A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

The Broad Stair.

The Long Stair.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir

The color-games played by a number of children together with the different-colored spools are various, but resemble more or less the old-fashioned game of authors. One of them is played thus. Eight children choose each the name of a color. Then the sixty-four spools are poured out in confusion on the table around which the children sit. One of them (the eldest or one chosen by lot) begins to deal out to the others in turn. That is, the one on his right asking for red, the dealer must quickly choose a spool of the right color and hand it to his neighbor. Then the child beyond asks for blue, and so it goes until the dealer makes a mistake. When he does, the deal goes to the child next him. After every child has before him in a mixed pile the eight shades of his chosen color, they all set to work as fast as they can to see who can soonest arrange them in the right chromatic order. The child who does this first has “won” the game, and is the one who deals first in the next game. Children of about the same age and ability repeat this game with the monotonously eternal vivid interest which characterizes an old-established quartet of whist-players, and they attain, by means of it and similar games with the color spools, a control of their eyes which is a marvel and which must forever add to the accuracy of their impressions about the world. When a generation of children trained in this manner has grown up, landscape painters will no longer be able to complain, as they do now, that they are working for a purblind public.

We are now approaching at last the extremely important and hitherto undescribed “geometric insets,” whose mysterious name has piqued the curiosity of more than one casual and hasty reader of accounts of the Montessori system. A look at the pictures of these shows them to be as simple as all the rest of Dr. Montessori’s expedients. Anyone who was ever touched by the picture-puzzle craze, or who in his childhood felt the fascination of dissected maps, needs no explanation of the pleasure taken by little children of four and five in fitting these queer-shaped bits of wood into their corresponding sockets, the square piece into the square socket, the triangle into the three-cornered hole, the four-leafed clover shape into the four-lobed recess. There can be no better description of the way in which a child is initiated into the use of this piece of apparatus than the one written by Miss Tozier for McClure’s Magazine:

“A small boy of the mature age of four, who has been sitting plunged either in sleep or meditation, now starts up from his chair and wanders across to his directress for advice. He wants something to amuse him. She takes him to the cupboard, throws in a timely suggestion, and he strolls back to his table with a smile. He has chosen half a dozen or more thin, square tablets of wood and a strip of navy-blue cloth. He begins by spreading down the cloth, then he puts his blocks on it in two rows. They are of highly-varnished wood, light blue, with geometrical figures of navy-blue in the centre; there is a triangle, a circle, a rectangle, an oval, a square, an octagon. The teacher, who has followed him, stands on the other side of the table. She runs two of her fingers round one of the edges of the triangle. ‘Touch it so,’ she says. He promptly and delightedly imitates her. She then pulls all the figures out of their light-blue frames by means of a brass button in each, mixes them up on the table; and tells him to call her when he has them all in place again. The dark-blue cloth shows through the empty frame, so that it appears as if the figures had only sank down half an inch. While he continues to stare at this array, off goes the teacher.

“‘Is she not going to show him how to begin?’

“‘An axiom of our practical pedagogy is to aid the child only to be independent,’ answers Dr. Montessori. ‘He does not wish help.’

“Nor does he seem to be troubled. He stares a while at his array of blocks; yet his eye does not grow quite sure, for he carefully selects an oval from the mixed-up pile and tries to put it in the circle. It won’t go. Then, quick as a flash, as if subconsciously rather than designedly, he runs his little forefinger around the rim of the figure and then round the edge of the empty space left in the light-blue frames of both the oval and the circle. He discovers his mistake at once, puts the figure into its place, and leans back a moment in his chair to enjoy his own cleverness before beginning with another. He finally gets them all into their proper frames, and instantly pulls them out again, to do it quicker and better next time.