MONTESSORI MATERIALS: Organic, Heirloom, & Free-Range

Parents want the best for their children, whether the highest rated car seat or the most organic, most heirloom, most free-range egg.  Hey, no shame, I do, too!  Why should the level of research, attention, and care be any different in choosing the type of environment that helps form children during one of the most developmentally impactful times in their lives?  In keeping with the organic, heirloom, and free-range theme, would it help to add that Montessori materials are often made of natural resources like wood, wool, cotton, and metal over customary preschool plastic, the philosophy hails from the elegant (cough, heirloom) Italian city of Rome where it was developed by one of Italy's first female medical doctors, and that children are offered freedom in Montessori environments to move around the room and use the Montessori materials when their interest and motivation directs them - all towards the development of the whole child?  Are we getting somewhere now? ☺

Beautiful, child-sized, and reflective of the child's time and place, the Montessori materials compose a rare place: an environment designed specifically for children with both form and function in mind.  For example, you might find a child sized snack table with a scalloped-edge tablecloth, pink Depression glass plates, hand-embroidered cloth napkins, and painted wooden napkin rings; or a corn broom with a wooden handle that fits comfortably in a child's hand and does not tower over her.  You might find a three-sided Shaker drying rack at a school in New England or delicately carved wooden chopsticks at a school in Beijing.  Chosen with an eye for beauty, attention to the child's size, and understanding of cultural heritage these materials send the messages to children that this is a place for them and that they are trusted and respected with beautiful things.  Montessori teachers, referred to as guides, show children how to use materials carefully, and children rise to the occasion to care for the charming objects in their midst.  The children become so oriented to their environments that the presence of even a new vase for flower arranging becomes cause for notice and delight.

While some objects in a Montessori environment are structural such as tables, chairs, and shelves, and some are decorative such as wall artwork representative of a variety of mediums and styles, and all of these are beautiful and child-sized or hung at a child's height; the remainder of this article addresses the didactic Montessori materials in a primary Montessori environment to which children, parents, and guides typically refer.  These materials fall into four main categories: Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, and Mathematics, though zoology, botany, physical geography, art appreciation, music appreciation, history, and literature also infuse the environment through activities, oral stories, books, poems, and special experiences throughout the year.  Montessori guides present materials mostly through one-on-one lessons, based on the child's interest and readiness.  And once a child has received a presentation, the child can practice with the material any time it is not being used by another child.  Over time, as the child receives more lessons, more of the environment becomes accessible to him.  All together, the Montessori materials help children develop concentration, independence and confidence, skills that build on each other, and a concrete understanding of abstract academic principles.  Let's dig in!       

For starters, the Montessori materials are designed to be engaging, challenging, and purposeful which helps lead to concentration.  The ability to concentrate is like a muscle.  Children start to build concentration with short and simple Practical Life activities when they first enter the Montessori community, such as pouring water from one pitcher to another without spilling a drop or buttoning five buttons on the Button Frame.  The Montessori guide then introduces more complicated and sequenced multi-step activities which support the deepening and extending of concentration, such as washing a table or washing cloths.  The daily three hour work cycle allows three year-olds to enter many short periods of concentration with the Montessori materials, broken up by interludes of movement and observation around the room.  Meanwhile, the three hour work cycle looks quite different for a child who has been developing the concentration muscle for three or four years.  Older children, following their own interest and motivation, might sit with the same activity for most of the morning, or even over several days.  Have you seen a six year-old make a book of all U.S. presidents?

Inherent to each Montessori material’s design is a control of error, which indicates whether a child has completed the material correctly.  For example, one of the clearest controls of error occurs in the Solid Cylinder Block activity, a puzzle in which the child puts different sized cylinders into their matching holes.  If the child has a cylinder left that does not fit the last remaining hole, then the child knows she made a mistake.  When confronted with this result, the child can take out the pieces and try again; humans have a tendency to repeat towards exactness.  Or the child can ask a child or adult for help.  Once help has been received, the child might continue working with the material, or put it back on the shelf to try again another day.  Since the child does not depend on the adult for correction, she learns to independently gauge her progress; and since the child frequently encounters errors, she develops friendliness towards error and the confidence and grit to persevere towards success.  

Embedded in many Montessori materials and presentations are indirect preparations, almost like hidden secrets, for activities to come in the future.  For example, the guide shows the child how to move the sponge, scrub brush, and towel across the table from left to right in Table Washing, indirect preparations for writing and reading from left to right.  Carrying pitchers and buckets of water and the circular motions of scrubbing and drying the table strengthen the hand, wrist, and arm for eventually holding a pencil.  Many Sensorial materials have a mathematical design. For example, the cubes of the Pink Tower increase from one cubed centimeter to 10 cubed centimeters by factors of one centimeter cubed, and it is a set of ten, the foundation of the decimal system. The pattern of presentations in Sensorial follows a mathematical progression. Children begin with matching, or identifying equivalence. After matching, children grade objects: mathematical because children deduce and order increments of difference. Sensorial games, in which children match or grade at a distance, strengthen the memory to prepare the child for mathematics. These games isolate the difficulty of memory just as Practical Life activities isolated the difficulties of movement. Sensorial games also involve applying language to mathematical concepts, such as, “Bring me the rod that is just shorter.”

