The Ultimate Montessori Blog

Children do not seem to be interested in just tracing the touch boards repeatedly when presented. They do it just once or twice and then stop. What shall we do?

The tactile material should be presented at the earliest opportunity after the child is admitted to the House of Children. We have to take advantage of the sensitive period for touch which may disappear soon. When presented during that period the children will do it with avid interest.

1. Never touch a child unless invited by him (in some form or another).
2. Never speak ill of a child, either in his presence or in his absence
3. Concentrate on strengthening and helping the development of what is good in a child so that its presence may leave less and less space for the bad.
4. Be active in preparing the environment:take meticulous and constant care of it help the children to establish constructive relationships with it. Show the children where everything belongs and demonstrate the use of the materials
5. Be ever ready to answer the call of a child who needs your assistance. Listen and respond to his appeals.
6. Respect children when they make mistakes. As soon as they can, allow them to discover their error and correct it by themselves. Stop firmly any misuse of the environment and any action which endangers a child, his development, or others.
7. Respect the child who takes rest or watches others or ponders over what he himselfhas done or will do. Neither call him nor force him to other forms of activity.
8. Help those who are in search of activity and cannot find it.
9. Be untiring in repeating presentations to the child who has refused them earlier; in helping the child acquire what is not yet his own and overcome imperfections. Do this by animating the environment with care and purposive restraint and silence, with mild words and loving presence. Make your ready presence felt to the child who searches and hide from the child who has found.
10. Ever treat the child with the best of good manners and offer him the best you have yourself and at your disposal.

How is History introduced in the Children’s House?

If children have been welcomed into a rich environment, in the first three years of life they will lay a solid foundation of complicity and solidarity with their world and all its exhilarating phenomena among which, first, foremost and above all, their own kind. The people around them are an inexhaustible source of interest. Initially those present and tangible, and as their sense of time, their capacity for abstraction and their imagination develop, also the doings, the comings and goings, the ventures and adventures of people past will fascinate them.

‘Indeed it is a love of his environment that we may envisage the irresistible urge which, throughout the sensitive periods, unites the child to things. It is not love in the sense that is commonly understood as an emotional feeling but a love of the intelligence which sees and assimilates and builds itself through loving’ - Maria Montessori, The Secret of Childhood.

Anything offered to the children in the Casa Dei Bambini must take into account the children’s passionate and vital interest in their environment.

History is introduced simply in the form of illustrated legends of human life through the ages rather than presented as a subject. It is interwoven into the fabric of the environment.

History is present in stories, by others, and our own. All true stories are history. Even an account of an event that occurred as short a time as half an hour before is an embryonic bit of history: “This morning when I was coming to school…’, ‘When I was a little girl …’, ‘When my father was a little boy …’, ‘Long, long ago when my grandfather was a young man…’ Family tales reach into the past and they are history.

History is present in music, the language of the spirit of place and time. Without music history is mute and dry.

History is present in art and artefact. Environments should have sets of choice and beautiful art cards, books on art and architecture, reproductions of great paintings on the walls - few and far between, given the place and space that they deserve. Objects used in the environment can and should have historical value.

When books are read, the name of the authors, their country of origin (for history and geography are inseparable), and when they lived should be mentioned. When music is played, again, the name, country and times of the composer are to be given.

As a knowledgeable Montessorian once said, the child in the Casa dei Bambini is fundamentally interested in fact, language, and sensorial exploration. Not to be forgotten is the child’s affective response to fact, language, and sensorial exploration. If a child has touched and been delighted by silken fabrics in the fabric boxes, it will look upon silk stocking of Ingres’ Napolean with delight.

As human beings, we love the history of our kind, and that of other species; the history of our earth, and that of our universe. Children’s pristine humanity is most avidly receptive and will thrive on the story of mankind if it is gently told, with absolute conviction.