Parent Education

Empowering Children

Empowering Children: The DIFFERENCES Between an ACTIVE and a PASSIVE Childhood can last a lifetime.

What do I mean by active vs. passive childhood? An active childhood is one where a child is encouraged to create and to think for themselves. They are expected to carry their weight at home. Even more, they are given free, unstructured time just to be alone, to be still. A passive childhood would then be the opposite.

Independence sometimes feels like a lofty but unobtainable goal for your child. I’m here to tell you it isn’t! Here are six strategies for empowering children.

Montessori Blog - Standardized Testing - Grumble Services Learning Resources Blog Post

Standardized Testing

Standardized testing plays a momentous role in our Nation’s education. The goal is to provide a measure to evaluate student performance across state, national and even global standards.

However, does our far-reaching focus on standardized test scores actually meet this lofty educational goal? This modern educational practice has ignited a national debate about the effectiveness of testing and how well they truly measure student achievement.

Thank you! Montessori Parent Education Blog - Montessori Blog - Grumble Services Montessori-inspired Elementary Learning Resources

Thank you

I would like to take this opportunity to thank you for supporting my educational undertakings over this past year. It is hard to believe one year has already come and gone for Grumble Services!

Since March 2020, I have updated and created many learning resources and Montessori materials in order to share them with the world. My goal was to have them available for both teachers and families by the beginning of the new school year. I’m happy to report I accomplished what I had set out to do.

hands united Montessori Parent Education Blog - Montessori Blog - Grumble Services Montessori-inspired Elementary Learning Resources

Montessori Parent Education

Montessori Parent Education is an integral part of each child’s academic success. As we all journey down this virtual-hybrid-physical school path together, I have rediscovered a few important truths. For me, the most critical of these is what we call parent education. I believe this is more critical now than ever before!

The Montessori Method is a unique educational approach nurturing a child’s intrinsic desire to learn. Montessori focuses on the whole child—their cognitive, social, emotional, and physical development.

Tree huggers Outdoor Learning Blog Grumble Services Blog elementary Montessori materials and learning resources

Outdoor Learning

Outdoor Learning includes the discovery, learning about and connecting to our natural world. Getting students outdoors, even just for 30 minutes, and engaged in environmental activities offers many benefits. This is true during the pandemic and beyond.

When I first started teaching about 13 years ago, I worked for a central city Milwaukee public school. Being a Montessori public school, our students had a slight advantage over many of their neighborhood peers. Connecting to the outdoors and the surrounding communities was already built into their learning curriculum.

Unschooling Movement Grumble Services Blog elementary Montessori materials and learning resources

Unschooling Movement

Unschooling Movement is an informal learning approach encouraging learner-chosen activities over adult-chosen ones. It was inspired by John Holt, widely regarded as the ‘father of unschooling.’ He served in the military during WWII. As a civilian, he served as a dissatisfied elementary school teacher.

Coining this term in the 1970s, Holt came to the conclusion reforming the American school system was an impossibility. He began recommending to parents to keep their children at home; to let them decide what to learn and when.

Project-based Learning Grumble Services Blog elementary Montessori materials and learning resources

Project-based Learning

Project-based Learning is a teaching method in which students learn by actively engaging in personally meaningful projects. These projects are designed to engross learners in solving a real-world problem or by answering a higher-level question.

Current research shows significant evidence of the effectiveness of project-based learning for all learners. This includes both young and old, all socio-economic levels and even those historically marginalized.

Montessori Blog - Brainstorming Graphic Organizer Elementary Montessori Creative Writing Worksheet Grumble Services Learning Resource

Writing strategies Part Two

Writing Strategies: Two Strategies to Help Young (and old) Writers. In my teaching experience, writing is one of the most difficult things to teach effectively. Teaching effective and meaningful writing in a virtual setting becomes that much harder. In the classroom, it has taken me many years to develop what I believe to be effective strategies to teach writing. Two strategies I encourage to help struggling writers in the classroom or at home: Writing Circles and Writing Graphic Organizers.

Montessori Blog - Writing Wounded Part One: 
How to Encourage Young (and old too!) Writers Grumble Services Learning Resources Blog Post

“Writing Wounded” Part One

Writing wounded. What exactly does this concept mean? Many educators, as do I, look at writing as the inverse of reading. If you follow the Montessori method, you discover the fundamentals of writing are taught even before many fundamentals of reading. Writing also happens to be one of the subjects I was given the least guidance in during my teacher training. In my experience, writing is one of the most difficult things to teach effectively. At least, I feel that way at the upper elementary ages.

Comprehension Thinking Strategies Montessori Blog - Skilled Reading Part 2: How do we help older students become better readers? Grumble Services Learning Resources blog

Comprehension Thinking Strategies

Written language is a code and children need to be taught how to decode it. Early reading skills include phonics, word recognition, vocabulary, decoding and fluency. But as young readers advance, the development of comprehension skills work differently. Skilled reading is an active process; the reader’s mind is constantly processing information extracted from the text.

There are multiple comprehension thinking strategies available to a struggling reader. Often, many or all of these strategies are working together to assist in comprehension. Here is a breakdown of the seven to which have been found most effective..