DESCRIPTION OF THE REST OF THE APPARATUS AND THE METHOD FOR WRITING AND READING  
THE carefully graded advance, from the simpler to the harder exercises, which is so essential a part of the correct use of the Montessori, as of all other educational apparatus, seems to most mothers contemplating the use of the system, a very difficult feature. “How am I to know?” they ask. “Which exercise is the best one to offer a child to begin with, how can I tell when he has sufficiently mastered that so that another is needed, and how shall I select the right one to go on with?”
Perhaps the first answer to make to these questions is the one which so often successfully solves Montessori problems: “Have a little more trust in your child’s natural instincts. Don’t think that a single mistake on your part will be fatal. It will not hurt him if you happen to suggest the wrong thing, if you do not insist on it, for, left freely to himself, he will not pay the least attention to anything that is not suitable for him. Give him opportunity for perfectly free action, and then watch him carefully.”
If he shows a lively spontaneous interest in a Montessori problem, and devotes himself to solving it,[68] you may be sure that you have hit upon something which suits his degree of development. If he goes through with it rather easily and, perhaps, listlessly, and needs your reminder to keep his attention on it, in all probability it is too easy; he has outgrown it, he no longer cares to occupy himself with it, just as you no longer care to jump rope, though that may have been a passion with you at the age of eight.
 
Buttoning-Frames to Develop Co-ordinated Movements of the Fingers and Prepare the Children for Exercises of Practical Life.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir
If, on the other hand, he seems distressed at the difficulties before him, and calls repeatedly for help and explanation, one of three conditions is present. Either the exercise is too hard for him, or he has acquired already the bad habit of dependence on others, in both of which cases he needs an easier exercise; or, lastly, he has simply had enough formal “sensory exercises” for a while. It is the most mistaken notion about the Montessori Children’s Home to conceive that the children are occupied from morning till night over the apparatus of her formal instruction. They use it exactly as long, or as often, or as seldom, as they please, just as a child in an ordinary nursery uses his ordinary toys. It must be kept constantly in mind that the wonderful successes attained by the Montessori schools in Rome cannot be repeated by the mere repetition of sensory exercises, thrust spasmodically into the midst of another system, or lack of system, in child-training. The Italian children of five or six, who have had two or three years of Montessori discipline, and who are such marvels of sweet, reasonable self-control, who govern their[69] own lives so sanely, who have accomplished such astonishing feats in reading and writing, are the results of many other factors besides buttoning-frames and geometric insets, important as these are.
Perhaps the most vital of these other factors is the sense of responsibility, genuine responsibility, not the make-believe kind, with which we are too often apt to put off our children when they first show their touchingly generous impulse to share some of the burdens of our lives. For instance, to take a rather extreme instance, but one which we must all have seen, a child in an ordinary home is allowed to pick up a bit of waste-paper on the floor, after having had his attention called to it, and is told to throw it in the waste-paper basket. This action of mechanical obedience, suitable only for a child under two years of age, is then praised insincerely to the child’s face as an instance of “how much help he is to Mother!”
The Montessori child is trained, through his feeling of responsibility for the neatness and order of his schoolroom, to notice litter on the floor, just as any housekeeper does, without needing to have her attention called to it. It is her floor and her business to keep it clean. And this feeling of responsibility is fostered and allowed every opportunity to grow strong, by the sincere conviction of the Montessori teacher that it is more important for the child to feel it, than for the floor to be cleaned with adult speed. As a result of this long patience on the part of the Directress, a child who has been under her[70] care for a couple of years, will (to go on with our chosen instance) pick up litter from the floor and dispose of it, as automatically as the mistress of the house herself, and with as little need for the goad either of upbraiding for neglect, or praise incommensurate with the trivial service. This is an attitude in marked contrast to that of many of our daughters who often attain high-school age without acquiring this feeling, apparently perfectly possible to inculcate if the process is begun early enough, of loyal solidarity with the interests of the household.
