Otello brought a great, crimson poppy to the Children’s House one day. Poppies to the Roman baby are as dandelions to our children, so lavish a gift of the nature mother as to be of little value after the first bloom colors the grass. Otello’s impulse was to pull off the already dropping petals of the flower, but Mario rescued it from the ruthless baby fingers. Holding the fragile stem between forefinger and chubby thumb, he ran the other forefinger lightly over the surface of the velvet-soft petals of the poppy. Then he ran to baby Valia and touched her leaf-soft cheek with the finger that taught him how like a flower petal in softness is the flesh of a child.
It was so daily an application of newly-gained knowledge as to be unnoticed save by a wondering onlooker. It was the mind enrichment through sense-training denied Mario by his home and offered him by Montessori.
A fineness of perception is developed by discriminating different textiles blindfolded.
The frames for geometric insets enthralled Mario next. To take out of its place, fit in again, and refit a dozen, twenty times the different sizes of flat wooden circles, squares, triangles, rectangles, and other forms kept the little fingers busy and the opening mind concentrated for long spaces. The wooden insets are large, shining with polish, and easy to handle because of the brass knob attached to each. As Mario lifted one out of its place in the form board, he ran his fingers around the edge, then around the empty place in the board. Soon he could do this with closed eyes, fitting wooden figures of many different shapes and sizes correctly in the form board. He matched these forms to corresponding paper forms mounted on cards and then to outlined forms.
Here was a circle like the top of the red copper bowl, and a smaller circle like the top of the yellow majolica mug that held his milk in the morning. Here was a rectangle like the kitchen window at home and a triangle like the glittering one the band man struck to make music. Kitchen utensils and home furnishings and the street band are as vastly interesting to all children as they were to little Mario, interesting because they are things of color and texture and shape and sound.
One morning Mario showed his teacher one of the rectangular geometric insets. “The window in the church,” he explained. Then he picked up a rectangular inset. “This is like the flower-bed in the Gardens,” he announced.
Your child struggles to educate himself through his senses as did Mario. You, too, perhaps, not seeing the inspiration in the active little fingers, say, “He gets into mischief all the time.” It is our privilege to turn child mischief into education. Instead of taking away from children the objects which they select for handling, we must study those objects and substitute for them didactic materials for education of the tactile sense, the sense of weight, the sense of form and contour.
A little girl whose spirit is so sensitively attuned that a breath, almost, will snap the too-taut strings was allowed to be present at a dinner her mother was giving. Through a wearisome round of courses, the little one sat in her uncomfortable chair, quiet, good, and tracing with one finger the design of her cut-glass tumbler. Sometimes the blue eyes closed as she tried to retrace the design in the air or on the table linen. At last her mother saw what she was doing.
“Leave the table immediately!” she commanded. “You are a very impolite child.”