DESCRIPTION OF THE REST OF THE APPARATUS AND THE METHOD FOR WRITING
AND READING
The carefully graded advance, from the simpler to the harder exercises,
which is so essential a part of the correct use of the Montessori, as
of all other educational apparatus, seems to most mothers contemplating
the use of the system, a very difficult feature. “How am I to know?”
they ask. “Which exercise is the best one to offer a child to begin
with, how can I tell when he has sufficiently mastered that so that
another is needed, and how shall I select the right one to go on with?”
Perhaps the first answer to make to these questions is the one which
so often successfully solves Montessori problems: “Have a little more
trust in your child’s natural instincts. Don’t think that a single
mistake on your part will be fatal. It will not hurt him if you happen
to suggest the wrong thing, if you do not insist on it, for, left
freely to himself, he will not pay the least attention to anything
that is not suitable for him. Give him opportunity for perfectly free
action, and then _watch him carefully_.”
If he shows a lively spontaneous interest in a Montessori problem, and
devotes himself to solving it, you may be sure that you have hit upon
something which suits his degree of development. If he goes through
with it rather easily and, perhaps, listlessly, and needs your reminder
to keep his attention on it, in all probability it is too easy; he has
outgrown it, he no longer cares to occupy himself with it, just as you
no longer care to jump rope, though that may have been a passion with
you at the age of eight.
If, on the other hand, he seems distressed at the difficulties before
him, and calls repeatedly for help and explanation, one of three
conditions is present. Either the exercise is too hard for him, or he
has acquired already the bad habit of dependence on others, in both
of which cases he needs an easier exercise; or, lastly, he has simply
had enough formal “sensory exercises” for a while. It is the most
mistaken notion about the Montessori Children’s Home to conceive that
the children are occupied from morning till night over the apparatus of
her formal instruction. They use it exactly as long, or as often, or as
seldom, as they please, just as a child in an ordinary nursery uses his
ordinary toys. It must be kept constantly in mind that the wonderful
successes attained by the Montessori schools in Rome cannot be repeated
by the mere repetition of sensory exercises, thrust spasmodically into
the midst of another system, or lack of system, in child-training. The
Italian children of five or six, who have had two or three years of
Montessori discipline, and who are such marvels of sweet, reasonable
self-control, who govern their own lives so sanely, who have
accomplished such astonishing feats in reading and writing, are the
results of many other factors besides buttoning-frames and geometric
insets, important as these are.
[Illustration: BUTTONING-FRAMES TO DEVELOP CO-ORDINATED MOVEMENTS OF
THE FINGERS AND PREPARE THE CHILDREN FOR EXERCISES OF PRACTICAL LIFE.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
Perhaps the most vital of these other factors is the sense of
responsibility, genuine responsibility, not the make-believe kind, with
which we are too often apt to put off our children when they first show
their touchingly generous impulse to share some of the burdens of our
lives. For instance, to take a rather extreme instance, but one which
we must all have seen, a child in an ordinary home is allowed to pick
up a bit of waste-paper on the floor, after having had his attention
called to it, and is told to throw it in the waste-paper basket. This
action of mechanical obedience, suitable only for a child under two
years of age, is then praised insincerely to the child’s face as an
instance of “how _much_ help he is to Mother!”
The Montessori child is trained, through his feeling of responsibility
for the neatness and order of his schoolroom, to notice litter on
the floor, just as any housekeeper does, without needing to have her
attention called to it. It is her floor and her business to keep it
clean. And this feeling of responsibility is fostered and allowed every
opportunity to grow strong, by the sincere conviction of the Montessori
teacher that it is more important for the child to feel it, than for
the floor to be cleaned with adult speed. As a result of this long
patience on the part of the Directress, a child who has been under her
care for a couple of years, will (to go on with our chosen instance)
pick up litter from the floor and dispose of it, as automatically as
the mistress of the house herself, and with as little need for the goad
either of upbraiding for neglect, or praise incommensurate with the
trivial service. This is an attitude in marked contrast to that of many
of our daughters who often attain high-school age without acquiring
this feeling, apparently perfectly possible to inculcate if the process
is begun early enough, of loyal solidarity with the interests of the
household.
