A Beginner's Guide to the Montessori Classroom
The mysteries of the prepared Environment for parents new to Montessori
The Montessori classroom can be a bewildering place for first time parents sitting on the sidelines wondering if and how their child will fit in. The equipment looks attractive and interesting but the teacher seems excessively fussy about the way the children handle those blocks. No one seems to be controlling the children as they take things from the shelves and yet they seem to know just how to put them back neatly. Is that tiny boy really polishing his shoes and why is that little girl having to wipe up the spilt water?
What is unique about a Montessori Nursery is that every aspect of its environment is planned down to the smallest details to meet the needs of the developing child. It is a world in microcosm, a child-sized world where there is perfect order, where adults treat children with respect and understanding and where children are free to choose their own work, because what a child chooses freely we know he is interested in.
The things to choose from are carefully selected by teachers to provide variety, interest, and the necessary learning experiences. Let's look for example at the way a child gets ready to write. First his fingers need to be strong enough to move the pencil without tiring. When the teacher shows a child how to hold the knobs on those wooden cylinders just so, she is helping him to strengthen those fingers. Then he needs to learn the shapes of the letters as eh runs his fingers across the sandpaper letters and mouths their sounds the multi-sensory experience is absorbed into his memory. Lastly he has to be dexterous enough to draws the shapes with a pencil as he moves tiny beads with tweezers from one basket to another and goes on to trace geometric shapes inside templates he hones up his fine motor skills.
Montessori nurseries focus on the whole child. The boy who is cleaning his shoes and the girl clearing up the mess are taking their first steps towards independence by learning to look after themselves in a safe place where everything is the right size for them and no grown-up will ridicule their efforts or seep in and take over.
PRACTICAL LIFE SKILLS
Life skills not only help children to feel at home, they develop a sense of responsibility for their classroom, noticing when something needs attending to and doing it without being told. Children who can pour their own drinks gain confidence as well as competence, but the main purpose of such exercise is a deeper one; children who work on real tasks which involve the hand and the mind together develop a great calm and capacity to concentrate which is the best possible preparation for intellectual work to come.
MATHS
Counting is as natural to children at a certain stage in their development, as learning to walk. Montessori teachers are trained to spot when a child is especially drawn to a particular sort of work and they provide it just tat the right moment to set his interest alight. Coloured counters can be grouped into patters - odd and even numbers. Numbers are built up from glass beads and their symbols traced with the fingers before symbol and quantity are connected in the understanding.
SENSORIAL
Understanding the basic geometric solids helps us make sense of what we see.
Wasn't it Cezanne who said all nature consists of the cylinder, the sphere and the cube? Small tablets of metal, marble and felt are all the same temperature really but they feel very different, especially out in the sunshine. Colours are very subtle. Different shades of pink, green, purple, yellow can be graded from dark to light. Children are often better at this than their teachers. Each of the Senses receives separate attention - Montessori recognised their importance in providing an understanding of the child's world, which he must experience through the senses.
SOCIAL SKILLS
BIOLOGY
A class pet teaches about life showing tenderness by stroking a rabbit might be a much better way of teaching it than telling a child off for being rough.
LANGUAGE
Before words can be read they can be built with cardboard letters. You take a small toy dog out of the pink box, say the word, listen to the sound in it... D.O.G. Then the letters are taken from the box, and we have a word.
Picture books are always available so non readers can enjoy them too. Writing skills can be learned by colouring intricate shapes traced around insects, and the shapes of the letters are experienced by feeling them as well as looking and saying.
GEOGRAPHY
The continents are slightly raised from the surface of the globe so they can be learned by touch as well as shape. The colours are repeated on a map which is a jigsaw puzzle, and these flat shapes can be traced and coloured in.
CREATIVE WORK
Painting should be available for every child every day if they wish. Music is also taught, both performing and listening, though not in the way you might think - no endless hours of practice of a piece of music.
OUTDOORS
Being outdoors is very important. Children learn a lot by climbing, swinging, taking turns with the rocker. They can garden, growing flowers for the classroom or vegetables to eat. Montessori is sometimes credited with having invented the sand pit.
