The Montessori Elementary Material. Maria Montessori Montessori

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СКАЧАТЬ Solving a problem in long division 238 Bead squares and cubes; and the arithmetic-board for multiplication and division 239 The bead number cubes built into a tower 282 The decagon and the rectangle composed of the same triangular insets 283 The triangular insets fitted into their metal plates 283 Showing that the two rhomboids are equal to the two rectangles 288 Showing that the two rhomboids are equal to the two squares 289 Hollow geometric solids 296 Designs formed by arranging sections of the insets within the frames 297 Making decorative designs with the aid of geometric insets 312 Water-color paintings from nature 313 The monocord 334 Material for indicating the intervals of the major scale 334 The music bars 335 The children using the music bells and the wooden keyboards 352 Analyzing the beat of a measure while walking on a line 353

PART I

       GRAMMAR

       Table of Contents

MONTESSORI ELEMENTARY MATERIAL

       Table of Contents

I

       Table of Contents

      THE TRANSITION FROM THE MECHANICAL TO THE INTELLECTUAL DEVELOPMENT OF LANGUAGE

      In the "Children's Houses" we had reached a stage of development where the children could write words and even sentences. They read little slips on which were written different actions which they were to execute, thus demonstrating that they had understood them. The material for the development of writing and reading consisted of two alphabets: a larger one with vowels and consonants in different colors, and a smaller one with all the letters in one color.

      (In English, to diminish the phonetic difficulties of the language, combinations of vowels and consonants, known as phonograms, are used. The phonograms with few exceptions have constant sounds and little attention is paid to the teaching of the separate values of the different letters: not until the child has built up his rules inductively does he realize the meaning of separate vowel symbols.)

      However, the actual amount of progress made was not very precisely ascertained. We could be sure only that the children had acquired the mechanical technique of writing and reading and were on the way to a greater intellectual development along these lines. Their progress, however extensive it may have been, could be called little more than a foundation for their next step in advance, the elementary school. What beyond all question was accomplished with the little child in the first steps of our method was to establish the psycho-motor mechanism of the written word by a slow process of maturation such as takes place in the natural growth of articulate speech; in other words, by methodically exercising psycho-motor paths.

      Later on the child's mind is able to make use of the successive operations performed with the written language which has been thus built up by the child as a matter of mechanical execution (writing) and to a certain extent of intelligent interpretation (reading). Normally this is an established fact at the age of five. When the child begins to think and to make use of the written language to express his rudimentary thinking, he is ready for elementary work; and this fitness is a question not of age or other incidental circumstance but of mental maturity.

      We have said, of course, that the children stayed in the "Children's House" up to the age of seven; nevertheless they learned to write, to count, to read, and even to do a certain amount of simple composition. It is clear, accordingly, that they had gone some distance in the elementary grade as regards both age and educational development. However, what they had actually accomplished beyond the mechanical technique of writing was more or less difficult to estimate. We can now say that our later experiments have not only clarified this situation, but enabled us to take the children much farther along than before.

      This only proves, however, that on beginning elementary grade work we did not depart from the "Children's House" idea; on the contrary we returned to it to give distinct realization to the nebulous hopes with which our first course concluded. Hence the "Children's House" and the lower grades are not two distinct things as is the case with the Fröbel Kindergarten and the ordinary primary school—in fact, they are one and the same thing, the continuation of an identical process.

      Let us return then to the "Children's House" and consider the child of five and one-half years. To-day in those "Children's Houses" which have kept up with the improvements in our method the child is actually started on his elementary education. From the second alphabet of the "Children's House" we go on to a third alphabet. Here the movable letters are a great deal smaller and are executed in model hand-writing. There are twenty specimens of each letter, whereas formerly there were but four; furthermore, there are three complete alphabets, one white, one black, and one red. There are, therefore, sixty copies of each letter of the alphabet. We include also all the punctuation marks: period, comma, accents (for Italian), apostrophe, interrogation and exclamation points. The letters are made of plain glazed paper.

      The uses of this alphabet are many; so before we stop to examine them let us look somewhat ahead. Everybody has recognized the naturalness of the exercise, used in the "Children's House," where the children placed a card bearing the name of an object on the object referred to. This was the first lesson in reading. We could see that the child knew how to read as soon as he was able to identify the object indicated on the card. In schools all over the world a similar procedure would, I imagine, be considered logical. I suppose that in all the schools where the objective СКАЧАТЬ