori is what guides me as a homeschooler. And it's what inspires me personally to lead a life that honors and respects the magic of childhood. It helps me to see our life with more clarity, because education is a journey we take with our children, and the opportunities for learning start over every day.
Hey Sweet Friend
Today we’re going to look at the one-room schoolhouse and see how we might use it as a metaphor to guide our Montessori homeschooling. We aren’t necessarily learning from the actual educational method that would happen inside that one-room schoolhouse, but the romanticized version of it, and think about how that might relate to how we educate our children in our own homes.
But first, if you are new here, I want to welcome you to Child of the Redwoods. I teach Montessori to parents all over the world, and my special focus is homeschooling because I am a homeschooler myself. However, just because I know how to talk about homeschooling doesn't mean that everyone who takes my courses is a full-time homeschooler!
I believe that every parent has the responsibility and the capability to educate their children, no matter how much time they're spending with them, no matter whether their children attend a school or whether they are home full time. Whether you know it or not, are your child's first and most important teacher. You'll often see that quote going around, “You are your child's first teacher,” but I also believe you are your child's most important teacher because you are the one that your child will model themselves after. It doesn't mean that they're going to become like you, doesn't mean that you're going to they're going to make all of your mistakes, it doesn't mean that they are going to choose a career path that's the same as yours at all. But it does mean that your impression of them is stronger than anybody else that they will come into contact with--any other teacher they are around, you are still the most important teacher.
In honor of the start of a new academic school year, I'd like to invite you to a free workshop that I am hosting on August 3 at 8 am PT. There will be a recording if you can't make it at the exact time, but I would love for you to come! I'll be telling my personal homeschooling story: how I got started with Montessori and why I chose to homeschool my children. I'll also lay down some truth bombs that I've learned along the way to help boost your confidence and usher you into the new year. This is an event that I love to throw around this time of year in August, as there are so many parents out there who are feeling a little insecure about their path, or are curious or testing the waters into homeschooling, trying to make that last-minute decision. I'm going to talk about socialization and all the challenges that can happen to homeschoolers so that you know what to expect ahead of time. I would love it if you would join me! If you're already on my newsletter, you'll get an invitation--you don't need to worry about signing up.
Meet Rachel
Today we’re introducing you to Rachel, a Montessori mom of three, living in Minnesota, USA! Rachel is an alumnus of both Homeschool of the Redwoods Primary AND Elementary, and a member of Constellation. You can learn more about Rachel here!
The Schoolhouse as Metaphor
The one-room schoolhouse is so romantic to me. I close my eyes, and I can see the perfect little schoolhouse. It's probably based on the shows I watched as a kid, maybe Little House on the Prairie or, I don't know, just these romantic old movies that I remember watching as a child. I can see it in my mind, a little red house in a great big green grassy field with oak trees around, with lots of room to run around and play. A little path leads up to the schoolhouse, and inside I can see a little stove with fire, to keep it all nice and toasty warm through all kinds of weather. I can see the wooden floors and imagine what it would be like to walk barefoot on those nice floors and to feel myself part of this community in this intimate way.
Now, the reality of the one-room schoolhouse is not all romantic. Certainly, things have changed in the field of education and things should change because the one-room schoolhouse was still very much a teacher-centric approach to education. You have the teacher at the chalkboard instructing you have the students at their desks, supposedly being quiet and doing their work. You might pull some students to the front to work with them in a group or to have them demonstrate their knowledge, maybe recite the poem out loud. There's a lot of Charlotte Mason vibes in this. It tends to be very old-school, rustic, and romantic in feel.
I definitely don't want to go back there to a place where children are sitting at their desks copying from the chalkboard --that is not the kind of education that I believe in. What I can take from it is I can just take the idea of it: the romanticized version of it, the metaphor and think about what good things are part of it that were not part of the schools that I taught at, or the schools that I went to as a child.
What We Can Learn from the One-Room Schoolhouse
I went to some little Montessori schools that I loved and cherished that very much aligned to the one-room schoolhouse. One was a classroom that was actually inside a mama's living room. The guide had this big old farmhouse and we had our little classroom in there. That's where I attended kindergarten. In Lower Elementary, I attended school in a house that had been converted! It was very comforting.
So one benefit of the one-room schoolhouse would be that it is multi-age. In your own house, I know maybe some of you are thinking right now “But my house is not multi-age!” Maybe you only have one child or maybe just two children. You don't have a big range of ages like they would in a Montessori classroom. That’s OKAY! You are much older than your child, and I imagine that anyone else that you live with is older than your child. You might even have some members of the extended family that are younger than your child. So remember that a multi-age environment can mean vast generational age gaps. It doesn't just have to be your child and then the child who's a year older or a year younger.
As homeschoolers, we have benefited from the multi-age experience at park days, as well! So not just in our own house, we also attend playdates with other kids that are of different ages and go to park days where there might be little ones running around and teenagers hanging out as well. There's so much opportunity when you create a multi-age environment. The older students are going to take on the role of teacher more, so there's going to be less work for you to do as the teacher. And I imagine in those romantic one-room schoolhouses, the teacher probably used the older students to teach the younger students a lot.
