What is the Montessori method, how it works and how it is recognized (articolo in Inglese)

What is the Montessori method, how it works and how it is recognized

 According to the Montessori philosophy, the child is not an empty vessel in which the adult has to put knowledge, concepts and abilities: the child is a being full of potentiality, which already contains his own abilities. The adult's job is to help him get them out.

To achieve this result it is very important that the child is autonomous .

If he is physically independent , he will know how to take care of his person without the help of an adult (dressing, washing, going to the bathroom, eating alone, etc.) and gaining self - awareness and therefore self-confidence .

If it is intellectually autonomous , it will know how to persevere and will therefore succeed in pursuing its objectives and making the most of its potential.

Three fundamental elements contribute to the achievement of the above autonomy: the environment, the teacher, the material .

The Montessori method or self-education method

According to the Montessori philosophy, the child is not an empty vessel in which the adult has to put knowledge, concepts and abilities: the child is a being full of potentiality, which already contains his own abilities. The adult's job is to help him get them out.

To achieve this result it is very important that the child is autonomous .

If he is physically independent , he will know how to take care of his person without the help of an adult (dressing, washing, going to the bathroom, eating alone, etc.) and gaining self - awareness and therefore self-confidence .

If it is intellectually autonomous , it will know how to persevere and will therefore succeed in pursuing its objectives and making the most of its potential.

Three fundamental elements contribute to the achievement of the above autonomy: the environment, the teacher, the material .

The Montessori school environment 

How can a child be physically autonomous inserted in a context in which everything is out of reach?

And it's not just about heights, it's about volumes, weights, and measures.

The Montessori school is furnished according to the child : everything is a measure within its reach, a weight that allows it to maneuver the objects to use them effectively and simply, so that everything is easy to clean and keep in order (furniture without plugs, grooves, convolutions etc.). Naturally everything is pleasantly colored, to offer a cheerful environment where children feel at ease.

In this context, the care of objects can be entrusted to the children: here nothing is done for pretend , it is done for real , because only this way is learned .

The objects are not unbreakable : they are light, so that there is little risk of dropping them. They are small, so that the hands can have a firm grip on them, but otherwise they are like those of adults: the dishes are made of ceramic, the glasses and the jugs are made of glass, and the iron really warms up (without burning, of course, but is able to iron handkerchiefs).

Each object is unique within these schools. There are no duplicates that agree on more contenders to the same activity: in this way the children learn to manage the wait , and with it, abdicate to that role of little tyrants that is natural in the first years of life, and they are introduced to democracy .

On the other hand, when they use an object, they can do it for as long as they wish and so enjoy the calm that the creative genesis of the ego requires, which is being consumed while working.

A peaceful working climate , this you will find in a Montessoriana school, and from this you can identify it as such.

Inside the school children are free to move as they wish: it is not by chance that the school is called the Children's Home .

Within those walls the child is at home. He will be able to choose to move from his class, to the practical living room, to the religious classroom, and freely choose the activities to be dedicated to. The day is however marked by fixed appointments: work, free play, lunch etc. Freedom of choice does not therefore translate into a cheerful confusion, nor in total anarchy, but in a system of organized freedom .

The role of the teacher in the Montessori school

The role of the teacher in this context is very different from that of a traditional teacher. His role is not central, he does not have a chair that stands in the middle of the class . The teacher teaches the child not to need the adult, to do for himself.

Learning takes place through the materials, which I will discuss in a moment , and the teacher's task is to propose the right material at the right time and explain its use .

Although there are general indications on the age of reference for each material, the teacher's task is to observe the single child, to understand when and if he is ready for a given activity, to understand his attitudes and inclinations, because each child is different and must be observed in its uniqueness. What is suitable for a child may not be for another: the teacher's intervention, the proposals he will make, will be designed specifically for each student.

The teacher is the figure that mediates between the child, the environment and the materials , his action is never imposing or judging. There are no grades or homework in the Montessori school, and there is no "wrong" phrase, which hurts the child in the intimate because he is not able to differentiate between "action" and "himself": feeling say "you're wrong", for him it means "you're wrong".

Calm, patience, charity and humility are the indispensable virtues of the teacher, according to Maria Montessori.

The Montessori material

What is this infamous Montessori material ? They are games, we could say simplifying but without moving away from reality.

I am sure that certain "intelligent" games of those we give to our children have been inspired by Montessori theories, even though they almost always lack the fundamental precepts.

The montessori material is not of support, but of development : it starts from sensoriality (touch, smell, sight, hearing), to bring the child to abstraction ( abstract learning).

Its fundamental characteristic, the one that many of the toys mentioned above is missing, is to be self-correcting : the child notices himself when he makes a mistake , because the material is made in such a way as to make him understand the error. In this way he will be able to go back and repeat until he obtains the correct result, without anyone from the outside telling him "you were wrong" (see above).

The materials are divided into six categories, corresponding to as many fields of knowledge and education: practical life , sensory material , psychoarithmetic , language , cosmic education , music .

For each of these categories there are materials suitable for children (from 3 years) and older (up to 6 years). You will notice that, in the summary list that I go to do by category, there are elements that seem to belong more to an elementary school than a nursery school: this derives from the fact that Montessori identifies 4 levels of development, of which the first (and more fertile) borders in our elementary school, by age group.

