A Montessori Mother

by Dorothy Canfield Fisher

Now of course, though it is most interesting to color triangles and circles, a child does not spend all his day at it. Among other things which occupy and amuse him at this time is getting acquainted with the look and feel of the letters of the alphabet. The children are presented, one at a time, sometimes only one a day, with large script letters, made of black sandpaper pasted on smooth white cards, and are taught how to draw their fingers over the letter in the direction taken when it is written. At the same time the teacher repeats slowly and distinctly the sound of the letter, making sure that the child takes this in.

After this, the little Italian child, happy in the possession of a phonetically spelled language, has an easier time than our English-speaking children, who begin then and there their lifelong struggle with the insanities of English spelling. But this is a struggle to which they must come under any system, and much less formidable under this than it has ever been before. For the next step is, of course, to put these letters together into simple words. There is no need to wait until a child has toiled all through the alphabet before beginning this much more interesting process. As soon as he knows two letters he can spell Mamma. There is no question as yet of his constructing the letters with his own hands. He simply takes them from their separate compartments and lays them on the floor or table in the right order. In handling them throughout all of these exercises the children are encouraged constantly to make that blind-man’s motion of tracing around the letter. The rough sandpaper apparently shouts out information to the little finger-tips highly sensitized by the tactile exercises, for the child nearly always corrects himself more surely by touching than by looking at his sandpaper alphabet. Of course, the strongest of muscular habits is being formed as he does this.

A pleasant variation on this routine is a test of the child’s new knowledge. The teacher asks him to give her B, give her D, P, M, etc. The letters are kept in little pasteboard compartments, a compartment for all the B’s, another for all the D’s, and so on. The child, in answer to the teacher’s request, looks over these compartments and picks out from all the others the letter she has asked for. This, of course, seems only like a game to him, a variation on hide-and-seek.

All these processes go on day after day, side by side, all invisibly converging towards one end. The practice with the crayons, the recognition of the letters by eye and touch, the revelation as to the formation of words with the movable alphabet, are so many roads leading to the painless acquisition of the art of writing. They draw nearer and nearer together, and then, one day, quite suddenly, the famous “Montessori explosion into writing” occurs. The teacher of experience can tell when this explosion is imminent. First the parallel lines which the child makes to fill and color the geometric figures become singularly regular and even; second, his acquaintance with the alphabet becomes so thorough that he recognizes the letters by sense of touch only, and, third, he increases in facility for composing words with the movable alphabet. The burst into spontaneous writing usually comes only after these three conditions are present.

It usually happens that a child has a crayon in his hand and begins the motion of his fingers made as he traces around one of his sandpaper letters. But this time he has the pencil in his fingers, and the idea suddenly occurs to him, usually reducing him to breathless excitement, that if he traces on the paper with his pencil the form of the letters, he will be writing. In the twinkling of an eye it is done. He has written with his own hand one of the words which he has been constructing with the movable alphabet. He is usually as proud of this achievement as though he had invented the art of writing. The first children who were taught in this manner and who experienced this explosion into writing did really believe, I gather, that writing was something of their own invention. They rushed about excitedly to explain, to anyone who would listen, all about this wonderful new discovery: “Look! Look! You don’t need the movable letters to make words. See, you just take a pencil or a piece of chalk, and draw the letters for yourself ... as many as you please ... anywhere!” And, in fact, for the first few days after this explosion, their teachers and mothers found writing “anywhere!” all over the house. The children were in a fever of excited pride. Since then, although the first word always causes a spasm of joy, children in a Children’s Home are so used to seeing the older ones writing and reading, that their own feat is taken more calmly, as a matter of course. It really always takes place in this sudden way, however. One day a child cannot write, and the next he can.

The formation of the letters, so hard for children taught in the old way, offers practically no difficulty to the Montessori child. He has traced their outline so often with his finger-tips that his knowledge of them is lodged where, in his infant organism, it belongs, in his muscular memory; so that when, pencil in his well-trained hand, he starts his fingers upon an action already so often repeated as to be automatic, muscular habit and muscular memory do the rest. He does not need consciously to direct each muscle in the action of writing, any more than a practised piano-player thinks consciously of which finger goes after which. The vernacular phrase expressing this sort of involuntary, muscular-memory facility is literally true in his case, “He has done it so often that he could do it with his eyes shut.” It is to be noted that for a long time after this explosion into writing, the children continue incessantly to go through the three preparatory steps, tracing with their fingers the sandpaper letters, filling in the geometric forms and composing with the movable alphabet. These are for them what scales are for the pianist, a necessary practice for “keeping the hand in.” By means of constantly tracing the sandpaper letters the children write almost from the first the most astonishingly clear, firm, regular hand, much better than that of most adults of my acquaintance.

It is apparent, from even this short-hand account of this remarkably successful method, that children cannot learn to write by means of it without considerable (even if unconscious and painless) effort on their part, and without intelligence, good judgment, and considerable patience on the part of the teacher. The popular accounts of the miracles accomplished by Dr. Montessori’s apparatus have apparently led some American readers to fancy that it is a sort of amulet one can tie about the child’s neck, or plaster to apply externally, which will cause the desired effect without any further care. As a matter of fact, it is a carefully devised trellis which starts the child’s sensory growth in a direction which will be profitable for the practical undertaking of learning how to write, a trellis invented and patented by Dr. Montessori, but which those of us who attempt to teach children must construct for ourselves on her pattern, following step by step the development of each of the children under our care.

Tracing Sand-Paper Letters.Tracing Geometrical Design.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir

And yet, although the Montessori apparatus does not teach children by magic how to write a good hand, in comparison with the methods now in use, it is really almost miraculous in its results. In our schools children learn slowly to write (and how badly!) when they are seven or eight, cannot do it fluently until they are much older, and never do it very well, if the average handwriting of our high-school and college student is any test of our system. In the Montessori schools a child of four usually spends about a month and a half in the definite preparation for writing, and children of five usually only a month. Some very quick ones of this age learn to write with all the letters in twenty days. Three months’ practice, after they once begin to write, is, as a rule, enough to steady their handwriting into an excellently clear and regular script, and, after six months of writing, a Montessori tot of five can write fluently, legibly, and (most important and revolutionary change) with pleasure, far beyond that usually felt by a child in, say, our third or fourth grades.