Montessori Mac

I have been in the education field in both private and charter Montessori schools since 1993. I began my first 8 years of teaching at a prestigious private Montessori school on the North Shore of Boston. I then moved to Central Florida where I have worked mostly in charter Montessori schools. After my first few years in a charter schools I began making some Montessori materials for some of the traditional teachers in my school. I learned how to tweak some of these materials to basically marry the Montessori and traditional styles of hands-on materials. The majority of the materials I have in my store were made specifically for my own primary and elementary Montessori classrooms, but I have tried to write directions in a way that traditional teachers can utilize them in their classrooms as well.

Being a Montessori trained teacher, my teaching style utilizes the principles of the Montessori Philosophy and Method.

I earned my AA in Early Childhood Education, BS in Psychology and Elementary Education from Endicott College in Beverly, MA by 1993. In 1994, I enrolled in the Northeast Montessori Institute and earned my Pre-Primary Montessori Credential (3-6). After graduating with a Masters of Education degree from Antioch New England Graduate School in New Hampshire in 2001, I moved to Florida that summer. A couple of years later, I attended the Florida Institute for Montessori Studies and earned a Primary Montessori Credential (6-9).

It all started on a warm and sunny day, in the northern woods of Maine, back in the summer of 1971. An elementary music teacher and an engineer welcomed a beautiful bouncing baby girl into the world. OK, I'm going to stop right there because I had to glorify that portion way too much. You see, it's not really anything like the real story I've been told. The baby girl part was true, but bouncing was substituted for coming out kicking and screaming like a banshee. And beautiful...well that's definitely an exaggerated word used during births to describe something blue and slimey with a cone shaped head. I think I may have explained enough about me in the beginning, so I'll end it with my name is Diane MacGilvray and my students call me Ms. Mac, hence the nickname "Montessori Mac". I was born and raised in northern Maine in a town called Millinocket, moved to the Boston area to go to college and stayed for 12 years before moving to Melbourne, Florida in 2001. I'm scared of sharks when I'm in the ocean, I fear alligators when I'm near the lake, and I'm horrified of snakes in my yard. Then why Florida? Because all three are much more tolerable when compared to scraping an eight inch blanket of ice off your windshield at the crack of dawn in the midst of a cold New England winter that seems to last just shy of 43 months.