With this caution that a Montessori life for a little child does not in
the least mean his incessant occupation with formal sensory exercises,
let us again take up the description and use of the apparatus.
The first thing which is given a child is usually either one of the
buttoning-frames (shown in the illustration facing page 68), or what
are called the “solid geometric insets.” This latter game with the
formidable name is illustrated opposite this page, where it is seen to
resemble the set of weights kept beside their scales by old-fashioned
druggists. No other Montessori exercise is more universally popular
with the littlest ones who enter the Children’s Home, and few others
hold their attention so long. This combines training for both sight and
touch, since, as an aid to his vision, the child is taught to run his
finger-tips around the cylinder which he is trying to fit in, and then
around the edges of the holes. His finger-tips recognize the similarity
of size before his eyes do. This piece of apparatus is, of course,
entirely self-corrective, and needs no supervision. When it becomes
easy for a child quickly to get all the cylinders into the right holes,
he has probably had enough of this exercise, although his interest in
it may recur from time to time, during many weeks.
[Illustration: SOLID GEOMETRICAL INSETS.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
One of the exercises which it is usual to offer him next is the
construction of the Tower. This game could be played (and often is)
with the nest of hollow blocks which nearly every child owns, and it
consists of building a pyramid with them, the biggest at the bottom,
the next smaller on this, and so on to the apex made by the tiniest
one. This is to learn the difference between big and small; and as the
child progresses in exactitude of vision, the game can be varied by
piling the blocks in confusion at one side of the room and constructing
the pyramid, a piece at a time, at some distance away. This means that
when the child leaves his pyramid to go and get the block needed next,
he must “carry the size in his eye” as the phrase runs, and pick out
the block next smaller by an effort of his visual memory.
The difference between long and short is taught by means of ten squared
rods of equal thickness, but regularly varying length, the shortest one
being just one-tenth as long as the longest. The so-called Long Stair
(illustration facing page 74) is constructed by the child with these.
This is perhaps the most difficult game among those by which dimensions
are taught, and a good many mistakes are to be anticipated. The
material is again quite self-corrective, however, and little by little,
with occasional silent or brief reminders from the adult onlooker, the
child learns first to correct his own mistakes, and then not to make
them. Thickness and thinness are studied with ten solids, brick-like
in shape, all of the same length, but of regularly varying thickness,
the thinnest one being one-tenth as thick as the biggest one. With
these the child constructs the Big Stair (illustration facing page
74). Later on (considerably later), when the child begins to learn his
numbers, these “stairs” are used to help him. The large numbers cut out
of sandpaper and pasted on smooth cardboard, are placed by the child
beside the right number of red and blue sections on each rod of the
Long Stair.
After the construction of the Long and Big Stair the child is usually
ready for the exercises with different fabrics to develop his sense
of touch, and for the first beginning of the exercises leading to
writing; especially the strips of sandpaper pasted upon smooth wood
used to teach the difference between rough and smooth. At the same time
with these exercises, begin the first ones with color which consist of
simply matching spools of identical color, two by two.
When these simple exercises of the tactile sense have been mastered,
the child is allowed to attempt the more difficult undertaking of
recognizing all the minute gradations between smooth and rough,
between dark blue and light blue, etc., etc.
The training of the eye to discriminate between minute differences in
shades, is carried on steadily in a series of exercises which result
in an accuracy of vision in this regard which puts most of us adults
to shame. These color-games are played with silk wound around flat
cards, like those on which we often buy our darning-cotton. There are
eight main colors, and under each color eight shades, ranging from dark
to light. The number of games which can be played with these is only
limited by the ingenuity of the Directress or mother, and, although
most of them are played more easily with a number of children together,
many are quite available for the solitary “only child at home.” He
can amuse himself by arranging his sixty-four bobbins in the correct
order of their colors, or he can later, as in the pyramid-making game,
pile them all on one side of the room, and make his graduated line at
a distance, “holding the color” in his mind as he crosses the room, a
feat which almost no untrained adult can accomplish; although it is
surprising what results can be obtained any time in life by conscious,
definite effort to train one of the senses. There is nothing miraculous
in the results obtained in the Casa dei Bambini. They are the simple,
natural consequence of definite, direct _training_, which is so seldom
given. The remarkable improvement in general acuteness of his vision
after training his eyes to follow the flight of bees, has been
picturesquely and vigorously recorded by John Burroughs; and all of us
know how many more chestnuts we can see and pick up in a given time,
after a few hours’ concentration on this exercise, than when we first
began to look for them in the grass.
