What were the major discoveries made by Maria Montessori?

At the end of the nineteenth century, it was claimed that children under the age of six were ineligible, incapable of attention, and could not be supervised. The First House of Children proved that these children`s theories were incorrect and revealed who the children are.

Maria Montessori calls this the true nature of children whose development has been obscured by the climate, which is not conducive to their growth. If the children have found a suitable setting, they have manifested their true characteristics.

 A repeat of the Exercise:

The first finding made by Montessori was that children were capable of repetition. Once, a boy, about three years old, was practicing cylinder blocks. She placed all the cylinders into their sockets and immediately removed them from the sockets with the same value.

She managed to perform the top of the tubes, adding them many times. Montessori instructed the helper to pick up the child with the cylinder block and position it on the table. There was a lot of commotion in there. And the child wasn`t disturbed by the commotion.

Forty-two times, she managed to perform the workout. Then, as if coming out of a dream, she stopped and grinned as if she were really happy. Her eyes are clear and sparkling (Montessori 1986: 126–127; Standing 1998: 41). The same phenomenon has been documented in various Children`s Houses around the world at the time and now.

Respect for Order:

Children are generally referred to as disorderly. At school, order and discipline are enforced on children with extreme punishment and compensation. Montessori has learned that children enjoy order. In Casa Dei Bambini, in the beginning, the instructor gave the apparatus back to its position after its use.

Each time the instructor took the show equipment, the children followed her and stood around her. They will always come back, even if she sends them away. Montessori felt it could be that the children decided to bring the device back on their own.

Then the children were allowed to keep things clean and tidy in the classroom. Children loved to do this as a job. If a glass falls out of the child`s hands, others rush to pick up the pieces and dry the cement. When the teacher dropped the tablets of light.

It was the children who easily put all of the tablets in order (Montessori 1986:128). This is only possible because children respect order.

Free Choice:

In Casa Dei Bambini, the toys were placed in the locked cupboard and the caretaker would bring the key with her. The caretaker would open the cupboard every day when she entered and give the children the equipment to play with.

One day, the caregiver failed to lock the cupboard. Not only did she forget to lock the cupboard, but she was also late for classes. She was concerned that the children would break down the machinery. At school, the caregiver was surprised to see that the children not only took the equipment by themselves but also carefully kept it back in their place of storage (Standing 1998:43; Montessori 1986: 129).

Until then, technology in the Montessori classroom has been presented beyond the scope of the child`s hands and senses. Adding the equipment is placing it in a position where children can see, touch, and navigate independently.

so that their option power is enriched.

They never chose the toys:

Casa Dei Bambini has a lot of lovely clothes and lovely dolls. Montessori has explained how to use them. Ex: the doll's crockery, lighting the fire in the tiny doll`s kitchen, putting a nice doll beside it, and so on.

Children had been showing interest for some time, but then they went down. Dolls and toys were not a spontaneous choice. Montessori (1986: 130) states. Demo

So I understood that in a child’s life play is perhaps something inferior, to which he has recourse for want of something better, but that there were loftier things that, in the child’s mind, seemed to take precedence over useless amusements.

The same might be said of ourselves; to play chess or bridge is pleasant enough for our leisure moments, but it would no longer be so if we were forced to do nothing else all through our life. when there is a lofty and urgent task to be done, the bridge is forgotten, and the child has always lofty, and indeed urgent, tasks before him.

Every passing minute is precious to him, representing the passage from a slightly inferior state of being to a higher one. The child is continually growing, and all that has to do with the means of his development fascinates him and makes him forget idle occupations.

Incentives and Punishment:

Montessori has found that incentives and punishments do not have the desired effect on children. Once, Montessori saw a child sitting in the middle of the room doing nothing with the pompous decoration that is normally offered to the teacher as a reward for good conduct.

The teacher said the child was being punished, but she had given that pompous decoration to another child for a few minutes. The child passed on the pompous decoration to this child as if it were useless. The guilty child gazed at the decoration indifferently, not thinking about his punishment.

Silence Exercise:

One day, a mother brought her four-month-old baby to Maria Montessori. Montessori took the child to the classroom to show the students. She said (1914:388), "I brought you a visitor; see how still it is; I`m sure you couldn`t hold it that way." Montessori said it was a joke, she didn`t expect the children to stay without shifting. Then she said, "If only you could breathe as softly as he does."

Now she wanted them to chuckle, but they started to breathe deeper. She gave the baby back to the mother. The children were still sitting in a serene, meditative way, regulating their breathing. In this silence, even the slightest sounds could be heard, such as a drop of water dropping in the distance, far away from a bird`s tweet, and so on. The silence-activity thus begun is still part of Montessori`s classrooms all over the world.

They refused Sweets:

It is a common misconception that children enjoy sweets and are very greedy for them. When the children at Casa dei Bambini were given sweets, they did not eat them but put them in their pockets.

And when they were given some more to take home, they took them but kept them in their pockets, but they didn`t eat. A couple of days later, one of the boys was ill, and the teacher visited his home. He opened his box and gave the teacher the sweets he had given him at school.

The Sense of Dignity:

Montessori once taught us how to blow our noses. She showed how to use a handkerchief to blow the nose, how to blow the nose without making a lot of noise, and how to fold the napkin and keep it in the pocket. Children watched all this with great interest.

There was silence for a while, and then a burst of applause. The children had always been scolded for running a nose, and they had never been shown how to blow their noses.

Montessori`s teaching has rescued them, and she has discovered that children have a deep sense of personal integrity and that their souls can remain injured, ulcerated, and oppressed in adulthood.

Spontaneous Discipline:

The Montessori classroom allows for the freedom of presentation, voice, and expression for the students. They offer an impression of extraordinary discipline, given this independence.

They work softly on a piece of the material selected by themselves, move softly without upsetting anyone to put back the finished material and select a new one. They went out and looked at what was going on outside, then they came back.

This order and discipline were spontaneous and the product of independence in the Montessori Children`s Houses (Montessori 1986:139).

The Explosion into Writing and Exploration of Reading:

In the Montessori Children`s Home, children learned writing on their own. It just happened this way. Montessori had provided some sandpaper letters to trace, as well as some loose letters similar to sandpaper letters.

One day, a child was walking himself, saying, "To make "Sofia" you need S, O, F, I, A," this child was working with a moving alphabet, an apparatus that uses the consciousness of sounds. This was written (Standing, 1998, p. 48). Later, another kid yelled, "I wrote, I wrote." Other children rushed to him, full of curiosity, looking at the words written by their mates.

They all picked up a piece of chalk and shouted, "I, too! yeah, I do!” They rushed to the blackboard and started to write on the blackboard. They wrote all day, everywhere— on the gate, on the walls, and even on the bread loaves. It was an eruption of prose (Montessori 1986:140).

Children understood the significance of writing six months after writing. Once Montessori had written a simple sentence on the blackboard, asking him to kiss her if anyone had read it.

Nothing has happened for a few days. Then a girl came to her and kissed her. In a short time, all the children began to write their sentences on the board, so that others could read and execute orders. This is how they discovered the transmission of human thought through writing and reading without speaking a word (Standing 1998:50).

Published By:-  Atheneum Global