One major tenet of Montessori education involves giving children a lengthy period — three hours, to be specific — of uninterrupted school work time.  This may seem hard to conceptualize, especially if your child is very young.  Maybe that’s because our idea of “work” could use a little refining.
A work cycle, simply, consists of selecting an activity, doing it, achieving some internal satisfaction for the work and then selecting the next task. When one experiences this cycle of  “choose-do-return to order-satisfaction, then choose again,”  a powerful success cycle is created for the student, with feelings of accomplishment and contentment.
When a child is having a productive work cycle, we’ll say they are ”on a roll.” The child will go from task to task, choosing progressively harder tasks as time allows. On those high-achieving days, the student feels unstoppable.
Then there are the days when the day gets off in fits and starts because of interruptions, not enough time to complete a task before another commitment or a lack of the necessary supplies. As adults, we know how this goes: multiple trips to the hardware store that sabotage the best efforts for a productive workday!
Most of us, even small children, have a built-in three-hour work cycle. We might contrast and compare it to a sleep cycle. When we know we have at least three hours of uninterrupted time, we will tackle a multitude of jobs and enjoy doing it. If our time is interrupted, we may not even try to start anything. “It’s not worth the effort” Â we might say. Sound familiar?
When given a regular three-hour period, children (and adults) learn to tap into a repeatable success cycle. After accomplishing a series of short and familiar tasks within a long-term time frame, a child will then choose a task that is more challenging, which habitually represents successive “true learning”.
Reference Information – MarenSchmidt.com
