Dr. Montessori's Own Handbook, Maria Montessori [simple e reader .txt] 📗
- Author: Maria Montessori
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These are the children who, in a short space of time, sometimes in a few days, learn to write and to perform the first operations of arithmetic. It is not a fact that children in general can do it, as many have believed. It is not a case of giving my material for writing to unprepared children and of awaiting the “miracle.”
The fact is that the minds and hands of our children are already prepared for writing, and ideas of quantity, of identity, of differences, and of gradation, which form the bases of all calculation, have been maturing for a long time in them.
One might say that all their previous education is a preparation for the first stages of essential culture––writing, reading, and number, and that knowledge comes as an easy, spontaneous, and logical consequence of the preparation––that it is in fact its natural conclusion.
We have already seen that the purpose of the word is to fix ideas and to facilitate the elementary comprehension of things. In the same way writing and arithmetic now fix the complex inner acquisitions 85 of the mind, which proceeds henceforward continually to enrich itself by fresh observations.
Our children have long been preparing the hand for writing. Throughout all the sensory exercises the hand, whilst cooperating with the mind in its attainments and in its work of formation, was preparing its own future. When the hand learned to hold itself lightly suspended over a horizontal surface in order to touch rough and smooth, when it took the cylinders of the solid insets and placed them in their apertures, when with two fingers it touched the outlines of the geometrical forms, it was coordinating movements, and the child is now ready––almost impatient to use them in the fascinating “synthesis” of writing.
The direct preparation for writing also consists in exercises of the movements of the hand. There are two series of exercises, very different from one another. I have analyzed the movements which are connected with writing, and I prepare them separately one from the other. When we write, we perform a movement for the management of the instrument of writing, a movement 86 which generally acquires an individual character, so that a person’s handwriting can be recognized, and, in certain medical cases, changes in the nervous system can be traced by the corresponding alterations in the handwriting. In fact, it is from the handwriting that specialists in that subject would interpret the moral character of individuals.
Writing has, besides this, a general character, which has reference to the form of the alphabetical signs.
When a man writes he combines these two parts, but they actually exist as the component parts of a single product and can be prepared apart.
Exercises for the Management of the Instrument of Writing(The Individual Part)
In the didactic material there are two sloping wooden boards, on each of which stand five square metal frames, colored pink. In each of these is inserted a blue geometrical figure similar to the geometrical insets and provided with a small button for a handle. With this material we use a box of ten colored pencils and a little book of 87 designs which I have prepared after five years’ experience of observing the children. I have chosen and graduated the designs according to the use which the children made of them.
The two sloping boards are set side by side, and on them are placed ten complete “insets,” that is to say, the frames with the geometrical figures. (Fig. 28.) The child is given a sheet of white paper and the box of ten colored pencils. He will then choose one of the ten metal insets, which are arranged in an attractive line at a certain distance from him. The child is taught the following process:
Fig. 28.––Sloping Boards to Display Set of Metal Insets.
He lays the frame of the iron inset on the sheet of paper, and, holding it down firmly with one hand, he follows with a colored pencil the interior outline which describes a geometrical figure. Then he lifts the square frame, and finds drawn upon the paper an enclosed geometrical form, a triangle, a circle, a hexagon, etc. The child has not actually performed a new exercise, because he had already performed all these movements when he touched the wooden plane insets. The only new feature of the exercise is that he follows the outlines no longer directly with his finger, but 88 through the medium of a pencil. That is, he draws, he leaves a trace of his movement.
The child finds this exercise easy and most interesting, and, as soon as he has succeeded in making the first outline, he places above it the piece of blue metal corresponding to it. This is an exercise exactly similar to that which he performed when he placed the wooden geometrical figures upon the cards of the third series, where the figures are only contained by a simple line.
This time, however, when the action of placing the form upon the outline is performed, the child takes another colored pencil and draws the outline of the blue metal figure.
When he raises it, if the drawing is well done, he finds upon the paper a geometrical figure contained by two outlines in colors, and, if the colors have been well chosen, the result is very attractive, and the child, who has already had a considerable education of the chromatic sense is keenly interested in it.
