08 - Writing

Chapter 8 of Dr. Montessori's own handbook by Maria Montessori. This Libravox recording

is in the public domain, recording by Phil Shinnevere, Chapter 8 writing. The child who

has completed all the exercises above described, and is thus prepared for an advance toward

unexpected conquests, is about four years old. He is not an unknown quantity, as are children

who have been left to gain varied and casual experiences by themselves, and who therefore

differ in type and intellectual standard, not only according to their natures, but especially

according to the chances and opportunities they have found for their spontaneous interformation.

Education has determined an environment for the children. Individual differences to be

found in them can, therefore, be put down almost exclusively to each one's individual

nature. Owing to their environment, which offers means adapted and measured to meet the

needs of their psychological development, our children have acquired a fundamental type

which is common to all. They have coordinated their movements in various kinds of manual

work about the house, and so have acquired a characteristic independence of action and

initiative in the adaptation of their actions to their environment. Out of all this emerges

a personality, for the children have become little men who are self-reliant. The special

attention necessary to handle small, fragile objects without breaking them, and to move

heavy articles without making a noise, has endowed the movements of the whole body with

a lightness and grace which are characteristic of our children. It is a deep feeling of

responsibility which has brought them to such a pitch of perfection. For instance, when

they carry three or four tumblers at a time, or a terrain of hot soup, they know that

they are responsible not only for the objects, but also for the success of the meal which

at that moment they are directing. In the same way each child feels the responsibility

of the silence, of the prevention of harsh sounds, and he knows how to cooperate for the

general good in keeping the environment not only orderly, but quiet, and calm. Indeed,

our children have taken the road which leads them to mastery of themselves, but their formation

is due to a deeper psychological work still arising from the education of the senses.

In addition to ordering their environment and ordering themselves in their outward personalities,

they have also ordered the inner world of their minds. The didactic material in fact does

not offer to the child the content of the mind, but the order for that content. It causes

him to distinguish identities from differences, extreme differences from fine gradations, and

to classify under conceptions of quality and of quantity the most varying sensations

appertaining to surfaces, colors, dimensions, forms, and sounds. The mind has formed itself

by a special exercise of attention, observing, comparing, and classifying. The mental attitude

acquired by such an exercise leads the child to make ordered observations in his environment

observations which prove as interesting to him as discoveries, and so stimulate him

to multiply them indefinitely and to form in his mind a rich content of clear ideas.

Language now comes to fix by means of exact words the ideas which the mind has acquired.

These words are few in number and have reference not to separate objects, but rather to the

order of the ideas which have been formed in the mind. In this way the children are

able to find themselves, alike in the world of natural things, and in the world of objects

and of words which surround them for they have an inner guide which leads them to become

active and intelligent explorers instead of wondering wayfarers in an unknown land. These

are the children who, in a short space of time, sometimes in a few days, learn to write

and to perform the first operations of arithmetic. It is not a fact that children in general

can do it as many have believed. It is not a case of giving my material for writing to

unprepared children and of awaiting the miracle. The fact is that the mind and hands of our

children are already prepared for writing, and ideas of quantity, of identity, of differences

and upgradation which form the basis of all calculation have been maturing for a long

time in them. One might say that all their previous education is a preparation for the

first stages of essential culture, writing, reading, and number, and that knowledge comes

as an easy, spontaneous and logical consequence of the preparation that it is in fact its natural

conclusion. We have already seen that the purpose of the word is to fix ideas and to facilitate

the elementary comprehension of things. In the same way, writing and arithmetic now

fix the complex inner acquisitions of the mind which proceeds hence forward continually

to enrich itself by fresh observations. Our children have long been preparing the hand

for writing. Throughout all the century exercises, the hand, whilst cooperating with the mind

in its attainments and in its work of formation, was preparing its own future. When the hand

learned to hold itself lightly suspended over a horizontal surface, it ordered to touch

rough and smooth, when it took the cylinders of the solid insets and placed them in their

apertures, when with two fingers it touched the outlines of the geometrical forms, it was

coordinating movements, and the child is now ready, almost impatient, to use them in the

fascinating synthesis of writing. The direct preparation for writing also consists in

exercises of the movements of the hand. There are two series of exercises, very different

from one another. I have analyzed the movements which are connected with writing, and I prepare

them separately one from the other. When we write, we perform a movement for the management

of the instrument of writing. A movement which generally acquires an individual character

so that a person's handwriting can be recognized, and in certain medical cases, changes in

the nervous system can be traced by the corresponding alterations in the handwriting. In fact, it is

from the handwriting that specialists in that field would interpret the moral character

of individuals. Writing has, besides this, a general character which has reference to the form

