The Montessori Method in Action

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In a prepared environment, materials and activities provide for three basic areas of child involvement:

1. Practical life or motor education
2. Sensory materials for training the senses
3. Academic materials for teaching writing, reading, and mathematics

All these activities are taught according to a prescribed procedure.

Practical Life

The prepared environment supports basic, practical life activities, such as walking from place to place in an orderly manner, carrying objects such as trays and chairs, greeting a visitor, and learning self-care skills. For example, dressing frames are designed to perfect the motor skills involved in buttoning, zipping, lacing, buckling, and tying. The philosophy for activities such as these is to make children independent and develop concentration.

Practical life activities are taught through four different types of exercise:

1. Care of the person—activities such as using dressing frames, polishing shoes, and washing hands
2. Care of the environment—for example, dusting, polishing a table, and raking leaves
3. Social relations—lessons in grace and courtesy
4. Analysis and control of movement—locomotor activities such as walking and balancing

Sensory Materials

There are 11 sensory materials found in a Montessori classroom. The materials for training and developing the senses have these characteristics:

• Control of error. Materials are designed so that children can see whether they made a mistake.
• Isolation of a single quality. Materials are designed so that other variables are held constant except for the isolated quality or qualities.
• Active involvement. Materials encourage active involvement rather than the more passive process of looking.
• Attractiveness. Materials are attractive, with colors and proportions that appeal to children.

Sensory materials have several purposes:

• To train children’s senses to focus on an obvious, particular quality. For example, with the red rods, the quality is length; with the pink tower cubes, size; and with the bells, musical pitch.
• To help sharpen children’s powers of observation and visual discrimination as readiness for learning to read.
• To increase children’s ability to think, a process that depends on the ability to distinguish, classify, and organize.
• To prepare children for the occurrence of the sensitive periods for writing and reading. In this sense, all activities are preliminary steps in the writing-reading process.

Academic Materials

The third area of Montessori materials is more academic. Exercises are presented in a sequence that encourages writing before reading. Reading is therefore an outgrowth of writing. Both processes, however, are introduced so gradually that children are never aware they are learning to write and read until one day they realize they are writing and reading. Describing this phenomenon, Montessori said that children “burst spontaneously” into writing and reading. She anticipated contemporary practices by integrating writing and reading and maintaining that writing lays the foundation for learning to read.