These may seem unnecessary details, but, as a matter of fact, they are all-important. For instance, if, instead of arranging the ten metal 89 insets in a row, the teacher distributes them among the children without thus exhibiting them, the child’s exercises are much limited. When, on the other hand, the insets are exhibited before his eyes, he feels the desire to draw them all one after the other, and the number of exercises is increased.
The two colored outlines rouse the desire of the child to see another combination of colors and then to repeat the experience. The variety of the objects and the colors are therefore an inducement to work and hence to final success.
Here the actual preparatory movement for writing begins. When the child has drawn the figure in double outline, he takes hold of a pencil “like a pen for writing,” and draws marks up and down until he has completely filled the figure. In this way a definite filled-in figure remains on the paper, similar to the figures on the cards of the first series. This figure can be in any of the ten colors. At first the children fill in the figures very clumsily without regard for the outlines, making very heavy lines and not keeping them parallel. Little by little, however, the drawings 90 improve, in that they keep within the outlines, and the lines increase in number, grow finer, and are parallel to one another.
When the child has begun these exercises, he is seized with a desire to continue them, and he never tires of drawing the outlines of the figures and then filling them in. Each child suddenly becomes the possessor of a considerable number of drawings, and he treasures them up in his own little drawer. In this way he organizes the movement of writing, which brings him to the management of the pen. This movement in ordinary methods is represented by the wearisome pothook connected with the first laborious and tedious attempts at writing.
The organization of this movement, which began from the guidance of a piece of metal, is as yet rough and imperfect, and the child now passes on to the filling in of the prepared designs in the little album. The leaves are taken from the book one by one in the order of progression in which they are arranged, and the child fills in the prepared designs with colored pencils in the same way as before. Here the choice of the colors is another intelligent occupation which encourages 91 the child to multiply the tasks. He chooses the colors by himself and with much taste. The delicacy of the shades which he chooses and the harmony with which he arranges them in these designs show us that the common belief, that children love bright and glaring colors, has been the result of observation of children without education, who have been abandoned to the rough and harsh experiences of an environment unfitted for them.
The education of the chromatic sense becomes at this point of a child’s development the lever which enables him to become possessed of a firm, bold and beautiful handwriting.
The drawings lend themselves to limiting, in very many ways, the length of the strokes with which they are filled in. The child will have to fill in geometrical figures, both large and small, of a pavement design, or flowers and leaves, or the various details of an animal or of a landscape. In this way the hand accustoms itself, not only to perform the general action, but also to confine the movement within all kinds of limits.
Hence the child is preparing himself to write in a handwriting either large or small. Indeed, 92 later on he will write as well between the wide lines on a blackboard as between the narrow, closely ruled lines of an exercise book, generally used by much older children.
The number of exercises which the child performs with the drawings is practically unlimited. He will often take another colored pencil and draw over again the outlines of the figure already filled in with color. A help to the continuation of the exercise is to be found in the further education of the chromatic sense, which the child acquires by painting the same designs in water-colors. Later he mixes colors for himself until he can imitate the colors of nature, or create the delicate tints which his own imagination desires. It is not possible, however, to speak of all this in detail within the limits of this small work.
Exercises for the Writing of Alphabetical Signs
Fig. 29.––Single Sandpaper Letter.
Fig. 30.––Groups of Sandpaper Letters.
In the didactic material there are series of boxes which contain the alphabetical signs. At this point we take those cards which are covered with very smooth paper, to which is gummed a letter of the alphabet cut out in sandpaper. (Fig. 29.) There are also large cards on which are gummed 93 several letters, grouped together according to analogy of form. (Fig. 30.)
The children “have to touch over the alphabetical signs as though they were writing.” They touch them with the tips of the index and middle fingers in the same way as when they touched the wooden insets, and with the hand raised as when they lightly touched the rough and smooth surfaces. The teacher herself touches the letters to show the child how the movement should be performed, and the child, if he has had much practise in touching the wooden insets, imitates her with ease and pleasure. Without the previous practise, however, the child’s hand does not follow the letter with accuracy, and it is most interesting to make close observations of the children in order to understand the importance of a remote motor preparation for writing, and also to realize the immense strain which we impose upon the children when we set them to write directly without a previous motor education of the hand.
The child finds great pleasure in touching the sandpaper letters. It is an exercise by which he applies to a new
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