WITH MARGHERITA IN THE CHILDREN’S HOUSE
Showing the Unconscious Influence of the True Montessori Environment
It is so early in the sweet, perfume-laden Italian morning that the dew is still hanging in diamond drops on the iris and roses in the garden of the Casa dei Bambini of the Via Giusti, Rome. The great white room, with its flooding sunlight and host of tiny, waiting chairs and tables, is empty, quiet, calm.
Margherita stands a happy second in the wide-arched doorway that makes room and garden melt into one fragrant, peaceful whole. A wee four-year-old girlie is Margherita, big-eyed, radiant with smiles, and tugging a huge wicker basket of lunch that is almost as large as she. She is the first baby to arrive at the Children’s House. Ah, but that does not ruffle her composure. She is already alone in her newly-found freedom of spirit. She needs no teacher.
She places the lunch basket on a waiting bench, crosses to a wall space where rows of diminutive pink and blue aprons hang at comfortable reaching distances for little arms. She finds her own apron, wriggles into it, buttons it at the back. She is ready for the day.
What shall come first in Margherita’s day? So much is in store for her, waiting for her eager finger tips, her electric-charged soul. As her great brown eyes slowly trail the room and the colorful garden outside, it is as if she were making a soul search for that “good thing” which will be her first silent teacher. Her glance lingers on the terraced rows of flowers, the tinkling fountain in the center. She has found the object of her search. She runs—no, she floats, for such complete physical control of her limbs has this four-year-old baby—to the garden, and kneels there, looking up at a redolent, yellow rose that has opened in the night. She does not touch it; she only looks and breathes and wonders. She has watched for this unfolding daily, waiting with sweet patience for the branch to burst into bud and the bud to unfold into bloom. She has tugged a vase of water each morning to offer drink to the roots. Now her patience and her service are rewarded. As she kneels there looking up into the petals of the gold flower, her small hands clasped over her breast with devotional ecstasy, Nature opens her heart to the heart of a little child.
Many rapturous minutes the baby kneels. Then she flies back to the room again and glances at it with the critical eye of a housekeeper. Here she flicks away a speck of dust, there she picks up a scrap of paper from the stone floor. She peeps into the wall cabinets that hold the Montessori didactic materials to see if the gay buttoning, lacing, and bow-tying frames, the fascinating pink blocks of the tower, the frames of form insets are all in their places. In the meantime the Signorina directress comes. Bruno, of five, arrives, bringing with him his two-and-a-half-year-old brother. More toddlers trail in, two and a half, three, four, four and a half years old, and button themselves into their pink and blue aprons. Independent, polite, joyous little children of the Cæsars they are, each with his or her own special happy task in mind in coming to the Children’s House this blue day.
The wee-est toddlers drag out soft-colored rugs, orange, dull green, deep crimson, and spread them on the wide white spaces of the sun-flecked stone floor. Here they build and rebuild the enchanting intricacies of the tower of blocks, the broad stair of blocks, and the red and white rods of the long stair, chanting to themselves as they unconsciously measure distances and make mental comparisons: “big, little; thick, thin; long, short.”
Children of three and a half and four take from the cabinets boxes of many-colored, silk-wound spools, which they sort and lay upon the little tables in chromatic order until a rainbow-tinted mass lies before their pigment-loving eyes. From the bright scarlet of poppies to the faint blush of pale pink coral, from the royal purple of the tall, spiked Roman iris to the amethyst tint of a wild orchid, they make no mistake in the intermediate color gradations. Other children of four and over finger with intelligent, trained skill the geometric forms; circles, triangles, squares that they are learning to recognize through the “eyes in their fingers,” and which will help them to see with the mind’s eye the form that makes the beauty of our world. Small Joanina, in her corner, runs her forefinger with the greatest delicacy of touch a dozen times around a circle. Then she fits it in its place in the form board, takes it out and fits it in again. Then she looks up, a new light in her eyes, darts out into the garden and walks slowly about the fountain, running her finger around its deep basin.