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Why Montessori in the early years?
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Sensorial
From an early age children are developing a sense of order and actively seek to sort, arrange, and classify their many experiences. The sensorial component provides a key to this world, a means for growth in perception and understanding. The sensorial materials help the child experience and perceive distinctions between similar and different things.
Later the child learns to grade a set of similar objects that differ in a regular and measurable way from most to least. Each piece of equipment is generally a set of objects that isolate a quality perceived through the senses: such as colour, form, dimension, texture, temperature, volume, pitch, weight, and taste.
Precise language such as loud/soft, long/short, rough/smooth, circle, square, cube, and so on is then attached to these sensorial experiences to make the world more meaningful to the child.
Language
Maria Montessori did not believe that reading, writing, spelling, and language should be taught as separate entities. Pre-primary children are immersed in the dynamics of their own language development and the Montessori approach provides a carefully thought-out program to facilitate this process. Oral language acquired since birth is further elaborated and refined through a variety of activities such as songs, games, poems, stories, and classified language cards.
Indirect preparation for writing begins with the Practical Life exercises and Sensorial training. Muscular movement and fine motor skills are developed along with the ability of the child to distinguish the sounds that make up language. With this spoken language foundation, the guide begins to present the symbols of the alphabet to the child.
Not only can children hear and see sounds but they can feel them by tracing the sandpaper letters. When sufficient letters have been learned the movable alphabet is introduced. These cardboard or wooden letters enable the child to reproduce his or her own words, then phrases, sentences, and finally stories.
Creativity is encouraged and the child grows in appreciation of the mystery and power of language. Other materials follow which present the intricacies of non-phonetic spelling and grammar. Because children know what they have written, they soon discover that they can read back their stories. Reading books both to themselves and others soon follows.
Mathematics
Mathematics is a way of looking at the world, a language for understanding and expressing measurable relationships. The child’s mind has already been awakened to mathematical ideas through the Sensorial experiences. They have seen the distinctions of distance, dimension, graduation, identity, similarity, and sequence and will now be introduced to the functions and operations of numbers. Geometry, algebra, and arithmetic are connected in the Montessori method as they are in life. For instance, the golden bead material highlights the numerical, geometrical, and dimensional relationships within the decimal system.
Through concrete material, the child learns to add, subtract, multiply, and divide and gradually comes to understand many abstract mathematical concepts with ease and joy.