You're probably already doing it. When you share your knowledge with your children, that’s multigenerational learning! Someone in our community recently asked whether or not we’re supposed to leave our children’s questions unanswered. It’s true, we want children to discover the answers and learn how to do good research on their own. But you're going to want to share so much of your own experiences and knowledge with your children, too. So sometimes you will answer questions: “Oh, I don't know! How do you think you could find out?” Other times you will offer “Would you like to learn more about that?” or “Actually, I had this experience, would you like to hear a story about it?” and just share that experience with your child. These are the beautiful things that can happen with multi-age spaces, even cross generations, that cannot necessarily happen in same-age classrooms.
If you have two five-year-olds and neither of them knows the answer to a question, they might come and ask an adult. If you had a five-year-old and an eight-year-old, you know, or a five-year-old and a three-year-old, those kinds of age spans are going to be able to better support each other in discovery and learning. You can let go of needing to have precisely same-age peers--you just have to expand your view of the way we can share knowledge and educate each other. Multi-age environments are research-backed strategies for learning and they work.
Another benefit is the variety of movement and freedom of movement offered in a schoolhouse setting. Mostly here I'm thinking of the freedom of movement that could happen in that great big field that I imagined outside of my one-room schoolhouse. The gift of freedom of movement and that playfulness could happen when children are uncaged into the wild. It makes me feel like I want to provide more of that kind of experience for my children. If we’re looking at this as a metaphor, we can apply it to our own scenario. What can I do as a parent who lives in an urban environment? I can look for big fields to take my child to rather than confining them only to the little playground. Instead of the playground today, this time I want to go and find the place in our city where there's a piece of land where they could run free.
Inside my house, I can think about how can I prepare my house so that there's lots of room for that freedom of movement in the house, even if we are kind of mushed together. how can I provide an environment where I get the most movement possible? This might mean something as simple as providing a great big rug area for work, or taking the baby gates up and allowing movement from the kitchen to the bedroom to the living room, really allowing the movement to go through the whole house. Learning can be anywhere in your house.
I also think of the warmth, comfort, and coziness of the schoolhouse. The nice woodstove where it's all toasty and warm. How can I make our home more comforting to children? How can I make sure that they are comfortable in it, so that I have things that are on their height and their level, not just putting our materials up high where I have to get them down, but making sure that things are easily accessible? If I want my children to do things more like more reading, I'm going to go out of my way to create more comforting little reading areas for them; maybe adding a little pillow and a blanket in an area of the home that was less than cozy.
These don’t need to be permanent decisions about how to structure your home. Our home is always very fluid and changing. I am always rearranging things based on what my children are interested in and what is best for us as a family. It is fun to shake things up a little bit! So you might just take this as a challenge from this episode and look around your house and see what kind of little nook you can create for your children. It could be a little surprise, or maybe your child is in on it. Maybe they see you gathering some pillows and ask what you’re doing, and you let them know: I want to make a little cozy corner somewhere for me to read! Then you're just going to wander around your house and find a little corner and you're going to stuff your little pillows, bring a little basket of books, and then you Nestle into your little area and you invite your child! It can bring something really fun and unique to your homeschool life just right there at the moment.
I see so many parents, looking at Instagram, seeing these beautiful perfect spaces, and getting all caught up and feeling like they have to make permanent decisions and to have permanent furniture in their house that will grow with their child that will always look ”Montessori.” But Montessori doesn't look like anything. It's a lifestyle, and comfort is part of it, making sure everyone in your home is comfortable. Think about how you can bring that little hearth area into your homes, some somewhere unique or different: maybe the kitchen or the dining room, or, I don't know, maybe you're going to fill the bathtub with pillows and read in there (as long as you can trust your children not to turn the water on, which mine totally would have).
The one-room schoolhouse is rustic and simplistic. The focus is on the people, right? It's on the children inside, and the teacher being part of that community. It's not on the stuff that's inside the schoolhouse. This is different in a Montessori classroom, which we visualize as being full of shelves and full of stuff. The one-room schoolhouse is focused on practicality: literally, what do you need to learn? You need pencils, some paper, and each other. Just by having a dialogue with each other, by getting creative and writing, learning to write and draw, putting on plays and interacting with each other, and running around run wild and free, children learn. That is a valid path to education.
Sometimes, I think we think we have to provide everything that the child needs on a shelf, and that is a problem for us. It leads us down the path of being more consumerist, which is not a problem if you are a Montessori teacher inside a Montessori classroom. Back in the day, I had the idea that I would have a classroom in my home. If I did, and if I were having children coming over with parents paying to have children in a Montessori classroom, I would go out of my way to buy a bunch of stuff, classic Montessori classroom materials, because I would want to provide the authentic Montessori classroom experience. But when we teach our children at home in a family environment, we don't usually have 20 to 30 kids. Most of us just have a few children, and those children live together in our home with us, where we have all sorts of priorities. Our home is not necessarily only focused on being a classroom. We are a family and need other things. What could our children do with less? What if we chose a simple life instead? What if we made the focus the people and not the stuff? What would that look like? How would that change the way we feel about our homes?