The Montessori Materials

The first materials that the child encounters in a Montessori Children’s House are the “practical life” activities. These everyday activities are familiar to the child from his home, such as pouring, scrubbing a table, polishing, buttoning, folding, or sewing. At first glance it seems that these activities help the child gain independence through the acquisition of particular skills, however, the main purpose of these activities is to help the child develop his ability to concentrate and to coordinate his movements.

In the Montessori environment, learning materials are arranged invitingly, on low open shelves. Children may choose whichever material they would like to use, and may work with it for as long as the material holds their interest. When they are finished, they return the material to the shelf from which it came.

The materials themselves also invite activity. There are bright arrays of solid geometric forms, knobbed puzzle maps, colored beads, and various specialized rods and blocks.

The other areas of curriculum for the children of this age are sensorial, mathematics, and language. The sensorial materials are designed based on the way children learn at this age: they learn through the senses rather than the intellect. There are materials that assist in the refinement of each sense, with each activity isolating one particular quality: such as, color, size loudness, taste, or weight.

For example, the material known as the pink tower is made up of ten pink cubes of varying sizes. The three-year-old constructs a tower with the largest cube on the bottom and the smallest on the top. This material isolates the concept of size. The cubes are all the same color and texture, the only difference is their size and, of course, weight. Other materials isolate different concepts: color tablets for color, geometry materials for form, and so on.

The materials themselves are self-correcting. When a piece does not fit or is left over, the child easily perceives error. There is no need for adult “correction.” The child is able to solve problems independently, building self-confidence, analytical thinking, and the satisfaction that comes from accomplishments.

As the children's exploration continues, the materials interrelate and build upon each other. For instance, in the elementary years, new aspects of some of the familiar material unfold, such as the concept the volume. A child may now look back to the same pink tower and discover that its cubes progress incrementally from one cubic centimeter to one cubic decimeter.

The ability to count or calculate, to write or read, is a byproducts of the child’s time spent in the prepared environment, but is not the goal. Through working with the different sensorial materials the child has developed a sense of size, but it does not stop there. The child yearns for more; he want to know how much bigger one object is than another. The math materials flow naturally from here, until eventually the child reaches a point where he must be introduced to the concept of numbers to sustain his interest.

The same applies with language. The subtle preparation that the child has been given in this environment—a rich diet of songs, stories, and poems, or the controls over the movement of the hand through polishing—allows four- and five-year old children to effortlessly start to write and read. Montessori education has been using an effective system of synthetic phonics for 100 years. This system is centered on a set of “sandpaper letters,” individual boards with the primary symbol for each of the 26 letters as well as many of the diagraph sounds (e.g., “sh” or “oa”) in the English language. Three-year-old children see and feel these symbols and pronounce the corresponding sound, absorbing the combination of sound and symbols through three different senses simultaneously.

It is through the language and sensorial extension that the child is linked to his world and all the animals, plants, and people within it. Like everything that is offered to the child at this age, the materials are sensory–based and introduced in an orderly way: first, the world, and then the plants and animals in it; first, animals, and then mammals, birds, amphibians, reptiles, and fish; first, the concrete—a real plant—then the more abstract pictures or reading that may describe it.

Referenced from:

http://montessoricentenary.org/briefins/WhatIsMontessoriEducation.pdf

http://www.montessori-namta.org/The-Montessori-Materials