Montessori Alliance
- Creating a structure to support & strengthen Early Years services in Ireland
- Providing a rich online knowledge base for practitioners & parents.
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Conference – Cork
Posted by admin on May 18, 2012
Cork City Childcare Committee and Cork County Childcare Committee are hosting a conference called ‘Potential of a Puddle‘ on Saturday the 16th of June 2012. The conference will address the issues of risky play, transient art, fire & tools and play affordance. The key speaker will be Kate Hookham from Mindstretchers. Some of you will have heard of Mindstretchers but for the benefit of those of you who haven’t here’s a short synopsis of who they are taken directly from their website.
Under New Management
Posted by admin on May 15, 2012
What happens when you take over an existing service? What do you need to consider? These were some of the questions one of our readers asked us to answer recently.
The following are some helpful tips compliled by Pamela Purcell for setting up or taking over a Montessori setting. This is not a definitive guide as it is not specific to any one individual set up and each business model is unique, especially where previous ownership is involved.
Choice
Posted by admin on May 12, 2012
Having choice in what we do, what we eat, what we wear is something, we as adults, take for granted. Sometimes the range of choice we have to choose from can make picking an option very difficult. This usually hits home for me 
when I’m trying to decide what to have for lunch just after I’ve restocked the fridge…..so many possibilities present themselves that I feel overwhelmed and in the end I give in and settle for a quick plain sandwich.
I’ve had many years of experience in making choices so I can only imagine how baffling making a choice can be for children if they are presented with too many great options. Read the rest of this post.
The Unnecessary ‘U’ Sound
Posted by admin on May 4, 2012
Our blogger today is Pamela Purcell who has been a teacher and tutor for longer than she cares to remember.
Something I have noticed over my career as a Montessori Teacher is a tendency for some children when they go to word build using the Movable Alphabet, to insert an unnecessary vowel ‘u’ sound in a world like mat or cat. It puzzled me for a long time until I managed to trace this back to when they were first introduced to the phonetic sounds of the consonants. Some Montessori Tutors, Teachers and Students add an unnecessary vowel ‘u’ sound to a consonant, they say ‘mu’ instead of just isolating the consonant and letting it stand by itself.
The Child’s Perspective
Posted by admin on April 30, 2012
One of the aims of Aistear is to give children a sense of belonging not only within the Early Years setting but within their wider community. I’ve come across practitioners like Kierna Corr from Learning for Life who takes her children out on adventures where they explore their local shops and supermarkets. Aistear itself suggests using ‘the journey of a letter’ as one of the ways to connect children with their community.
The other day while waiting in line at my local Post Office I observed a girl of about 3 and her granny waiting in the queue. The girl was clutching an envelope and chatted excitedly to her granny about what she was going to do; give the lady the money, get the stamp, stick the stamp on to the letter and post the letter in the letterbox. Read the rest of this post.
Early Years Education Show Review
Posted by admin on April 25, 2012
Our Guest Blogger Meave Dunne kindly agreed to write a review of the EYE show in Dublin. Meave is in the process of opening her first school and is aiming for next September as her start date. She’s hoping everything will go smoothly and we’re sure you’ll join us in wishing her all the best for her venture.
‘Our first impressions on entering the hall were that it was well laid out, colourful and bright and we were looking forward to visiting each stand.
We had pre-registered online for free entry and upon arriving we picked up our name badges from the girls at the reception desk. We received a free cloth bag, with “Childcare.ie” and “Irish Parent” magazines included, which we found useful for putting our leaflets and fliers into while visiting each stand. Read the rest of this post.
Early Years Ireland Conference April 2012
Posted by admin on April 21, 2012
Our guest blogger who agreed to write a review of the Early Childhood Ireland Conference is Karen Higgins. And it’s thanks to her that if like me you didn’t attend the conference you will still be able to get a flavour of the day 
The Early Childhood Ireland conference 2012 which is being held in Dublin this weekend proved to be a really brilliant experience and it was great to meet so many people from the early years sector
There were lots of guest speakers. Doctor Michelle Share, Children’s Research Centre, Trinity College Dublin, opened procedures with a couple of comments on health and it’s correlation with early years, quite an interesting topic. Read the rest of this post.
What’s New?
Posted by admin on April 17, 2012
We’ve been busy creating and uploading new resources to the site & we’ve been so busy that we’ve forgot to tell you about them!
After a very slow start our Aistear section is coming on in leaps and bounds. We’ve completed linking Aistear’s Learning Goals for each theme to Individual Montessori Exercises in Practical Life. So now under the Practitioners tab you’ll find the Aistear’s Principals & Themes section with each Theme in it’s own sub division. Both Well Being & Communicating (comparison and individual Montessori Exercises) are available freely on the site but the sections for Identity & Belonging and Exploring & Thinking are limited to Subscribers only. Read the rest of this post.
April/May 2012 Newsletter
Posted by admin on April 9, 2012
We’ve just released our April/May Newsletter and it’s the biggest one yet! We were fortunate to have some great contributions from some very busy people who found time in their hectic schedules to share their knowledge and experiences with us.
Denise Flood works as the Academic Director and Head of the Early Years Department of Portobello Institute, Dublin. She, along with her team of Happy Hearts have recently returned from a trip to Pune, India. Denise and her colleagues have been training Montessori Teachers in BSSK Orphanage and on this trip they set up and opened a Montessori School. Denise’s story gives an insight into what it’s like to travel all the way from Ireland to India and experience such a different culture. Read the rest of this post.
What Montessori Alliance is
Posted by admin on March 24, 2012
We recently received an email asking us exactly what Montessori Alliance does and thought it was a good opportunity to let everyone know a bit more about us. Montessori Alliance was set up to support people who work with children whether they’re owners, managers, practitioners or students. Our mission is to help Childhood Professionals to deliver a quality service.
We have found people who work with children in a small setting can feel very isolated and lonely and although they enjoy working with children they can, at times, run out of steam and get bogged down in the day to day running of their centre.
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