The color-games played by a number of children together with the
different-colored spools are various, but resemble more or less the
old-fashioned game of authors. One of them is played thus. Eight
children choose each the name of a color. Then the sixty-four spools
are poured out in confusion on the table around which the children
sit. One of them (the eldest or one chosen by lot) begins to deal out
to the others in turn. That is, the one on his right asking for red,
the dealer must quickly choose a spool of the right color and hand it
to his neighbor. Then the child beyond asks for blue, and so it goes
until the dealer makes a mistake. When he does, the deal goes to the
child next him. After every child has before him in a mixed pile the
eight shades of his chosen color, they all set to work as fast as
they can to see who can soonest arrange them in the right chromatic
order. The child who does this first has “won” the game, and is the one
who deals first in the next game. Children of about the same age and
ability repeat this game with the monotonously eternal vivid interest
which characterizes an old-established quartet of whist-players, and
they attain, by means of it and similar games with the color spools, a
control of their eyes which is a marvel and which must forever add
to the accuracy of their impressions about the world. When a generation
of children trained in this manner has grown up, landscape painters
will no longer be able to complain, as they do now, that they are
working for a purblind public.
[Illustration: THE BROAD STAIR.]
[Illustration: THE LONG STAIR.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
We are now approaching at last the extremely important and hitherto
undescribed “geometric insets,” whose mysterious name has piqued the
curiosity of more than one casual and hasty reader of accounts of the
Montessori system. A look at the pictures of these shows them to be as
simple as all the rest of Dr. Montessori’s expedients. Anyone who was
ever touched by the picture-puzzle craze, or who in his childhood felt
the fascination of dissected maps, needs no explanation of the pleasure
taken by little children of four and five in fitting these queer-shaped
bits of wood into their corresponding sockets, the square piece into
the square socket, the triangle into the three-cornered hole, the
four-leafed clover shape into the four-lobed recess. There can be no
better description of the way in which a child is initiated into the
use of this piece of apparatus than the one written by Miss Tozier for
_McClure’s Magazine_:
“A small boy of the mature age of four, who has been sitting plunged
either in sleep or meditation, now starts up from his chair and wanders
across to his directress for advice. He wants something to amuse him.
She takes him to the cupboard, throws in a timely suggestion, and he
strolls back to his table with a smile. He has chosen half a dozen
or more thin, square tablets of wood and a strip of navy-blue cloth.
He begins by spreading down the cloth, then he puts his blocks on
it in two rows. They are of highly-varnished wood, light blue, with
geometrical figures of navy-blue in the centre; there is a triangle, a
circle, a rectangle, an oval, a square, an octagon. The teacher, who
has followed him, stands on the other side of the table. She runs two
of her fingers round one of the edges of the triangle. ‘Touch it so,’
she says. He promptly and delightedly imitates her. She then pulls all
the figures out of their light-blue frames by means of a brass button
in each, mixes them up on the table; and tells him to call her when
he has them all in place again. The dark-blue cloth shows through the
empty frame, so that it appears as if the figures had only sank down
half an inch. While he continues to stare at this array, off goes the
teacher.
“‘Is she not going to show him how to begin?’
“‘An axiom of our practical pedagogy is to aid the child only to be
independent,’ answers Dr. Montessori. ‘He does not wish help.’