of the alphabetical signs. When a man writes, he combines these two parts but they actually exist

as the component parts of a single product and can be prepared apart. Exercises for the

management of the instrument of writing, the individual part. In the didactic material,

there are two sloping wooden boards on each of which stand five square metal frames colored

pink. In each of these has inserted a blue geometrical figure similar to the geometrical

insets and provided with a small button for a handle. With this material, we use a box of ten

colored pencils and a little book of designs which I have prepared after five years experience

of observing the children. I have chosen and graduated the designs according to the use which

the children make of them. The two sloping boards are set side by side and on them are placed

ten complete insets, that is to say the frames with the geometrical figures. The child is given

a sheet of white paper and the box of ten colored pencils. He will then choose one of the ten

metal insets which are arranged in an attractive line at a certain distance from him. The child

is taught the following process. He lays the frame of the iron inset on the sheet of paper

and holding it down firmly with one hand. He follows with a colored pencil the interior outline

which describes a geometrical figure. Then he lifts the square frame and finds drawn upon the

paper and enclosed geometrical form, a triangle, a circle, a hexagon, etc. The child has not

actually performed a new exercise because he has already performed all these movements when he

touched the wooden plane insets. The only new feature of the exercise is that he follows the

outlines no longer directly with his finger but through the medium of a pencil, that is he draws,

he leaves a trace of his movement. The child finds this exercise easy and most interesting

and as soon as he has succeeded in making the first outline, he places above it the piece of

blue metal corresponding to it. This is an exercise exactly similar to that which he performed

when he placed the wooden geometrical figures upon the cards of the third series where the figures

are only contained by a simple line. This time however, when the action of placing the form upon

the outline is performed, the child takes another colored pencil and draws the outline of the blue

metal figure. When he raises it if the drawing is well done, he finds upon the paper a geometrical

figure contained by two outlines in colors and if the colors have been well chosen, the result is

very attractive and the child who has already had a considerable education of the chromatic sense

is keenly interested in it. These may seem unnecessary details but as a matter of fact,

they are all important. For instance if instead of arranging the ten metal insets in a row,

the teacher distributes them among the children without thus exhibiting them, the child's exercises

are much limited. When on the other hand, the insets are exhibited before his eyes,

he feels the desire to draw them all one after the other and the number of exercises is increased.

The two colored outlines rouse the desire of the child to see another combination of colors

and then to repeat the experience. The variety of the objects and the colors are therefore an

inducement to work and hence to final success. Here the actual preparatory movement or writing begins.

When the child is drawn the figure in double outline, he takes hold of a pencil like a pen for

writing and draws marks up and down until he has completely filled the figure and this way a

definite filled-in figure remains on the paper similar to the figures on the cards of the first

series. This figure can be in any of the ten colors. At first the child feels and the figures

very clumsily without regard for the outlines, making very heavy lines and not keeping them parallel.

Little by little however, the drawings improve so that they keep within the outlines and the lines

increase in number, grow finer and are parallel to one another. When the child has begun these

exercises, he is seized with a desire to continue them and he never tires of drawing the outlines

of the figures and then filling them in. Each child suddenly becomes the possessor of a considerable

number of drawings and he treasures them up in his own little drawer. In this way he organizes

the movement of writing which brings him to the management of the pen. This movement in ordinary

methods is represented by the worrisome pot hook connected with the first laborious and tedious

attempt set writing. The organization of this movement which began from the guidance of a piece

of metal is as yet rough and imperfect and the child now passes on to the filling-in of the

prepared designs in the little album. The leaves are taking for the book one by one in the order of

progression in which they are arranged and the child fills in the prepared designs with colored

pencils in the same way as before. Here the choice of the colors is another intelligent occupation

which encourages the child to multiply the tasks. He chooses the colors by himself and with much

taste. The delicacy of the shades which he chooses and the harmony with which he arranges them in

these designs show us that the common belief that children love bright and glaring colors

has been the result of observation of children without education who have been abandoned to the

rough and harsh experiences of an environment unfitted for them. The education of the chromatic

sense becomes at this point of a child's development the lever which enables him to become possessed

of a firm bold and beautiful handwriting. The drawings lend themselves to limiting in very

many ways the length of the strokes with which they are filled in. The child will have to fill in

geometrical figures both large and small of a pavement design or flowers and leaves are the

various details of an animal or of a landscape. In this way the hand accustoms itself not only to

perform the general action but also to confide the movement within all kinds of limits.

Hence the child is preparing himself to write in a handwriting either large or small.

