All the colors of nature may be found.
To Raffaelo, the child was a spellworker. Watching this fascination, the directress gave Raffaelo a box of color spools, emptying them out and allowing him to try and differentiate the colors, putting each back in its right compartment in the box. She did not burden his mind with names. He was feeding his senses by just handling and feeling the colors, and he was unspeakably happy. When the noon hour came, he did not want to go home. When his bedtime came, that night, he escaped from his mother and ran to the window, looking out. The night before, he had looked down at the soiled, unbeautiful street; to-night he looked up. The sun was just setting, a ruby ball in a sea of amber.
“See!” Raffaelo shouted, pointing to the sunset. “Red; yellow!”
As his mother picked him up and carried him away from the window, he looked deep down into her eyes. “Blue,” he said, seeing them for the first time in all their beauty. The hunger of Raffaelo was fed.
Every child is color hungry. Your child may be a painter in the making, heir to a century-old talent that somebody had to bury, but which would not die and rose and haunted. Or he may be an average child who will be happier and better all his life if he can see each fine gradation of color that tints the sunset and can feed his soul on a beautiful Titian or a Fra Angelico.
We have thought that we were teaching our children color when we called their attention to a colored object. A child is much more apt to associate taste with the apple which we show him when we try to give him a color lesson, and quite possibly we make a false statement when we say that the apple is red. Very few apples are red; they are dark red, light red, orange, or yellow in tint. Why not begin the other way round, as Dr. Montessori does, and teach pure color, giving the child the joy that comes from discovering for himself just what pigment nature used in painting the apple.
In teaching children color, we will use, if possible, Dr. Montessori’s own box of sixty-four color spools that include almost all the tints and shades of the prismatic colors, black to gray, and the scale of browns. If we are not so fortunate as to be able to use this apparatus, which is a most careful and scientific analysis of color, we can try to study color ourselves, and point it out to children as it is found in the home in textiles, silk and worsted, papers, flowers, and colored crayons and paints.
In teaching color at home we may all follow Dr. Montessori’s own simple method. The Montessori directress might have tried to teach Raffaelo color as we, in America, teach our children, saying:
“See the ball; it is red. The forget-me-not is blue. See the pretty robin redbreast,” and in making these statements confusing in the child’s mind the concepts of toy, flowers, birds, and colors when all he needs is color. Every child wants to make his own application of knowledge. Instead, the girl who had been trained under Dr. Montessori had followed the only true method of teaching any fact, the method that lies at the basis of Montessori education miracles. Dr. Montessori says that teaching must be simple and objective. There hasn’t been enough of “calling a spade a spade” in our American schools and homes.
Show your child red, or the letter A, or a moral fact—it doesn’t matter much which—and name it red, or A, or right.