Unlike traditional educational approaches, the Montessori method before 1st grade does not set abstract learning goals. This is because a young child’s brain is not yet wired for abstract thinking. Instead, our approach is centered on physical engagement with didactic materials, where the hands and minds of young learners work in unison to grasp concepts. Everything is tangible and concrete, fostering a deeper understanding.
In the Montessori method, the child’s development is at the forefront. The hand is not just a tool but a crucial instrument for the mind’s development. It plays a significant role in how children learn and understand the world around them, fostering their overall growth and development.
Decades of research underscores that physical engagement in learning, particularly in young children, leads to a more profound and comprehensive understanding of the subject matter.
It happens repeatedly when a child carries multiple objects while constructing a work, standing, kneeling, twisting, carrying, and grasping. Let’s take the 45 Card Layout as an example. As the child retrieves blocks representing 1,000, the child uses both hands to pick up and move the blocks from one place to another. Arriving at the rug with five 1,000 blocks, the child will count, “one thousand, two thousand, three thousand, four thousand, five thousand.” She counts as she retrieves – she counts as she places the blocks on the rug. A child as young as four actively sets the stage for place value using this work.
At this stage, the focus is not on the child’s ability to verbally articulate what she has constructed. The process, emphasizing uninterrupted concentration, is the true work. This uninterrupted concentration is crucial as it allows the child to internalize the concept of place value, turning the process into a template in her body, mind, and voice.
Nothing in a Montessori classroom is presented in isolation. Considering the math work in the picture, multiple other math works in the school support an understanding of quantity and numerical value. Other math work includes little beads called units, sets of beads called tens, squares of beads called hundreds, and blocks representing one thousand. There is a Hundreds Board with 100 pieces categorized in rows of 10. There are Bead Chains with individual beads, sectioned off from one to ten, that increase from 1 bead to 1000 beads in increments of ten. If your child stays all three years in Primary, it would be almost impossible not to understand what ten is or what 100 is. They might even be squaring numbers and counting to 1,000. While this is not a learning goal in any first-grade classroom in the U.S., we celebrate the early exploration of value, symbol, quantity, and operations, as well as the structures that underlie all future studies in math.
With repetition, learning from watching and listening to others work, small group and individual lessons, and uninterrupted time to concentrate on any one of over 180 different options on our shelves, every child who departs for their first-grade destination will have constructed knowledge and understanding of the underlying structure of the subjects they will encounter moving forward.
The teacher ‘must not only not interfere when the child is concentrating, she must also see that [the child] is not disturbed.’
-Maria Montessori
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