Why have Montessori didactic materials stood the test of time? They work!
Here’s how:
Effective and elegant, the materials foster curiosity, facilitate mastery, and inculcate concentration, as their use gradually builds in complexity. Their beauty appeals to children. And to their parents! I was given a wonderful quilted checkerboard that was crafted by a student’s grandmother (I was leaving a Montessori school) because she wanted all my students to be able to experience the “aha!” moment that her grandson had as he slid the beads into place, consolidating the partial products, reducing the places to simplest form, then recording and reading the answer to a multiplication problem with a multiplicand in the tens of thousands and a multiplier in the hundreds.
She and her husband had been mesmerized by their second year grandson (age 7), a gregarious and hilarious individual, bring out the material, ask them for a problem (“Make it a hard one!”) and carefully lay out the work, execute it, accurately record the answer, and meticulously return the work to the shelf. Similarly, parents watched, fascinated, as their 8-year old used the grammar symbols to form a snowflake of sentences with each symmetrical arm the same grammatical pattern (e.g., pronoun/verb/adverb/preposition/article/ noun) with the center being the same part of speech (“I go sadly into the woods,” “You skip merrily from the woods,””He trudged grumpily through the woods,” etc.)
So often, loving adults marvel at the contrast between the way they learned things and their child’s. Frequently, they add, “And s/he has no fear!” or “And s/he loves challenges!”
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