 
Solid Geometrical Insets.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir
With this caution that a Montessori life for a little child does not in the least mean his incessant occupation with formal sensory exercises, let us again take up the description and use of the apparatus.
The first thing which is given a child is usually either one of the buttoning-frames (shown in the illustration facing page 68), or what are called the “solid geometric insets.” This latter game with the formidable name is illustrated opposite this page, where it is seen to resemble the set of weights kept beside their scales by old-fashioned druggists. No other Montessori exercise is more universally popular with the littlest ones who enter the Children’s Home, and few others hold their attention so long. This combines training for both sight and touch, since, as an aid to his vision, the child is taught to run his finger-tips around the cylinder which he is trying to fit in, and then around the edges of the holes. His finger-tips recognize the similarity of[71] size before his eyes do. This piece of apparatus is, of course, entirely self-corrective, and needs no supervision. When it becomes easy for a child quickly to get all the cylinders into the right holes, he has probably had enough of this exercise, although his interest in it may recur from time to time, during many weeks.
One of the exercises which it is usual to offer him next is the construction of the Tower. This game could be played (and often is) with the nest of hollow blocks which nearly every child owns, and it consists of building a pyramid with them, the biggest at the bottom, the next smaller on this, and so on to the apex made by the tiniest one. This is to learn the difference between big and small; and as the child progresses in exactitude of vision, the game can be varied by piling the blocks in confusion at one side of the room and constructing the pyramid, a piece at a time, at some distance away. This means that when the child leaves his pyramid to go and get the block needed next, he must “carry the size in his eye” as the phrase runs, and pick out the block next smaller by an effort of his visual memory.
The difference between long and short is taught by means of ten squared rods of equal thickness, but regularly varying length, the shortest one being just one-tenth as long as the longest. The so-called Long Stair (illustration facing page 74) is constructed by the child with these. This is perhaps the most difficult game among those by which dimensions are[72] taught, and a good many mistakes are to be anticipated. The material is again quite self-corrective, however, and little by little, with occasional silent or brief reminders from the adult onlooker, the child learns first to correct his own mistakes, and then not to make them. Thickness and thinness are studied with ten solids, brick-like in shape, all of the same length, but of regularly varying thickness, the thinnest one being one-tenth as thick as the biggest one. With these the child constructs the Big Stair (illustration facing page 74). Later on (considerably later), when the child begins to learn his numbers, these “stairs” are used to help him. The large numbers cut out of sandpaper and pasted on smooth cardboard, are placed by the child beside the right number of red and blue sections on each rod of the Long Stair.
After the construction of the Long and Big Stair the child is usually ready for the exercises with different fabrics to develop his sense of touch, and for the first beginning of the exercises leading to writing; especially the strips of sandpaper pasted upon smooth wood used to teach the difference between rough and smooth. At the same time with these exercises, begin the first ones with color which consist of simply matching spools of identical color, two by two.
When these simple exercises of the tactile sense have been mastered, the child is allowed to attempt the more difficult undertaking of recognizing all the[73] minute gradations between smooth and rough, between dark blue and light blue, etc., etc.
The training of the eye to discriminate between minute differences in shades, is carried on steadily in a series of exercises which result in an accuracy of vision in this regard which puts most of us adults to shame. These color-games are played with silk wound around flat cards, like those on which we often buy our darning-cotton. There are eight main colors, and under each color eight shades, ranging from dark to light. The number of games which can be played with these is only limited by the ingenuity of the Directress or mother, and, although most of them are played more easily with a number of children together, many are quite available for the solitary “only child at home.” He can amuse himself by arranging his sixty-four bobbins in the correct order of their colors, or he can later, as in the pyramid-making game, pile them all on one side of the room, and make his graduated line at a distance, “holding the color” in his mind as he crosses the room, a feat which almost no untrained adult can accomplish; although it is surprising what results can be obtained any time in life by conscious, definite effort to train one of the senses. There is nothing miraculous in the results obtained in the Casa dei Bambini. They are the simple, natural consequence of definite, direct training, which is so seldom given. The remarkable improvement in general acuteness of his vision after training his eyes to follow the flight of bees, has been[74] picturesquely and vigorously recorded by John Burroughs; and all of us know how many more chestnuts we can see and pick up in a given time, after a few hours’ concentration on this exercise, than when we first began to look for them in the grass.
