Where Learning Grows
Rebecca Lingo • August 18, 2025

One of the many beautiful and empowering aspects of Montessori education is how it helps children understand themselves as valued members of a community. A key way this happens is through Care of the Environment, a form of Practical Life work that provides children with the opportunity to tend to the spaces they live in each day. 


By participating in and building these skills, children begin to feel at home in their classroom, school, and community. They have a sense of ownership and take pride in their surroundings. In the process, they develop deep senses of responsibility and connection.


The Outdoor Environment


We consider the outdoors to be a natural and essential extension of our prepared, indoor classroom spaces. For young children who are absorbing everything from the world around them, time spent outdoors supports development in profound and lasting ways. For older children and adolescents, outdoor spaces can be a place for self-regulation and deep focus. We value being the outdoor extensions of our classrooms.


Did you know we have an additional 1-acre natural area on the west side of our campus? It’s true and we are excited to share more about this space in over the course of the school’s 25th year.


Did you know that our students have daily outdoor recess as toddlers and all the way through the end of 9th grade? 7-9th grades often go to nearby parks for their recess time. 


Did you know that older elementary and all adolescent students take annual camping trips? Adolescents are encouraged to plan and execute a second camping experience, also!



Why Being Outdoors Matters


We know natural spaces are vital for promoting the physical, emotional, and cognitive health of everyone, regardless of age. Research supports this, including Richard Louv’s book, The Last Child in the Woods. Louv highlights a growing body of evidence that time spent in nature is critical to the healthy development of both children and adults. 


In Montessori, we recognize that outdoor time is not a break from learning. Rather, the natural world is a powerful space for movement, language, social development, and sensory integration. Time spent outdoors is learning time. 


Nature nourishes the whole child. Plus, the natural world’s beauty, order, and rhythm speak to our deepest human tendencies to explore, understand, and belong.


Opportunities for Adults


Outdoor spaces become a rich environment for observation, guidance, and connection. Children are often more socially expressive outdoors, making this a critical place for observing group dynamics and supporting social-emotional growth.


Time spent outdoors also models joyful, playful behavior. Children need to see that being human includes lightness and laughter. Being outside with children offers perfect opportunities for us to play alongside them while still maintaining an appropriate level of guidance.


As children gain different experiences, they come to understand how to conduct themselves with grace and courtesy, whether on a woodland trail, at a community park, or in a garden bed. Activities like fort building or group games help them navigate the intricacies of collaborative work and group dynamics, which sharpen social skills. Montessori children learn to move through different scenes and scenarios with increasing awareness, sensitivity, and confidence.


Getting Outdoors 


Wheaton Montessori School values time outdoors; we incorporate movement and outside into every school day. We believe this time outside is an extension of classroom work and academics. Students in grades 4-9 often have P.E. outdoors, all grades have daily recess, and our all-day PLUS wrap-around students have extended play after school, which seeks to offer activities similar to neighborhood play of the past


This fall, when you come to observe your child’s class, take a peek at the outdoor spaces: open play spaces, Gaga ball pit, sandboxes, chicken coop, gardens, conservation area, rain garden, and beehives. Our playgrounds are ready for your children’s imaginations to soar next week!