The 6 categories of Montessori materials:

1. Life Practice

That is: practical activities designed to develop personal autonomy , but also to train the muscles of the hand (three-finger pression, and wrist agility) and hand-eye coordination, as a propedeutic activity to writing .

In the practical life classroom, it is ironed, served at the table (game of the waiter and the diner), it is racked, strings are tied, buttons are fastened, they are decanted, the shoes are cleaned, the mess is collected and cleaned. derives from the activities.

Children, especially the little ones, adore these activities and it is not by chance that they spend a lot of time in the first year (they choose it spontaneously, as I said).

2. Sensory Material

That is: objects that represent the attributes of things . The big, the small, the long the short, the heavy and the light.

There are geometric figures to be interlocked (with a small pinch of pressure which in the meantime trains the three-fingered printhead, see above), quills of colors to be paired or put in gradation, triangles with which to form other figures, rough quills and cruets of smells from sniffing and pairing with eyes closed (eg self-correction: this game is blindfolded, when the child removes the blindfold, he will see if he did well because the same pairs have the same color).

This material makes the child use all the senses and is particularly indicated in these phases of growth in which he still knows the world through himself and his senses.

Through the sensation will come to abstraction: that boom so long that you have to maneuver carefully not to give it to someone, gives a sense of length even from a sensory, practical point of view.

(eg The fact that 100 km can not be traveled on foot because they are too many, will be an abstraction more affordable for those who have experienced "on their skin" the meaning of the word "long" and at an early age. I am explained, but this is precisely the sense of " going from sensoriality to abstraction".)

3. Psychoarithmetic

That is: mathematical sciences .

Personally I found myself thinking that, if I had done such a school, I would have a better relationship with mathematics. I do not know if it happens to you, but for me it is absolutely necessary to visualize an arithmetic operation, breaking it down into dozens, in order to be able to remember it. Here, the psycho-analytical material provides the ability to visualize abstract concepts such as quantities, units, tens, hundreds, even and odd .

Materialized abstractions , these are the materials of psychoarithmetic.

There are the punches (allow to associate numbers and quantities), the buttons (units to be distributed under the numbers in different shapes depending on whether the number is even -quadrilatero- or odd -pentagono-), beads, temples, squares and cubes ( units, tens, hundreds, thousands), and tables of operations (they are tables like those of the Chinese lady, to be understood, within which are distributed buttons that represent the unit, in different ways depending on the operation to be performed. In the case of additions - to compose the 10 - are rules to be embedded in the appropriate boxes).

4. Language

That is: we learn to read and write ( sooner or later ... ).

I have already talked about the propedeutics to writing, talking about practical life. The material of language instead is designed to teach the shape and sound of the individual letters, providing two basic types: frosted (that the younger child can trace with the finger starting to memorize the shape) and mobile (with which you can start to compose the words).

An important thing is that the sound of the letters is proposed exactly as it is : we will not say, for example, "dog's", but "dog's", with the hard, guttural sound of the word "dog" ( in short, the cantilena of the alphabet is not proposed as perfectly useless and completely incomprehensible to the smallest).

5. Cosmic education

That is: history, geography and botany .

Also in this case the materials are modulated according to the different ages of the child and exploit the touch (globes with earth and water of different roughness), the colors, the joints (maps to be decomposed and recomposed as puzzles, trees to be assembled and disassembled in all their parts) and finally the names of the elements to match the various pieces of the games.

If for the geography and the botany the forms of the things are introduced (that they are parts of a flower, of a continent or of a tree), for the historyintroduce the concepts related to the passing time, essential to arrive then to place the facts of the story itself, which will be learned more when grown up.

At this stage the children learn the concepts of yesterday, today and tomorrowthanks to calendars that gradually update in turn: the seasons, the days of the week and the month (to which every day apply elements related to the time it does, or to the activities carried out, so as to make understand, through the practice of their lives, what happened yesterday, and what is happening today and what will happen tomorrow - that you do not know ... -).

6. Music

For Montessori, the teaching of music is fundamental and this is learned, as well as with hearing, even with the body.

If the sound cylinders introduce in practice the piano and the bell and the bells (to be matched according to the identical sound) the concept of scales , to learn the rhythm the children use their own body, experimenting different rhythms of gait, walking on the wire (element characteristic of the Montessoriana school) and maybe carrying something in hand, or with a book on the head.

The wire is nothing but a double ellipse drawn on the floor, and is used for various games.

In my daughter's school, for example, it is also used to "establish an order" when it is necessary to reunite the cheerful band before a change of activity, for example at lunchtime, after the hour of free play. The children were asked to put themselves on the edge of the courtyard, the teachers called them in groups according to the color of the apron and the class (eg "pink room females with green apron"), so they entered the dining room, and managed , with a game, a flow of 100 children who otherwise could have resolved into a terrible chaos. This example, although belonging to my daughter's school, is not a codified practice, but demonstrates the polyvalent use of the famous thread (which in my daughter's stories, at the beginning, we made a little effort to decipher ...).

How do I understand if a school is really Montessori?

Some or many of the elements I talked about in this long article could be found in some traditional schools . This is none other than the demonstration of the fact that the Montessori theory has marked an important distinction with previous pedagogical theories , penetrating deeply into our current mentality. A school, however, can not be called Montessori if it does not present all these fundamental characteristics and found the method itself.

If you want to know if a school is really Montessori, you can not but verify that all the elements described above live together : in fact, there is no "official" Montessori certification.