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Before talking about the principles of this method, the target competencies that the method aims to develop are presented.

The target competencies in the Montessori method

Based on her theory of sensitive periods, Montessori, through observation and experimentation, designed a curriculum that sought to develop children's competencies in three areas: practical life skills, motor and sensory training, and more formal literary and computational skills and subjects. This curriculum was not all in place when Montessori opened the Casa dei Bambini, but its various pieces came together to form a complete method of education.

First Group: Exercises of Practical Life:

Montessori designed the practical exercises so that children could use them to develop the skills needed in everyday life, such as serving food, washing one's 18 Introduction hands and face, tying a shoelace, or buttoning a shirt or blouse. The aim of the exercises was to move children from being dependent on adults to performing the exercises independently. The practical skills were generic in that once a child had mastered a particular skill, such as tying, lacing, or buttoning, the skill could be transferred to the many occurrences when it was needed in daily life. Designed to exercise and develop motor, muscular, and coordination skills, the successful performance of everyday skills gave children a sense of independence and a self- confidence that they could do things without adult assistance. The everyday life activities included washing and dressing oneself, setting tables and serving meals, housekeeping, gardening, gymnastic activities, and rhythmic movements. Using frame pieces of cloth with buttons, laces, and hooks, the children practiced fastening, buttoning, zipping, lacing, and tying skills that they could transfer to the buttoning and hooking of their own clothing and the tying of their own shoes. The school also utilized ordinary household objects washbasins, dishes, silverware, and gardening tools. Washstands and tables were proportioned to the children's sizes so that they could easily reach them. Cabinets to store materials were accessible so that children could reach them and then return materials to their proper location.

Second Group: Sensory Training:

Montessori designed the materials and activities for sensory education to develop the children's ability to perceive distinctions in color and hue and in sound and tone, and the curriculum included the skills needed to manipulate various kinds of objects. The sensory exercises were designed to cultivate three kinds of skills: discernment of
color and hue, sensitivity to smell and sound, and making comparisons and conta Montessori developed order to using the materials. They began with a series of solid insets wooden cylinders of different sizes, to be inserted in holes of the same size in a wooden block. Then, with ten pink wooden cubes of graduated size, the child built a tower, then knocked it down and rebuilt it. In addition, there were ton brown wooden prisms and ten red rods with which the child built a broad and long stair. There were geometric solids (pyramids, spheres, cones), little boards with rough and smooth surfaces and others of different weights and colors, and pieces of fabric of different textures. There were wooden plane insets, a little cabinet of drawers, each containing framed geometrical figures blue triangles, circles, squares of different sizes to be taken out and replaced correctly in their frames. There were cards with paper geometrical shapes pasted on them, a series of cylindrical boxes filled with different materials that produced different sounds when shaken; sixty-three little tables in nine different shades, from light to dark and of seven différent colors. A series of A Biography and an Analysis 19 musical tone bells was used with a wooden board that had musical staff lines and a set of wooden disks to represent the notes. The tone bells were used to develop the child's ability to discriminate between various tones. Sensory boxes included those filled with spices with distinctive odors. As the child worked with the didactic materials, he or she learned to recognize, group, and compare similar objects and contrast them from dissimilar ones.

Third Group: Language Development:

In her work at the Casa dei Bambini, Montessori faced the common problem that besets all primary school teachers how to teach reading and writing. Montessori opposed the commonly held idea that reading and writing needed to be imposed on children. Convinced of the power of what she termed "autoeducation," she believed that when children were ready to read and write, they would do what was needed to develop these skills. Through trial and error, she developed materials that were conducive for readiness for reading, writing, and arithmetic. These materials included sandpaper letters, boxes of colorcardboard letters and numbers, and counting rods- square-sided sticks of different lengths and different colors representing different numbers as well as strings of different lengths with various numbers of beads of different colors.42 Montessori's claim that children of four and five years "burst spontaneously into writing" attracted considerable attention from her proponents and some skepticism from critics. Montessori saw writing and reading as being developed in close relationship. To create readiness for them, she devised letters cut out of cardboard and covered with sandpaper. As the children touched and traced these letters, the directress would voice the sound of the letter. While the children were being prepared to write the letter by the movements needed to trace its shape, they fixed the letter in their minds and came to recognize the sound it represented. Children discovered reading when they understood that the sounds of the letters that they were tracing, and then writing, formed words. When the children knew all of the vowels and some of the consonants, they were ready to form simple words. Using the vowels, the