“Nor does he seem to be troubled. He stares a while at his array of
blocks; yet his eye does not grow quite sure, for he carefully selects
an oval from the mixed-up pile and tries to put it in the circle. It
won’t go. Then, quick as a flash, as if subconsciously rather than
designedly, he runs his little forefinger around the rim of the figure
and then round the edge of the empty space left in the light-blue
frames of both the oval and the circle. He discovers his mistake at
once, puts the figure into its place, and leans back a moment in his
chair to enjoy his own cleverness before beginning with another. He
finally gets them all into their proper frames, and instantly pulls
them out again, to do it quicker and better next time.
“These blocks with the geometric insets are among the most valuable
stimuli in the Casa dei Bambini. The vision and the touch become,
by their use, accustomed to a great variety of shapes. It will be
noted, too, that the child apprehends the forms synthetically, as
given entities, and is not taught to recognize them by aid of even the
simplest geometrical analysis. This is a point on which Dr. Montessori
lays particular stress.”
Now it is to be borne in mind that although, for the children, this is
only a “game,” as fascinating to them as the picture-puzzle is to their
elders, their far-seeing teacher is utilizing it, far cry though it may
seem, to begin to teach them to write. And here I realize that I have
at last written a phrase for which my bewildered reader has probably
been waiting in an astonished impatience. For of all the profound,
searching, regenerating effects of the Montessori system, none seems
to have made an impression on the public like the fact, almost a
by-product of the method, that Montessori children learn to write and
read more easily than others. I have heard Dr. Montessori exclaim in
wonder many times over the popular insistence on that interesting
and important, but by no means central, detail of her work; as though
reading and writing were our only functions in life, as though we could
get information and education only from the printed page, a prop which
is already, in the opinion of many wise people, too largely used in our
modern world as a substitute for first-hand, individual observation.
It cannot be denied, however, that the way Montessori children learn
to write is very spectacular. The theory underlying it is far too
complicated to describe in complete detail in a book of this sort, but
for the benefit of the person who desires to run and read at the same
time, I will set down a short-cut, unscientific explanation.
The inaccuracy and relative weakness of a little child’s eyesight,
compared to his sense of touch, has been already mentioned (page 57).
This simple element in child physiology must be borne constantly in
mind as one of the determining factors in the Montessori method of
teaching writing. The child who is “playing” with the geometric insets
soon learns, as we have seen from Miss Tozier’s description, that he
can find the shallow recess which is the right shape for the piece of
wood which he holds in his hand if he will run the fingers of his other
hand around the edge of his piece of wood and then around the different
recesses.
[Illustration: INSETS WHICH THE CHILD LEARNS TO PLACE BOTH BY SIGHT AND
BY TOUCH.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
It is hard for an ordinary adult really to conceive of the importance
of this movement for a little child. Indeed, so fixed is our usual
preference for vision as a means of gaining information, that it gives
one a very queer feeling to watch a child, with his eyes wide open,
apparently looking intently at the board with its different-shaped
recesses, but unable to find the one matching the inset he holds, until
he has gone through that eerie, blind-man’s motion with his finger-tips.
Now that motion, very frequently repeated, not only tells him where
to fit in his inset, but, like all frequently repeated actions, wears
a channel in his brain which tends, whenever he begins the action,
to make him complete it in the way he always has done it. It can be
seen that, if, instead of a triangle or a square, the child is given a
letter of the alphabet and shown how to follow its outlines with his
fingers in the direction in which they move when the letter is written,
the brain channel and muscular habit resulting are of the utmost
importance.
But before he can make any use of this, he needs to learn another
muscular habit, quite distinct from (although always associated with)
the mastery of the letters of the alphabet, namely, the mastery of
the pencil. The exceeding awkwardness naturally felt by the child in
holding this new implement for the first time, has nothing to do with
his recognition of A or B, although it adds another great difficulty
to his reproducing those letters. He must learn how to manage his
pencil before he engages upon the much more complicated undertaking
of constructing with it certain fixed symbols, just as he must learn
how to walk before he can be sent on an errand. The old-fashioned way
(still generally in use in Italy, and not wholly abandoned in all
parts of our own country) was to force the child to fill innumerable
copy-books with monotonous straight lines or “pot-hooks,” a weariness
of the spirit and a thorn in the flesh which any one who has suffered
from it can describe feelingly. One way adopted by modern educators to
avoid this dreary exercise is by frankly running away from the issue
and postponing teaching children to write until a much more mature
age than formerly, in the hope that general exercises in free-hand
drawing will sufficiently supplement the general strengthening and
steadying of the muscles which come with more mature development. It
is an inaccurate but, perhaps, suggestive comparison to say that this
is a little as though young children should not be taught how to walk
because it is so hard for them to keep their balance, but made to wait
until all their bones are mature.
