The Montessori Elementary Material / The Advanced Montessori Method

Transcriber's Notes: The cover for this electronic edition has been created by the transcriber and is placed in the public domain.

The first Montessori Elementary Class in America, opened in Rivington Street, New York, May, 1916.
THE ADVANCED MONTESSORI METHOD
BY MARIA MONTESSORI AUTHOR OF THE MONTESSORI METHOD, PEDAGOGICAL ANTHROPOLOGY, ETC. TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY ARTHUR LIVINGSTON ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ITALIAN AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY WITH FORTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS AND WITH NUMEROUS DIAGRAMS
NEW YORK FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY PUBLISHERS
Copyright, 1917, by Frederick A. Stokes Company All rights reserved, including that of translation into foreign languages.
The patent rights in the Montessori apparatus and material are controlled, in the United States and Canada, by The House of Childhood, Inc., 16 Horatio Street, New York. The publishers are indebted to them for the photographs showing the Grammar Boxes.

So far as Dr. Montessori's experiments contain the affirmation of a new doctrine and the illustration of a new method in regard to the teaching of Grammar, Reading and Metrics, the following pages are, we hope, a faithful rendition of her work. But it is only in these respects that the chapters devoted to these subjects are to be considered a translation. It will be observed that Dr. Montessori's text is not only a theoretical treatise but also an actual text-book for the teaching of Italian grammar, Italian reading and Italian metrics to young pupils. Her exercises constitute a rigidly tested material: her Italian word lists are lists which, in actual practise, have accomplished their purpose; her grammatical categories with their relative illustration are those actually mastered by her Italian students; her reading selections and her metrical analyses are those which, from an offering doubtless far more extensive, actually survived the experiment of use in class.
It is obvious that no such value can be claimed for any translation of the original material. The categories of Italian grammar are not exactly the categories of English grammar. The morphology and, to a certain extent, the syntax of the various parts of speech differ in the two languages. The immediate result is that the Montessori material offers much that is inapplicable and fails to touch on much that is essential to the teaching of English grammar. The nature and extent of the difficulties thus arising are more fully set forth in connection with specific cases in our text. Suffice it here to indicate that the English material offered below is but approximately experimental, approximately scientific. The constitution of a definitive Montessori material for English grammar and the definitive manner and order of its presentment must await the results of experiments in actual use. For the clearer orientation of such eventual experiments we offer, even for those parts of Italian grammar which bear no relation to English, a virtually complete translation of the original text; venturing meanwhile the suggestion that such studies as Dr. Montessori's treatise on the teaching of Italian noun and adjective inflections—entirely foreign to English—may prove valuable to all teachers of modern languages. While it might seem desirable to isolate such superfluous material from the English grammar given below, we decided to retain the relative paragraphs in their actual position in the Italian work, in order to preserve the literal integrity of the original method. Among our additions to the text we may cite the exercises on the possessive pronouns—identified by Dr. Montessori with the possessive adjectives—the interrogatives and the comparison of adjectives and adverbs.