How Your Young Children Learn and Why It Matters

How Your Young Children Learn and Why It Matters

By Rebecca Lingo • February 23, 2026
How Your Young Children Learn and Why It Matters Your young children learn by actively constructing themselves through purposeful work. From birth through age six, learning is not passive or instructional. It is driven from within your child, supported by responsive adults like you and all of my colleagues. This internal passion to learn is also boosted through the campus design and surroundings. Every movement, repetition, and exploration is meaningful work that builds the child’s body, mind, language, and sense of self. How learning happens Active construction through work: Your young children learn by doing. Don’t we all! Movement, using the hands, exploring real materials, and repeating challenging tasks are how the brain develops. This work must be meaningful and appropriately challenging, not busy work. Movement and the hand: Development of walking, balance, and refined hand use is foundational. Your children of all ages need freedom to move and manipulate real objects to fully develop coordination, concentration, and foundational academics like writing and adding. Language through relationship: Language develops through reciprocal human interactions. Rich spoken language, conversation, naming the world, and storytelling are essential. Wheaton Montessori School eliminates screens and background noise to highlight communication. Sensorial exploration of reality: Your children learn the world through their senses. Touching, comparing, carrying, observing, and interacting with real things builds the foundation for imagination, reasoning, and abstract thinking later. Authentic Montessori immerses us in exploration and discovery. Sensitive periods: Your children pass through brief, powerful windows of heightened interest and ability, such as for language, movement, social behavior, etc. Wheaton Montessori School teachers observe and offer the right experience at the right time. Learning happens easily and joyfully and feels like play! Concentration and normalization: When your children are connected to meaningful work that they choose themselves and repeat, they develop deep concentration, self-regulation, delight in effort, and care for others. Why This Is Important Early experiences shape lifelong learning: Early experiences lay the neurological, emotional, and social foundation for everything that follows. Missed opportunities are harder to recover: Skills learned during ideal stages are acquired with ease. When these periods are missed, learning later requires more effort and frustration. My colleagues are passionate about tailoring lessons and their classrooms to match child development (and adolescent development, too!) Strong foundations support later independence: Your children deserve rich early support leading to confident, capable, socially aware, and academically prepared people. Well-supported children become well-adjusted humans: This approach supports not just academic readiness, but the development of secure, courteous, empathetic children who care about their community and the world. In short, your children learn best when they are trusted as active learners, supported by attentive adults, and given real, challenging work at the right time. Investing in this early foundation supports not only your child’s success in school, but their lifelong well-being and ability to thrive.
Be Quiet and Sit Still

Be Quiet and Sit Still

By Rebecca Lingo • February 16, 2026
At Wheaton Montessori School, your child is guided by highly trained professionals who deeply understand child and adolescent development. Every day, thoughtful structures and intentional practices support students in using their intellect, curiosity, time, and choices successfully, so they can grow into capable, self-directed individuals. Dr. Maria Montessori never equated being “good” with silence or stillness. Our teachers do not equate being well-behaved with being quiet and sitting still. In fact, like Dr. Montessori, we believe that movement, communication, and social interaction are essential to learning. When you observe a classroom at Wheaton Montessori School, you’ll see exactly that: children moving purposefully, talking with peers, collaborating, and responsibly managing their academic work throughout the day. What may look like “freedom” on the surface is actually built upon a strong underlying structure. Students experience a sense of choice, what to work on, where to sit, how long to engage, and who to collaborate with, because the environment has been carefully prepared to support those decisions. The Power of Structure and Grace The foundation of our campus is made up of proactive lessons called Grace and Courtesy . These lessons explicitly teach students how to: Set up and return materials Respect others’ space and work Ask to observe a peer’s work Acknowledge feelings and resolve conflict respectfully These shared lessons give everyone a common language and reference point for living and learning together. Older or more experienced students model appropriate behavior, creating classrooms full of young teachers, not just the adults guiding the environment. Students always have opportunities to challenge themselves or to take a healthy break. They work and play with materials they are developmentally ready to use, ensuring success while still encouraging growth. Not a Free-For-All: A Thoughtfully Designed Community Authentic Montessori environments are often misunderstood as unstructured. In reality, our campus is carefully designed to meet the developmental needs of preschool children through high school freshmen. The structure is natural, respectful, and aligned with who children and adolescents truly are. We know learners may still experience frustration, regret, and disappointment at times. Those moments are part of learning. When a child sits beside a teacher to regroup, it may feel like a “time out” to them, but it is actually a moment of support, reflection, and connection within a safe community. When challenging behaviors arise, our teachers respond with empathy and expertise. They understand that all behavior communicates a need. Rather than relying on rewards or punishments, teachers may guide a child toward a break, offer work that better meets their developmental needs, or help them return to a centered and purposeful state. Growing Self-Discipline From the Inside Out At Wheaton Montessori School, self-discipline and regulation develop through meaningful activity. Expected behavior grows through practice within a warm, structured community. Curiosity sparks interest, interest fuels focus, and focus leads toward mastery. This process contributes to valorization, your child’s growing sense of confidence, capability, and belonging. Children who feel balanced and respected naturally behave with greater care for themselves, others, and their environment. This sums up Dr. Montessori’s limits in three rules: care for yourself, care for others, and care for your surroundings. The true outcome of this work is human development: your child and adolescent’s identity, agency, purpose, and love of learning. When they understand big ideas and see themselves as capable contributors, they grow in ways that last a lifetime.