Extracts from THE ABSORBENT MIND
(A Book by Maria Montessori)
From chapter 3, The Periods of Growth.
In my young days, no one gave any thought to children between two and six years of age. Now, there are preschool institutions of various kinds, which take children from three to six; but today, as of old, the university is held in the highest esteem, since out of it come those who have cultivated most fully the essentially human faculty of intelligence. But, now that psychologists have begun to study life itself, there is growing up a tendency to do just the opposite. There are many who hold, as I do, that the most important period of life is not the age of university studies, but the first one, the period from birth to the age six. For this is the time when man's intelligence itself, his greatest implement, is being formed.
Our mind, as it is, would not be able to do what the child's mind does. To develop a language from nothing needs a different type of mentality. This the child has. His intelligence is not of the same kind as ours.
It may be said that we acquire knowledge by using our minds; but the child absorbs knowledge directly into his psychic life. Simply by continuing to live, the child learns to speak his native tongue. A kind of mental chemistry goes on within him. We, by contrast, are recipients. Impressions pour into us and we store them into our minds; but we ourselves remain apart from them, just as a vase keeps separate from the water it contains. Instead, the child undergoes a transformation. Impressions do not merely enter his mind; they form it. They incarnate themselves in him. The child creates his own "mental muscles," using for this what he finds in the world about him. We have named this type of mentality, The Absorbent Mind.
From chapter 4, The New Path.
Let us start with one very simple reflection: the child, unlike the adult, is not on his way to death. He is on his way to life. His work is to fashion a man in the fullness of his strength. By the time the adult exists, the child has vanished. So the whole life of the child is an advance toward perfection, towards a greater completeness. From this we may infer that the child will enjoy doing the work needed to complete himself. The child's life is one in which work - the doing of one's duty - begets joy and happiness. For adults, the daily round is more often depressing.
The process of living is, for the child, an extension and amplification of himself; the older he gets, the stronger and more intelligent he becomes. His work and activity help him to acquire this strength and intelligence. But in adult life the passing of the years has an opposite effect. Again, there is no competition in childhood, because no one can do for the child the work he has to do to build the man he is making. No one, in short, can do his growing for him.
From chapter 7, The Spiritual Embryo.
The first care given to the newborn - overriding all others - must be a care for his mental life, and not just his bodily life, which is the rule today.
The developing child not only acquires the faculties of man: strength, intelligence, language; but, at the same time, he adapts the being he is constructing to the conditions of the world about him. And this it is that gives virtue to his particular form of psychology, which is so different from that of adults. The child has a different relation to his environment from ours. Adults admire their environment; the can remember it and think about it; but the child absorbs it. The things he sees are not just remembered; they form a part of his soul. He incarnates in himself all in the world about him that his eyes see and his ears hear. In us the same things produce no change, but the child is transformed by them.
The Parent's Mission
( Extract from The Secret of Childhood - by Maria Montessori )
The child's parents are not his makers but his guardians. They must protect and care for him in the deepest sense, as, a sacred mission that goes far beyond the interests and ideas of external life. They are for him supernatural guardians, who, united to the child in a way of which he is unaware, cannot be separated from him. For such a mission parents must purify the love nature has implanted in their hearts, and they must understand that such love is the conscious part of a deeper guidance which must be contaminated by egotism or apathy. It is for parents to visualise and take up the social question facing us at the present day, the struggle to establish the rights of the child in the world.
Much has been said of recent years about the rights of man, and especially about the rights of the worker, but now the time has come when we must speak of the social rights of the child. The social question of the rights of the worker has been the basis of social transformations, for humanity lives by the work of men, and hence this question was connected with the material existence of humanity as a whole. But if the worker produces what man consumes, and is a creator in external things, the child produces mankind itself, and therefore his rights are still more powerful in calling for social transformation. It is plain that human society should direct its wisest and most perfect care to the child, to receive from him greater strength and greater values in the humanity of the future.
The fact that it has instead neglected and indeed forgotten the rights of the child, that it has, maybe unconsciously, tormented and broken him down, has failed to recognise his value, his power, his essential nature, should be realised and this feeling should arouse the conscience of humanity in a most vehement manner.