Dr. Montessori has solved the difficulty by another use of the
geometric insets. This time it is the hole left by the removal of one
of the insets which is used. Suppose, for instance, that one chooses
the triangular inset. It is set down on a piece of paper and the
triangle is lifted out, leaving the paper showing through. The child
is provided with colored crayons and shown how to trace around the
outline of the triangular-shaped piece of paper. The fact that the
metal frame stands up a little from the paper prevents his at first
wildly unsteady pencil from going outside the triangle. When he has
traced around the outline[A] with his blue crayon, he lifts the frame
up and there is the most beautiful blue triangle, all the work of his
own hands! He usually gazes at this in delighted surprise, and then it
is suggested to him to fill in this outline with strokes of his pencil.
He is allowed to make these as he chooses, only being cautioned not to
pass outside the line. At first the crayon goes “every which way,” and
the “drawings” are hardly recognizable because the outline has been
so overrun at every point; but gradually the child’s muscular control
is improved and finally carried to a very high degree of perfection.
Regular, even parallel lines begin to appear and the final result is as
even as a Japanese color-wash. It is evident that in the course of this
work he makes of his own accord, with the utmost interest animating
each stroke, as many lines as would fill hours and hours of enforced
drudgery over copy-books. When, after much practice, the muscles have
learned almost automatically to control fingers holding a pencil, that
particular muscular habit is sufficiently well-learned for the child to
begin on another enterprise.
Now of course, though it is most interesting to color triangles and
circles, a child does not spend all his day at it. Among other things
which occupy and amuse him at this time is getting acquainted with
the look and feel of the letters of the alphabet. The children are
presented, one at a time, sometimes only one a day, with large script
letters, made of black sandpaper pasted on smooth white cards, and are
taught how to draw their fingers over the letter in the direction taken
when it is written. At the same time the teacher repeats slowly and
distinctly the sound of the letter, making sure that the child takes
this in.
After this, the little Italian child, happy in the possession
of a phonetically spelled language, has an easier time than our
English-speaking children, who begin then and there their lifelong
struggle with the insanities of English spelling. But this is a
struggle to which they must come under any system, and much less
formidable under this than it has ever been before. For the next step
is, of course, to put these letters together into simple words. There
is no need to wait until a child has toiled all through the alphabet
before beginning this much more interesting process. As soon as he
knows two letters he can spell Mamma. There is no question as yet of
his constructing the letters with his own hands. He simply takes them
from their separate compartments and lays them on the floor or table in
the right order. In handling them throughout all of these exercises the
children are encouraged constantly to make that blind-man’s motion of
tracing around the letter. The rough sandpaper apparently shouts out
information to the little finger-tips highly sensitized by the tactile
exercises, for the child nearly always corrects himself more surely
by touching than by looking at his sandpaper alphabet. Of course, the
strongest of muscular habits is being formed as he does this.
A pleasant variation on this routine is a test of the child’s new
knowledge. The teacher asks him to give her B, give her D, P, M, etc.
The letters are kept in little pasteboard compartments, a compartment
for all the B’s, another for all the D’s, and so on. The child, in
answer to the teacher’s request, looks over these compartments and
picks out from all the others the letter she has asked for. This, of
course, seems only like a game to him, a variation on hide-and-seek.