Similar to Russian psychologist Lev Vygotsky's theory of scaffolding, in which instruction occurs a step above the level the child is capable of without support, many of the Montessori materials build on each other by offering one new challenge.  For example, in the sequence of learning to write, the guide first shows the child how to isolate the sounds of words: the beginning sounds ("cat starts with c - c - c"), ending sounds ("cat ends with t - t - t"), middle sounds ("cat has a middle sound a,  c - aaa - t"), and then all of the sounds in a word ("what are the sounds in cat? c - a - t.").  Then, the guide helps helps the child connect sounds to symbols with the Sandpaper Letters: "Remember that sound c we've talked so much about.  I want to show you what c looks like."  The adult introduces the Sandpaper Letter for c, which the child experiences multi-sensorially: hearing the sound, seeing the cursive letter outlined in sandpaper on a wood background, and feeling the cursive letter by tracing.  Once the child has connected all of the sounds to their symbols, the guide introduces the Moveable Alphabet, a box with all of the letters of the alphabet as cursive wooden cut-outs.  First, the guide orients the child to the box: "I see a sound I know.  I see n," and she takes n from the box and sets in the on the rug.  "I see f," she would continue.  "Do you see any sounds you recognize?"  And together the adult and child would take out some of the sounds and then replace all in the box.  Next, the guide might say, "Remember that story about the two cats that live at my parents house.  I want to write cat today.  What are the sounds in cat?  C - a - t." And then, she would find those letters in the box and place them together on the rug so they touched.  The guide would continue offering words in context and building them on the rug until the child was ready to take over.  And this is the method by which a three, four, or five year-old child, long before the hand is ready to hold and control a pencil, can learn to write in a Montessori environment.

Lest they not be neglected, the Montessori math materials also build sequentially on each other.  Take for instance, the process leading up to addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division in the primary environment.  After much work with numbers one through ten, the child and guide move to the decimal system and four operations.  First, the guide shows the child a unit, ten, hundred, and thousand.  Picture a single golden glass bead, a wire bar of ten glass beads, ten bars wired together with one hundred glass beads, and ten hundred squares wired together with one thousand glass beads.  These materials are beautiful, delicate, and exact.  The child plays a memorization game with the guide to attach the names to the categories. Then, in much the same way, the guide introduces the symbols 1, 10, 100, and 1000 and plays a memorization game with these.  This work extends with games identifying other numbers in these categories.  At a rug, with number cards mixed up, the guide might say, "Point to seven hundred.  Find three tens.  Where is nine thousand?  Find two units."  Eventually, the child reads the numbers without prompting.  Next, the guide helps the child connect quantity to symbol through a series of fetching games.  The guide would put several number cards on a tray, and the child would have to fetch that quantity of golden beads from the bank.  The child plays this game over a long period of time until he can accurately make, read, and verify four digit numbers in quantity and symbol.  Then, the child is ready for a series of dramatic, interactive and small group lessons on the four operations with the golden beads.  For example, in addition, each child is given a different four digit number and has to get this quantity of golden beads.  Then, the guide playfully wonders how to find out how many they have together, so the children put all of their beads in a silk scarf, which is lifted at the corners to make a massive bundle.  The children each practice feeling the heavy weight of the combined beads.  Then, they organize the beads into categories and count how much they have when they put all of their beads together.  That is addition.  Children repeat the games of the different operations frequently, providing a deep and concrete understanding of what happens in each.  This understanding provides a foundation on which memorization of basic math facts can be built with significance, comfort, and ease.  What does 3 + 6 mean?  Children can think back to the golden beads and the scarf.  

Are you dizzy yet?  Do I mean to tell you that all of this exists in an accredited primary Montessori program?  Yes, I do.  But it is important for everyone to remember that even the most beautiful environment with all of the Montessori materials is just a room with things without the trained Montessori guide.  The trained Montessori guide provides the powerful connection between the child and the materials, at the appropriate time and in the appropriate way, using her understanding of each child and all children as her guide and her relationship with the individual child as her enticement.  The guide also has the great responsibility of creating and maintaining a culture of respect, in which freedom and limits are established, concentration is protected, independence is supported, grace and courtesy are modeled and practiced, and curiosity is piqued.  Can you imagine a more thoughtful form of education for children?  Let us all have the power to be discerning about such important things.