 
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[75] 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[76] 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[77] 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.
“These blocks with the geometric insets are among the most valuable stimuli in the Casa dei Bambini. The vision and the touch become, by their use, accustomed to a great variety of shapes. It will be noted, too, that the child apprehends the forms synthetically, as given entities, and is not taught to recognize them by aid of even the simplest geometrical analysis. This is a point on which Dr. Montessori lays particular stress.”
Now it is to be borne in mind that although, for the children, this is only a “game,” as fascinating to them as the picture-puzzle is to their elders, their far-seeing teacher is utilizing it, far cry though it may seem, to begin to teach them to write. And here I realize that I have at last written a phrase for which my bewildered reader has probably been waiting in an astonished impatience. For of all the profound, searching, regenerating effects of the Montessori system, none seems to have made an impression on the public like the fact, almost a by-product of the method, that Montessori children learn to write and read more easily than others. I have heard Dr. Montessori exclaim in wonder many times over the popular[78] insistence on that interesting and important, but by no means central, detail of her work; as though reading and writing were our only functions in life, as though we could get information and education only from the printed page, a prop which is already, in the opinion of many wise people, too largely used in our modern world as a substitute for first-hand, individual observation.
It cannot be denied, however, that the way Montessori children learn to write is very spectacular. The theory underlying it is far too complicated to describe in complete detail in a book of this sort, but for the benefit of the person who desires to run and read at the same time, I will set down a short-cut, unscientific explanation.
The inaccuracy and relative weakness of a little child’s eyesight, compared to his sense of touch, has been already mentioned (page 57). This simple element in child physiology must be borne constantly in mind as one of the determining factors in the Montessori method of teaching writing. The child who is “playing” with the geometric insets soon learns, as we have seen from Miss Tozier’s description, that he can find the shallow recess which is the right shape for the piece of wood which he holds in his hand if he will run the fingers of his other hand around the edge of his piece of wood and then around the different recesses.
 
Insets Which the Child Learns to Place Both by Sight and by Touch.
Copyright 1912, by Carl R. Byoir
It is hard for an ordinary adult really to conceive of the importance of this movement for a little child.[79] Indeed, so fixed is our usual preference for vision as a means of gaining information, that it gives one a very queer feeling to watch a child, with his eyes wide open, apparently looking intently at the board with its different-shaped recesses, but unable to find the one matching the inset he holds, until he has gone through that eerie, blind-man’s motion with his finger-tips.
Now that motion, very frequently repeated, not only tells him where to fit in his inset, but, like all frequently repeated actions, wears a channel in his brain which tends, whenever he begins the action, to make him complete it in the way he always has done it. It can be seen that, if, instead of a triangle or a square, the child is given a letter of the alphabet and shown how to follow its outlines with his fingers in the direction in which they move when the letter is written, the brain channel and muscular habit resulting are of the utmost importance.
