A Valentine- Love and Its Source- the Child

Yesterday was Valentine's Day. In the primary classroom we had strawberries and a heart shaped snack, wrote Valentine's Day cards for our friends and family, and learned to say I Love You in American Sign Language, Chinese, Hawaiian, French, and Spanish.

In the Montessori classroom love is a part of every day, not just Valentine's Day. Each day in the classroom we teach about peace and about those who have spread love around the world as peacemakers. We teach the children how to be good friends and  how to be independent and responsible citizens of the classroom and citizens of the world. We show them love by respecting each child and providing them with an environment in which their developmental needs are met and an environment in which they feel valued and loved.

  Yesterday's post on mariamontessori.com was titled Seven Ways to Love a Child: A Valentine for Parents. Jennifer Rogers a Montessori teacher and mother of three says in the article, "Parenting is not consistent or predictable.  Loving a child is not always fun or easy. Establishing a few flexible, healthy habits is a parent’s best demonstration of love" .

One of my favorite excerpts  from Dr. Montessori's writings can be found in her book The Absorbent Mind. 

Love and its Source the Child. 

If we want to produce harmony in the world, it is clear that we ought to think more about this. The child is the only point on which there converges from everyone a feeling of gentleness and love. People's soul's soften and sweeten when one speaks of children; the whole of mankind shares in the deep emotion they awaken. The child is a wellspring of love. Whenever we touch the child, we touch love. It is difficult to define; we all feel it, no one can describe its roots or evaluate the immense consequences which flow from it, or gather up its potency for union between men. Despite our differences of race, religion, and of social position, we have felt during our discussions of the child a fraternal union growing up between us. This has conquered our shyness and dispelled those defenses which are always ready to spring up between man and and man and between groups of men in the daily affairs of life. In the vicinity of children mistrust melts away, we become sweet and kindly because, when we are gathered about them, we feel warmed by that flame of life which is there, where life originates. In adults there is an impulse for defense which coexists with the impulse for love. Of these two, the fundamental one is love, the other being superimposed upon it. Love, like that which we feel for the child, must exist potentially between man and man, because human unity does exist and there is not unity without love.