A Peace Pole in our garden - A silent message

He maungarongo ki runga i te whenua

Children are our most vulnerable group in society, and the most susceptible to unhealthy environments. At our preschools we aim to use more renewable resources and sustainable practices. When building our new preschool, Little Earth, in 2009, we wanted to make sure it would be a healthy and more ecologically sustainable building, a healthy environment for our children and teachers to learn and teach. We are now busy developing our outdoor naturalised environment. We will use local elements as much as possible to create a living landscape, with natural discovery spaces, an organic garden and spaces set aside for the development of natural habitats.

The outdoor environment is a key element of our philosophy. We believe in the importance of the development of children's love and appreciation for nature and their surroundings. At Tawa Montessori we have a beautiful outdoor classroom, a living landscape where children interact and are engaged with the natural world. At Little Earth we are developing a naturalised outdoor environment, where our children can create happy and joyful childhood memories that will last a lifetime.

Many of us will have childhood memories of happy and carefree days, unlimited play, and spending time in the outdoors. We are creating the childhood memories of the children in our care and it is important to help make these memories warm, rich, diverse, safe, happy and loving. The environment plays an important role in this. It is the soul and the atmosphere of the environment that contributes the most to the child’s belonging and wellbeing.

There are many aspects that make up the soul of your environment. Your programme, your adults, your interactions, your values, and your community all create an atmosphere. For us, as a Montessori preschool, aesthetics play an important part in our prepared environment (see previous post). Placing a mood setting device, like a statue, a bird feeder, or a wind vane, adds beauty and ambience. To celebrate the Montessori Centenary in February 2007, we placed and dedicated a Peace Pole in our Tawa Montessori garden, as a tribute to Maria Montessori, who was nominated for the Nobel Prize for Peace three times. We are very excited that a Peace Pole at our new preschool, Little Earth, has now been placed.

A Peace Pole is a hand-crafted monument that displays the message “May Peace Prevail on Earth” on each side, in different languages. There are more than 250,000 Peace Poles in 180 countries all over the world. Our Peace pole is hand-crafted and recycled from a century old pole. It displays the message “May Peace Prevail on Earth” on six sides, in six different languages, representing six continents, and six peace activists.

Peace is about respect - respect for ourselves, each other, and the planet we share. Our Peace Pole is an inspiration to embrace compassion, to respect life and to live in harmony with one another. Maria Montessori firmly believed in the importance of education for the attainment of world peace. Having a Peace Pole at our preschools announces that they are a special place, dedicated to peace on Earth. They add soul to our environment, and create an ambience of love and respect. We often sit around our Peace Pole, sharing and celebrating, creating little snippets of fond memories that hopefully last a lifetime!

- Anja

For more information about the Peace Pole Project, visit the Peace Pole Project website

Sunflowers, messenger of aesthetics and beauty

Time has come for our sunflowers to be taken out. The flowers have wilted: the leaves have died, the seeds have ripened, and the sunflowers are sadly dropping their head. We have thoroughly enjoyed our sunflowers, both at Tawa Montessori and at Little Earth.

Sunflowers are very fast growers, making it one of the best flowers to grow with children. They are also one of the tallest flowers, as they can easily grow up to 3.00 m. When we planted our seeds in the potting shed, we had seedlings within days and it looked as if we could “see the flower growing in front of our eyes”. Sunflowers will need support to stop them from blowing over or breaking, especially in windy weather. Our children have enjoyed taking care of the flowers and watering them dutifully, taking regularly note of its growing length. A milestone was reached once the plants grew taller than the teachers!

When the flower heads open, bees and other beneficial insects will visit for nectar and pollen. Heaps of bumble bees visited our flowers, sometimes as many as five at a time on one head. The nearby bug hilton may have played a role in this! We harvested some of the heads once they started to turn brown and into seed and hung them to dry underneath the roof of our deck. We left some flowers for the birds to feed and some to ripen in the sun.

Sunflowers are used for their oil and for their seeds, which are used in salads, breads and other foods. Sunflowers have called to peoples imaginations for centuries, most famously Vincent van Gogh, whose sunflower paintings are well known. The flowers at our preschools definitely add aesthetics and beauty to our garden, which is a most important aspect of our classroom environment, inside and outside.

Maria Montessori strongly believed that the child should live in an environment of beauty. Although aesthetics is subject to one's taste, and is strongly dependent on sense perception, hence the derivation from the Greek aisthetikos, aesthetics in the classroom are strongly encouraged and nurtured.

Nature provides many aspects of beauty and aesthetics, if not physical, it is emotional or spiritual, making it a perfect classroom. At our preschools we work very hard to keep our gardens, which function as an outdoor classroom, beautiful and aesthetically pleasing. Our sunflowers have been a big part of this.



It is with sadness we pull the dead flowers out, but we will collect the ripened seeds, using tweezers as part of our practical life activities,  and keep them for next season’s planting. This will teach us an important lesson about the cycle of life, close up!

- Anja

Messages from our children

"Within the child lies the fate of the future"

- Maria Montessori

Over at The Grass Stain Guru I wrote a guest post, The virtue of the Dandelion. The children of Tawa Montessori and Little Earth Montessori shared their thoughts and dreams for a more sustainable world to grow up in. Here are some of their messages written on the dandelion labels:

“Flowers grow with water and sunshine, and dotty rain” - M, 4 yrs
“We found a REAL insect in the sand” - D, 4 yrs
“My flower needs sun and water and rain to grow and the leaf needs all that too!” - E, 4 yrs
“I think the slugs are sleeping, they are tired from racing” - C, 3 yrs
“The sun makes the plants grow up, up, up” - G, 4 yrs
“I’m going to tip the water out. I ‘m going to tip it on the plants so they will grow” - C, 3 yrs
“Did you know ... if you scrunch a piece of paper, you waste a whole tree?” - C, 4 yrs
"We don't squish the butterflies. We let them go" - S, 4 yrs
"We leave insects where we find them" - S, 4 yrs
"Don't take the bugs. We put them back in their homes" - C, 3 yrs