Presently, however, Mario began to show a steady intellectual development in his work. Through the physical exercises of Montessori, through the rhythmic exercises carried on with music and through exercises of usefulness in keeping himself and the room neat and waiting upon others, he learned an important lesson of muscular co-ordination.
He learned to make his body respond to the command of his brain.
Through the sense exercises in recognizing fine differentiations of color and form and weight and sound and texture, Mario found a clear mental vision. A month before, the hill back of the school had been a blur to his mental vision. Now it was, for him, a clear percept made up of various component parts. He saw it tall, broad, steep, colored in varying tints of green and brown; its outlines were broken for him by the sunshine, the gardens, the red and yellow tiled houses; he could almost smell the sweet perfume from its orchards and vineyards.
The sense-training of the Montessori system had quickened and clarified the little boy’s perceptive faculties.
Following side by side with Mario’s new mental development came as marked a development in his play. His play impulses were no longer scattering but had objectivity. He was, in fancy, a steam engine puffing along or the little father of a group of other children.
As he swung himself over the parallel bars in the school yard he felt that he was a famous acrobat entertaining an applauding audience. In a second he slipped into another path of fancy; as he piled stones into a pyramid, he was a great builder. More than this, Mario’s newly-found play impulses carried him into a unique plane of idealism. Crouched in a sunny corner of the playground, he was a sleeping seed; slowly and with spontaneous grace the little body rose, arms upstretched, as Mario felt in dreams the growth of root and branch and flower. No one had taught four-year-old Mario the skill of making real these fantasies. How had he taken his way alone into the fertile fields of the imagination?
It has been suggested that the Montessori system does not take into account the stimulating of the child’s imagination. Daily instances of very original, undirected imaginative play on the part of Montessori children show a subtle force at work in the method which results in a spontaneous unfolding of the imagination. The games and plays which we teach our children in kindergarten and primary school are carried on by the Montessori-trained children without adult supervision. Leaving their work, they run to the garden or playground, imitating with great freedom and beauty of imagination the activities of the gardener, the baker, the artisan, the street vender, and the traveling musician. They even impersonate in a more idealistic way, playing, as did little Mario, that they are birds and flowers.
This natural expression of imagination in very young children is an important development of the method, and a suggestive one.
We are all familiar with the timid, shrinking little child in the center of a game circle who doesn’t want to be a chickadee, but who is urged by the teacher in charge of the circle. The child persists in her disinclination; she is overawed by so large a ring of spectators; it is possible that she has never seen a chickadee. The teacher, also, persists. She goes to the child and tries to teach her the motions of bird flight, but the child sees only an adult running about and waving her arms in an unusual way. She does not connect the spectacle in any way with the free flight of a bird, and when she does take courage and tries to follow the directions of her teacher, the little one is not giving expression to her own mental image, but is endeavoring to imitate a rather ungainly adult.
Is this play of the imaginative type?