WESTHAMPTON — While taking a break to adopt her son in 2007, Westhampton resident Julia Volkman started making her own teaching materials as she prepared to return to her job as a Montessori teacher.
When a friend suggested she should send the materials to a publishing company, Volkman wasn’t sure what to expect. But the results were encouraging, to say the least.
“They bought everything that I sent in,” Volkman said. “All of the sudden, I had this accidental company.”
That company is now known as Maitri Learning. Fourteen years later, educators use Volkman’s materials from the local to international level to engage Montessori students, homeschoolers and traditional students in their curricula.
Volkman produces the learning resources with a goal of providing “materials that help children help themselves, and (help) the adults that care for children to help them grow and flourish,” she said.
Volkman, who has a background in graphic design and medical communications, said she saw several insufficiencies she wanted to address in existing learning materials.
Among the perceived hindrances Volkman targets, all of the materials she’d previously worked with had square corners.
“I once had a student … who just didn’t want to use the language cards,” Volkman said, “and I realized the pokey edges were bothering her.
“I started rounding the corner, and she used them all the time,” Volkman continued, “so it was my student who taught me that.”
Some print resources also used a laminate that would quickly peel apart, so Volkman decided to try a slightly thicker material. She sent the materials to 10 schools in the U.S. and one in France as part of a clinical study, and “there was a clear preference” among students and teachers for the thicker laminate, Volkman said.
Most of the materials are based in print and literacy, with the business offering products such as geography cards, movable alphabets, and matching cards. Maitri also makes textile materials such as pouches for the prints and aprons for students to wear during certain activities.
The resources offered are based on Montessori learning principles, such as teaching students self-efficacy and allowing them to choose from a variety of learning options. Titles draw from different themes, such as transportation, dogs or butterflies, so that students can work with materials that interest them.
“You follow the interest of the child so that they want to do the work and are kind of innately drawn to this,” Volkman said. “We give them many options, and they get to choose.
“The reason we do that is not only does it work with the internal motivation of the child, but it inspires them to do the work, and it inspires them to repeat the work,” she added. “Repetition helps them learn the road to mastery.”
Materials such as vocabulary and reading cards also come with a card showing the correct answers for an exercise, allowing students to judge their own work.
“That ability to judge one’s own skill is really important to the development of self-efficacy,” Volkman said, “so most of the materials are self-correcting … the children find out for themselves if they did well.”
Volkman was drawn to a career as a Montessori teacher based on her daughter’s experience at a school in eastern Massachusetts that followed the method.
“It was her school, and really made for people her size and age,” Volkman said. “It blew my mind that she was effortlessly happy there, learned incredibly well and started reading on her third birthday.”
Maitri, which draws its name from a Buddhist term for loving kindness and friendliness, also produces its materials in an environmentally-conscious manner, Volkman said, making its materials in-house from resources that are recycled or are manufactured in a way that mitigates ecological impacts.
Maitri Learning currently employs four full-time and two part-time employees, and is currently hiring for two additional positions in production and social media/marketing.
The business also has a new location on the horizon. Maitri will move from its current Westhampton location to a new office space at the former Strawbale Cafe & Gift Shop, which closed earlier this week due to the owners retiring. The larger office space will provide an upgrade from the currently “cramped” location, Volkman said, and will provide more employee parking and easier access for shipment deliveries.