directress would show the children how to compose three-letter words and p them clearly. In the next step, the children would write the words dictatcd by directress. After enough practice, the children were able to compose words w assistance. In teaching arithmetic, counting was taught by arranging objects accord to their number and by measuring them using a series of colored rods of vary lengths, Children learned about the natural environment by planting and cultivats gardens, which Montessori believed established the intellectual connection about sprouting of seeds and the growing of plants within the larger world 20 Introduction of in the develop a sense of responent nature. Thef zoology and provided a way deducion, Montessoresponsibility beginning them. Through her work at the Casa dei Bambini, Montessori tested many caring for the principles that she had developed earlier from her work with mentally the ideas and bren, her reading her clinical bologne children and impaired dia medicine, psychology, and anthropology. She implemented the backuple of a child's freedom in the arrangement of materials and in the structure of prin prepared environment. According to her principle of auto-education, a child's freedom made it possible for children to select their own learning activities,

Montessori's ability to match the child's readiness to the materials and activities was one of her most significant methodological achievements. Readiness, in turn, was based on children's developmental periods, especially the sensitive period when they were ready to learn and needed to learn. Although children have a great capacity for acquiring and incorporating knowledge, the exercises for acquiring this knowledge needed to be appropriate to their particular stage of development. Determining what kind of content and activities were appropriate to children's readiness to learn remains one of the great pedagogical problems. Montessori turned to the children themselves to solve the problem of matching their needs and readiness with the materials and situations available to them by creating the prepared environment in which they were free to choose from a number of materials. Drawing from Itard's and Seguin's work with mentally impaired children, Montessori developed didactic materials designed to exercise children's motor and sensory skills, and she stocked the prepared environment with them. When children reached a sensitive readiness to try to master the skills, they themselves matched their readiness with the material. Her experience at the Case des Bambini united her theory with her practice. Montessori's success at the Casa dei Bambini led to the establishment of several additional schools in Rome-a second in the San Lorenzo district, two in a middle-class area of the city, and one at the villa of the British ambassador to Italy.
Practical te activitate sght through our different syste

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   Gaw of the cextranet-for example, lasting, polishing a table, sodakangheris

   
   


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SENSORY MATERIALS

The sensory materials described in Pigute, 2x anung those found in a typical Mores sorn claszmom. Materials for training and developing the senses have these characteristics

Control of error Materials are designed so that children can see whather they malne a mistake, for example, a child whe does not build the blocks of the peak tower in their proper order does not achieve a tower effect.

Isolation of a single quality. Materials are designed so that other varubles are held constant except for the isolated quality or qushtues. Therefore, all blocks of the pink sewes are pink because size, not color, is the twolated quality

Active involvement. Materials encourage active involvement rather than the move passive proces of looking

Attractiveness. Materials are attractive, with colors and propentions that appeal to children.

Sensory materials have several purposes

To tran children's senses to focus on an obvious, particular quality For example, with the red rods, the quality is length, wth the pink sower cubes, size, and with the bells, musical patch

To help sharpen children's powers of observation and visual ducrmination as readiness for learn- ing to read

To increase children's ability to think, a process that depends on the ability to distinguish, clap sify, and organize

To prepare children for the occurrence of the sen sitive 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 aca demic. Exercises are presented in a sequence that en courages writing before reading. Reading is therefore an outgrowth of wraing. 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. Describ ing this phenomenon, Montessori said that children "burst spontaneously into writing and caling She anticipated contemporary praustoes maintaining that weistung lays the foundation by integrating witting and reading and Koorming to wond

Montessort believed that many citildico were ready for wrang at font years of age

Comegacetis, children who enter a Montesson system age the have done most of the