All these processes go on day after day, side by side, all invisibly
converging towards one end. The practice with the crayons, the
recognition of the letters by eye and touch, the revelation as to the
formation of words with the movable alphabet, are so many roads leading
to the painless acquisition of the art of writing. They draw nearer
and nearer together, and then, one day, quite suddenly, the famous
“Montessori explosion into writing” occurs. The teacher of experience
can tell when this explosion is imminent. First the parallel lines
which the child makes to fill and color the geometric figures become
singularly regular and even; second, his acquaintance with the alphabet
becomes so thorough that he recognizes the letters by sense of touch
only, and, third, he increases in facility for composing words with the
movable alphabet. The burst into spontaneous writing usually comes only
after these three conditions are present.
It usually happens that a child has a crayon in his hand and begins the
motion of his fingers made as he traces around one of his sandpaper
letters. But this time he has the pencil in his fingers, and the
idea suddenly occurs to him, usually reducing him to breathless
excitement, that if he traces on the paper with his pencil the form
of the letters, he will be writing. In the twinkling of an eye it is
done. He has written with his own hand one of the words which he has
been constructing with the movable alphabet. He is usually as proud
of this achievement as though he had invented the art of writing. The
first children who were taught in this manner and who experienced this
explosion into writing did really believe, I gather, that writing
was something of their own invention. They rushed about excitedly to
explain, to anyone who would listen, all about this wonderful new
discovery: “Look! Look! You don’t need the movable letters to make
words. See, you just take a pencil or a piece of chalk, and draw the
letters for yourself ... as many as you please ... anywhere!” And, in
fact, for the first few days after this explosion, their teachers and
mothers found writing “anywhere!” all over the house. The children
were in a fever of excited pride. Since then, although the first word
always causes a spasm of joy, children in a Children’s Home are so used
to seeing the older ones writing and reading, that their own feat is
taken more calmly, as a matter of course. It really always takes place
in this sudden way, however. One day a child cannot write, and the next
he can.
The formation of the letters, so hard for children taught in the old
way, offers practically no difficulty to the Montessori child. He has
traced their outline so often with his finger-tips that his knowledge
of them is lodged where, in his infant organism, it belongs, in his
muscular memory; so that when, pencil in his well-trained hand, he
starts his fingers upon an action already so often repeated as to be
automatic, muscular habit and muscular memory do the rest. He does
not need consciously to direct each muscle in the action of writing,
any more than a practised piano-player thinks consciously of which
finger goes after which. The vernacular phrase expressing this sort of
involuntary, muscular-memory facility is literally true in his case,
“He has done it so often that he could do it with his eyes shut.” It
is to be noted that for a long time after this explosion into writing,
the children continue incessantly to go through the three preparatory
steps, tracing with their fingers the sandpaper letters, filling in
the geometric forms and composing with the movable alphabet. These are
for them what scales are for the pianist, a necessary practice for
“keeping the hand in.” By means of constantly tracing the sandpaper
letters the children write almost from the first the most astonishingly
clear, firm, regular hand, much better than that of most adults of my
acquaintance.
It is apparent, from even this short-hand account of this remarkably
successful method, that children cannot learn to write by means of
it without considerable (even if unconscious and painless) effort on
their part, and without intelligence, good judgment, and considerable
patience on the part of the teacher. The popular accounts of the
miracles accomplished by Dr. Montessori’s apparatus have apparently
led some American readers to fancy that it is a sort of amulet one can
tie about the child’s neck, or plaster to apply externally, which will
cause the desired effect without any further care. As a matter of fact,
it is a carefully devised trellis which starts the child’s sensory
growth in a direction which will be profitable for the practical
undertaking of learning how to write, a trellis invented and patented
by Dr. Montessori, but which those of us who attempt to teach children
must construct for ourselves on her pattern, following step by step the
development of each of the children under our care.
[Illustration: TRACING SAND-PAPER LETTERS.]
[Illustration: TRACING GEOMETRICAL DESIGN.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir]
And yet, although the Montessori apparatus does not teach children by
magic how to write a good hand, in comparison with the methods now in
use, it is really almost miraculous in its results. In our schools
children learn slowly to write (and how badly!) when they are seven
or eight, cannot do it fluently until they are much older, and never
do it very well, if the average handwriting of our high-school and
college student is any test of our system. In the Montessori schools a
child of four usually spends about a month and a half in the definite
preparation for writing, and children of five usually only a month.
