At first, Valia could not find the white circle of delight. Her fat feet refused to obey the impulse of her eagerly musical soul. But with the days she found poise and grace and erectness and the crooked limbs began to straighten themselves.
She sat, for hours at a time, in a patch of sunlight on the floor, using her incompetent little fingers in some of the practical exercises of everyday living. The directress gave her a stout wooden frame, to which were fastened two soft pieces of gay woolen stuff, one of which was pierced with buttonholes and the other having large bone buttons. Valia worked all one morning before she was able to fit each button in its corresponding buttonhole, but when she did accomplish this, the triumph was a bit of wonder-working in Valia’s control of herself. It started her on the road to physical freedom.
An important physical exercise of Montessori.
Happy in her new accomplishment, she mastered all the other dressing frames; the soft linen with pearl buttons that was like her underlinen, the leather through which one thrust shoe buttons with one’s own button hook, or laced from one eyelet to another, the lacing on cloth like her mother’s Sunday bodice of green velvet, the frames of linen with large and small hooks and eyes, the frame upon which were broad strands of bright-colored ribbon to be tied in a row of smart little bows.
Daily, simple physical exercises such as these; hand and eye co-ordination, exercises in poise, stretching, rest for the limbs and freedom for the spine and torso slowly transformed Valia from a lump of disorganized, putty-like flesh to an erect, graceful, self-controlled little woman.
“What have you done to my Valia?” asked the mother as she waited at the school door for her little one a few months later. “She dresses the young bambino at home and buttons her own shoes. She no longer stumbles all day long but stands well on her feet. She helps me to lay the evening meal and carries a dish of soup, full, to the place of her father. I do not understand it. Did you punish her for climbing and being clumsy?”
“No.” The directress of the Children’s House lays a kind hand on Valia’s curly head as she explains. “We did not punish Valia. We gave her a fence upon which to climb and we let her tumble about on the floor when she was tired, and we helped her to find her feet and her fingers.”
Dr. Montessori tells us that there is a little Valia in every home. The child from one to three and four years of age is in need of definite physical exercises that will tend to the normal development of physiological movements. We ordinarily give the little child’s body slight thought. Then, in the schools, we gather older children into large classes, and by a series of collective gymnastics in which the commands of the teacher check all spontaneity, we try to secure poise and self-control and grace for the child body.
