His hands were stretched far apart, but not all the way to the ends of the red rod, the longest one of a graduated set of ten. He walked with the slight wobble of a three year old as he carried the one meter long rod across the classroom. He stopped to wait for two older children to move so that he could maneuver past. He navigated around several rugs that were laid out on the floor to define the work spaces of other children. Finally he came to the shelf where the red rods are kept and he carefully laid down the one he had been carrying. He headed back to his own work rug, walking carefully across the classroom, to get the next rod, and the next one, carrying them one by one until all ten were returned to the proper place on the shelf.
Montessori education is movement education. This young boy was spending a long time moving purposefully from one side of the classroom to the other. The movement was careful and controlled – exactly what is needed by this young boy as he refines both his ambulatory powers and the awareness of his own body in space. Grace and courtesy guide him even as he furthers their development within – the respect for the activity and the space of his classmates guides him around their work rugs (rather than marching across them or leaping over them).
The ten trips back and forth to the shelf indicate that the characteristic of repetition is fully alive in this young one. That he carried suceedingly smaller rods each time gives evidence of his sense of order. The Montessori primary classroom assumes these characteristics in the young child and utilizes them to aid the child in the natural course of development as he builds himself physically and cognitively.
Why ten rods rather than five or nine or twelve? Many of the Montessori sensorial materials, the ones that appeal to the youngest children in the primary classroom, come in sets of ten. As the children work with them, they build up at an unconscious level, a muscular memory of the number ten which is the foundation of our decimal number system. The Montessori materials designed for both direct and indirect purposes.
What about vocabulary enrichment? This young boy will have a powerful sensorial experience of long, longer, longest, short, shorter, shortest – the specific vocabulary tied to this lesson.
Who chose this work? He did, though his teacher had introduced it to him because she knew he was ready for it, in the sensitive period for work with this kind of material. In choosing the work for himself, he is developing the will, his future ability to act, to operate with self-direction. And by the time the last rod had been returned to its place on the shelf and the rug rolled up an returned to its basket, he had work for far longer than most of society dares to expect from a three year old, and at the same time, experienced the beginning, middle and end of completing work. These are lessons that show up as subtle lessons in character development — the kinds of results that lead parents to observe, “Montessori kids are different.”
Yes, they are. And those differences are rooted in the work of the very youngest children – long before obvious academic work begins.
We want to once again thank John Long and the Post Oak School for allowing us to republish John?s wonderful essays in Tomorrow?s Child and in our online resource collections.
