Willowbrook Montessori Preschool
Preschool in Edenvale

We, loving andwarm environment, at Willowbrook Montessori vieweach child as special and unique and therefore treat them so. We provide a high quality, helping each child to reach their full potential in allareas of life.

Children are human beings to whom respec t is due, superior to us by reason of their innocence and of the greater possibilities of their future. Maria Montessori, founder of the Montessori Philosophy, was born in 1870, in 1896 she became Italy’s first woman medical doctor. Her special interest was in children and this led her to study the works of physicians such as Jean-Marc Gaspard Itard who worked at a Paris institution for deaf. Dr. Montessori believed that observation was just as important in education as in the treatment of the sick, and that the mind developed through the actions of the senses. In this school Montessori was now able to apply her methods to normal children. She believed that if her methods achieved such startling results with retarded children then these same methods would improve the performance of normal children. It was soon evident that all children were capable of achieving and becoming independent learners when taught by her methods. What she accomplished was to draw together the knowledge and methods from the disciplines of Education and Medicine. Through methodical observations of the children and their individual needs, she worked out the best means suited to teach them. Those children who had previously been abandoned as incapable of learning to function productively began showing the ability to care for themselves. The materials for learning were designed to be self-correcting and the children thrived on the activity involved with learning. In observing these children, Dr. Montessori noticed that after doing a particular activity, the children continued working with it over and over again, rather than putting it away. They seemed to work for the sake of working, not for reward. She also introduced reading and writing to these children of illiterate parents. This project marked a turning point in Maria Montessori’s career and life, and would soon cast her in the role of the world’s foremost female educator. Currently the United States has three thousand private Montessori Schools and a like number of educational programmes implementing or supplementing with Montessori in their classrooms. The Montessori Method has proven itself both adaptable and beneficial to all socioeconomic levels and specialities within the educational systems. Today there are numerous Montessori schools throughout South Africa as well as in Botswana, Swaziland, Zimbabwe and Namibia. Maria Montessori drew her ideas about how to educate and work with children from her observations of them at different stages in their development, and from her exposure to children of different cultures.