The Harbour Library Journal

  How a child learns to speak and understand the spoken word is a mysterious process. As long as a child is exposed to some language in his/her early life, s/he will almost always learn to speak. We don’t entirely understand why, but we know this to be true. She will learn the vocabulary that she is offered. We can do much to enrich these offerings, to give the child a greater wealth of words at her command, but we can not make her learn to speak. That occurs in a way that, at present, remains a mystery. But the same can not be said for writing or reading. These, we teach. Montessori believed that language is innate and it is in the nature of humans to express themselves both orally and through the written word. The Montessori Language Arts curriculum, therefore, starts the moment the child first enters the environment. Montessori Language: Ages 0-3 Montessori believed that the sensitive period for language begins at birth and continues to about six years of age....

Meet the Programs Director of Shades of Purple Education My name is Olapeju Okungbowa. I have a Master of Science degree in Education for Sustainability from London South Bank University with courses that focused on physical/ human geography and research writing.  I also have a Cambridge Certificate in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages, I diversified into teaching from broadcast journalism and in my fourteen years of practice I have seen that teaching provides all-encompassing and sometimes arduous tasks for which the rewards more than justify the effort. It is a profession which I have grown to appreciate. I am very creative and I have the ability to create lessons that are interesting enough to capture the attention of my students and to keep them interested in learning more. For the past several years, I have taught a range of students from preschool to adult education (onsite and offline). In this time, I have developed several different strategies to captur...