Montessori Movement

Movement is integral to learning, exploration, and discovery. Dr. Maria Montessori, the founder of Montessori pedagogy, considered respecting children’s need to move—and providing them the freedom to act on that need—to be an essential component in healthy development and meaningful education. She saw the work of everyday life as the means for intelligent movement, and found that movement without purpose was often fatiguing to children.

For young children, purposeful movement creates a positive feedback loop: more movement makes the child’s experiences in their environment more significant. These experiences help students develop better control of the body and higher levels of thinking, which in turn help them interact with their environment and the people within in more meaningful and more complex ways. At Wellan, we consider movement an essential part of the prepared classroom environment.

Purposeful movement at Wellan begins with allowing children to move freely around the classroom. They can sit anywhere they would like and they don’t have to ask a teacher’s permission to move around, use the bathroom, or have a snack. They choose an activity from a shelf and carry it to a mat or a table, and they clean it up and return it to where they found it when they’ve finished the work. Then, the process starts again–we call this a “work cycle.”

Movement in our Primary classrooms doesn’t stop there: Wellan’s Primary Practical Life curriculum includes lessons on Control of Movement related to gross motor skill development. These lessons involve increasingly challenging tasks, such as carrying chairs, full watering cans, and even sharp objects, like scissors. Our Practical Life curriculum also strengthens students’ fine motor skills through scooping, twisting, and squeezing lessons. By learning to control the movements of their body both large and small, students can move around a classroom, interact with others, write, draw, and use cutlery independently and intentionally.

In addition to these integral movement components of our Primary curriculum, our teachers incorporate other creative, movement-based materials into their classrooms. Primary students have opportunities to practice yoga using yoga cards and yoga mats; they can exercise balance and strength by moving heavy objects, like a jug full of rocks or a bag filled with weights, around the classroom. They develop stability through pushing activities, and they practice dexterity by using spoons to transfer small objects between baskets on opposite sides of the classroom and by imitating animal walks with the help of movement cards.

The Montessori Practical Life curriculum—and the movement we consider fundamental to it—is not just about teaching practical motor skills; it’s about nurturing the whole child. By encouraging children to engage in movement that is meaningful, purposeful, and intertwined with other curricular areas, we instill independence, confidence, and a strong, skill-focused foundation that will serve them well throughout their lives.