Introducing naturetot
Your Casa Montessori environment will never be the same
Give children the benefits of real nature in your morning work period and create a happy children's community connected to nature.
Nature-based Learning
Start a life cycle in your morning work period
The child touches and smells soil, observes wet and dry, notices growth and decay, follows sequence and order in repeatable practical life exercises. Free access to worms, soil, plants, seeds, harvesting, growing, and more creates depth of learning, from the most basic practical life exercises to a comprehensive understanding of inter-dependencies in nature.
Designed, built, and tested by AMI Montessori guides
Committed and passionate, bringing you the best we can offer.
First they plant
The child begins by planting seeds. All exercises are functional and purpose-driven.Then they water
Care of the seedlings provides responsibility. Daily, observable changes.They harvest
The children delight in the vibrant growth and delicious microgreens. Joy in harvesting.Next they share
The children share the delicious greens. Loved by their peers. Confidence and belonging.They feed
They feed roots and plants scraps to the worms. The children love the worms.And begin again
The worms provide the compost for planting. And so it begins again.
NatureTot empowers you to bridge the gap between nature and the urban child while enhancing the essence of your Casa Montessori prepared environment.
The NatureTot System is an aid for the Casa guide to provide independent and spontaneous indoor access to nature in the morning work period.
Accessible nature
The young child needs real, meaningful, and hands-on experiences with nature.
Busy educators, working families, lack of tools, lack of resources. It’s hard to give the young child real experiences of nature in an urban society.
But every Montessori guide knows that offering the child experiences with real objects is key to their learning, helping them later to understand abstract ideas. The child under six is particularly vulnerable to a lack of access to nature, at a time when it matters most.
- When the activity of the young child shapes the future adult.
- When the world needs those who understand the interdependence of all life.
Do your children have free access to nature in the morning work period?
"Children indeed love flowers, but they need to do something more than remain among them and contemplate their coloured blossoms. They find their greatest pleasure in acting, in knowing, in exploring, even apart from the attraction of external beauty. "
~Maria Montessori
Prepared Environment
Integrating nature in your Montessori classroom is surprisingly easy.
Here’s what makes the NatureTot System great…
Real nature
Nature makes people happy. Experience leads to familiarity. Hands-on develops understanding.
Set up for independence
The young child learns by doing; not by words alone. A personal experience of nature.
In the work period
Enables the young child to absorb the essence of sustainable living like never before.
Primary child development
Spanning from basic practical life exercises to concepts in grace, science, math, ecology....
Work is the child's
The educator is guide & observer. The children's community maintains the cycle.
Quick-growing sessions
Observable changes & consequences develop confidence & responsibility.
Embedded purpose
Every single exercise and participant provides for another, creating real value.
A nature community
Contributions of nature-based work form a sense of place & self within a community.
Montessori Exercises
Introducing the NatureTot System
The NatureTot System helps the Montessori guide easily integrate simple, accessible life cycles of planting, harvesting and decomposing within their casa classroom.
Carefully designed practical-life extensions ensure that natural processes are maintained by the children’s community in the morning work period, largely independent of the guiding adults.
A variety of exercises means each child has freely chosen work suited to their developmental needs while contributing to the bigger work.
Child, plant, and worm each play vital roles in the give-and-take of nature. This interdependence embeds purpose within every activity.
A short growing period creates a window of time the young child will experience and remember.
In Classrooms
What others are saying
Most striking to me as an educator was the children were the doers while I was an observer. I have done gardening many times but it requires lots of work from an educator, from the set up all the way to the follow up. The part that children were doing was very little, even though I wanted to encourage more of their work and diminish my part. NatureTot somehow encouraged children to do it on their own or as a team, making it very unique and which I’ve never seen before in other programs. Once NatureTot was set up, the adults, guides, and assistants became observers, literally acting as guides, and just a little bit of coaching, pairing, or encouragement that was all that was needed from the guide.
With my observations as a Montessori educator and a childhood based in the wilderness of Canada as my foundation, I set out to create a system that could remove barriers to real nature for the young child and aid the Montessori educator who experiences limitations in outdoor space, time or material. Now that it’s in classrooms, I can confidently say it’s far more profound and integrates more deeply with Montessori’s vision of education than I ever imagined. Practical life meets science, and a hands-on understanding of the natural world is developed. A nature-based community emerges that values the work of each member, from soil, to worm, to plant, to child. The Montessori educator using the NatureTot System has the potential to transform nature education for the young child in a society often far-removed from nature.
Leet Mueller
Founder of NatureTot
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Free shipping of all cabinets & learning materials.*
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- Canada
- Continental US
*excluding territories & remote areas