Indeed later on he will write as well between the wide lines on a blackboard as between the narrow

closely rule lines of an exercise book generally used by much older children. The numbers of

exercises which the child performs with the drawings is practically unlimited. He will often take

another colored pencil and draw over again the outlines of the figure already filled in with color.

A help to the continuation of the exercise is to be found in the further education of the chromatic

sense which the child acquires by painting the same designs in watercolors. Later he mixes colors

for himself until he can imitate the colors of nature or create the delicate tense which his

own imagination desires. It is not possible however to speak of all this in detail within the limits of

this small work. Exercises for the writing of alphabetical signs. In the didactic material

there are series of boxes which contain the alphabetical signs. At this point we will take those

cards which are covered with very smooth paper to which is gummed a letter of the alphabet cut

out in sandpaper. There are also large cards on which are gummed several letters grouped together

according to analogy of form. The children quote have to touch over the alphabetical signs as though

they were writing, close quote. They touch them with the tips of the index and middle fingers

in the same way as when they touched the wooden insets and with the hand raised as when they

lightly touched the rough and smooth surfaces. The teacher herself touches the letters to show the

child how the movement should be performed and the child if he has had much practice in touching

the wooden insets imitates her with ease and pleasure. Without the previous practice however,

the child's hand does not follow the letter with accuracy and it is most interesting to make

close observations of the children in order to understand the importance of a remote motor

preparation for writing and also to realize the immense strain which we impose upon the children

when we set them to write directly without a previous motor education of the hand.

The child finds great pleasure in touching the sandpaper letters. It is an exercise by which he

applies to a new attainment the power he has already acquired through exercising the sense of touch.

While the child touches a letter the teacher pronounces its sound and she uses for the lesson

the usual three periods. Thus for example presenting the two vowels I-O she will have the child

touch them slowly and accurately and repeat their relative sounds one after the other as the child

touches them i-i-i-o-o then she will say to the child give me i give me o finally she will ask the

question what is this to which the child replies i-o she proceeds in the same way through all the other

letters giving in the case of the consonants not the name but only the sound the child then touches

the letters by himself over and over again either on the separate cards or on the large cards on

which several letters are gummed and in this way he establishes the movements necessary for tracing

the alphabetical signs. At the same time he retains the visual image of the letter. This process

forms the first preparation not only for writing but also for reading because it is evident that

when the child touches the letters he performs the movement corresponding to the writing of them

and at the same time when he recognizes them by sight he is reading the alphabet.

The child is thus prepared in effect all the necessary movements for writing therefore he can write.

This important conquest is the result of a long period of inner formation of which the child

is not clearly aware but a day will come very soon when he will write and that will be a day of

great surprise for him a wonderful harvest of an unknown sewing. The alphabet of movable letters

cut out in pink and blue cardboard and kept in a special box with compartments serves for the

composition of words. In a phonetic language like Italian it is enough to pronounce clearly the

different component sounds of each word as for example ma no so that the child whose ears is

already educated may recognize one by one the component sounds then he looks in the movable

alphabet for the signs corresponding to each separate sound and lays them one beside the other

thus composing the word for instance mono. Gradually he will become able to do the same thing with words

of which he thinks himself he succeeds in breaking them up into their component sounds

and in translating them into a row of signs. When the child has composed the words in this way

he knows how to read them in this method therefore all the processes leading to writing

include reading as well. If the language is not phonetic the teacher can compose separate words

with the movable alphabet and then pronounce them letting the child repeat by himself the exercise

of arranging and rereading them. In the material there are two movable alphabets one of them consists

of larger letters and is divided into two boxes each of which contains the vowels this is used

for the first exercises in which the child needs very large objects in order to recognize the

letters. When he is acquainted with one half of the consonants he can begin to compose words

even though he is dealing with one part only of the alphabet. The other movable alphabet has

smaller letters and is contained in a single box. It is given to children who have made their first

attempts at composition with words and already know the complete alphabet. It is after these exercises

with the movable alphabet that the child is able to write entire words. This phenomena generally

occurs unexpectedly and then a child who has never yet traced a stroke or a letter on paper

writes several words in succession. From that moment he continues to write always gradually

perfecting himself. This spontaneous writing takes on the characteristics of a natural phenomena

and the child who has begun to write the first word will continue to write in the same way

as he spoke after pronouncing the first word and as he walked after having taken the first step.

The same course of interformation through which the phenomena of writing appeared is the course

of his future progress of his growth to perfection. The child prepared in this way has entered upon a

course of development through which he will pass as surely as the growth of the body and the

development of the natural functions have passed through their course of development when life has

once been established. For the interesting and very complex phenomena relating to the development

of writing and then of reading, see my larger works. End of chapter 8