Some very quick ones of this age learn to write with all the letters in
twenty days. Three months’ practice, after they once begin to write,
is, as a rule, enough to steady their handwriting into an excellently
clear and regular script, and, after six months of writing, a
Montessori tot of five can write fluently, legibly, and (most important
and revolutionary change) with pleasure, far beyond that usually felt
by a child in, say, our third or fourth grades.
He has not only achieved this valuable accomplishment with enormous
economy of time, but he has been spared, into the bargain, the endless
hours of soul-killing drudgery from which the children in our schools
now suffer. The Montessori child has, it is true, gone through a far
more searching preparation for this achievement, but it has all been
without any strain on his part, without any consciousness of effort
except that which springs from the liveliest spontaneous desire. It has
tired him, literally, no more than if he had spent the same amount of
time playing tag.
I have heard some scientific talk which sounded to my ignorant ears
very profound and psychological, about whether this capacity of
Montessori children to write can be considered as a truly “intellectual
achievement,” or only a sort of unconsciously learned trick. This is a
fine theoretic distinction which I think most mothers will feel they
can safely ignore. Whatever it is from a psychological standpoint, and
however it may be rated in the Bradstreet of pure science, it is an
inestimable treasure for our children.
Reading comes after writing in the Montessori system, and has not
apparently as inherently close a connection with it as is sometimes
thought. That is, a child who can form letters perfectly with his
pencil and can compose words with the movable alphabet may still be
unable to recognize a word which he himself has neither written nor
composed. But, of course, with such a start as the Montessori system
gives him, the gap between the two processes is soon bridged. There
are various reasons why a detailed account of the Montessori method
of teaching reading need not be given here. One is that this book
is written for mothers and not teachers, and since the methods for
teaching reading in our schools are much better than those used for
teaching writing, mothers will naturally, as a rule, leave reading
until the child is under a teacher. Furthermore, there is nothing so
very revolutionary in the Montessori method in this regard and there
exist already in this country several excellent methods for teaching
reading. And yet a few notes on some features of the Montessori system
will be of interest.
Like many variations of our own system it begins with the recognition
of single words. At first these are composed with the movable alphabet.
Later, when the child can interpret readily words composed in this way,
they are written in large clear script on slips of paper. The child
spells the word out letter by letter, and then pronounces these sounds
more and more rapidly until he runs them together and perceives that he
is pronouncing a word familiar to him. This is always a moment of great
satisfaction to him and of encouragement to his teacher.
After this has continued until the children recognize single words
quickly, the process is extended to phrases. Here the teacher goes very
slowly, with great care, to avoid undue haste and lack of thoroughness.
There is a danger here that the children will fall into the mechanical
habit (familiar to us all) of reading aloud a page with great glibness,
although the sense of the words has made no impression on their minds.
To avoid this the Montessori Directress adopts the simple expedient
of not allowing them at first to read aloud. She carries on, instead,
a series of silent conversations with the children, writing on the
board some simple request for an action on their part. “Please stand
up,” “Please shut your eyes,” and so on. Later longer and more
complicated sentences are written on slips of paper and distributed
to the children. They read these to themselves (not being misled by
their oral fluency into thinking they understand what they do not), and
show that they have understood by performing the actions requested. In
other words, these are short letters addressed by the teacher to the
children, and answered by silent action on the part of the children.
Like all of the Montessori devices, this is self-corrective. It is
perfectly easy for the child to be sure whether he has understood
the sentence or not, and his attention is fixed, not on pronouncing
correctly (which has nothing to do with understanding the sentences
before him), but on the comprehension of the written symbols. As for
the teacher, she has an absolutely perfect check on the child. If he
does not understand, he does not do the right thing. It means the
elimination of the “fluent bluffer,” a phenomenon not wholly unfamiliar
to teachers, even when they are dealing with very young children.