But before he can make any use of this, he needs to learn another muscular habit, quite distinct from (although always associated with) the mastery of the letters of the alphabet, namely, the mastery of the pencil. The exceeding awkwardness naturally felt by the child in holding this new implement for the first time, has nothing to do with his recognition of A or B, although it adds another great difficulty to his reproducing those letters. He must learn how to manage his pencil before he engages upon the much more[80] complicated undertaking of constructing with it certain fixed symbols, just as he must learn how to walk before he can be sent on an errand. The old-fashioned way (still generally in use in Italy, and not wholly abandoned in all parts of our own country) was to force the child to fill innumerable copy-books with monotonous straight lines or “pot-hooks,” a weariness of the spirit and a thorn in the flesh which any one who has suffered from it can describe feelingly. One way adopted by modern educators to avoid this dreary exercise is by frankly running away from the issue and postponing teaching children to write until a much more mature age than formerly, in the hope that general exercises in free-hand drawing will sufficiently supplement the general strengthening and steadying of the muscles which come with more mature development. It is an inaccurate but, perhaps, suggestive comparison to say that this is a little as though young children should not be taught how to walk because it is so hard for them to keep their balance, but made to wait until all their bones are mature.
Dr. Montessori has solved the difficulty by another use of the geometric insets. This time it is the hole left by the removal of one of the insets which is used. Suppose, for instance, that one chooses the triangular inset. It is set down on a piece of paper and the triangle is lifted out, leaving the paper showing through. The child is provided with colored crayons and shown how to trace around the outline[81] of the triangular-shaped piece of paper. The fact that the metal frame stands up a little from the paper prevents his at first wildly unsteady pencil from going outside the triangle. When he has traced around the outline[A] with his blue crayon, he lifts the frame up and there is the most beautiful blue triangle, all the work of his own hands! He usually gazes at this in delighted surprise, and then it is suggested to him to fill in this outline with strokes of his pencil. He is allowed to make these as he chooses, only being cautioned not to pass outside the line. At first the crayon goes “every which way,” and the “drawings” are hardly recognizable because the outline has been so overrun at every point; but gradually the child’s muscular control is improved and finally carried to a very high degree of perfection. Regular, even parallel lines begin to appear and the final result is as even as a Japanese color-wash. It is evident that in the course of this work he makes of his own accord, with the utmost interest animating each stroke, as many lines as would fill hours and hours of enforced drudgery over copy-books. When, after much practice, the muscles have learned almost automatically to control fingers holding a pencil, that particular muscular habit is sufficiently well-learned for the child to begin on another enterprise.
Now of course, though it is most interesting to[82] 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[83] 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[84] 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[85] 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[86] 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[87] 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.
He has not only achieved this valuable accomplishment with enormous economy of time, but he has been spared, into the bargain, the endless hours of soul-killing drudgery from which the children in our schools now suffer. The Montessori child has, it is true, gone through a far more searching preparation for this achievement, but it has all been without any strain on his part, without any consciousness of effort except that which springs from the liveliest spontaneous desire. It has tired him, literally, no more than if he had spent the same amount of time playing tag.
I have heard some scientific talk which sounded to[88] my ignorant ears very profound and psychological, about whether this capacity of Montessori children to write can be considered as a truly “intellectual achievement,” or only a sort of unconsciously learned trick. This is a fine theoretic distinction which I think most mothers will feel they can safely ignore. Whatever it is from a psychological standpoint, and however it may be rated in the Bradstreet of pure science, it is an inestimable treasure for our children.
Reading comes after writing in the Montessori system, and has not apparently as inherently close a connection with it as is sometimes thought. That is, a child who can form letters perfectly with his pencil and can compose words with the movable alphabet may still be unable to recognize a word which he himself has neither written nor composed. But, of course, with such a start as the Montessori system gives him, the gap between the two processes is soon bridged. There are various reasons why a detailed account of the Montessori method of teaching reading need not be given here. One is that this book is written for mothers and not teachers, and since the methods for teaching reading in our schools are much better than those used for teaching writing, mothers will naturally, as a rule, leave reading until the child is under a teacher. Furthermore, there is nothing so very revolutionary in the Montessori method in this regard and there exist already in this country several excellent methods for teaching reading.[89] And yet a few notes on some features of the Montessori system will be of interest.
Like many variations of our own system it begins with the recognition of single words. At first these are composed with the movable alphabet. Later, when the child can interpret readily words composed in this way, they are written in large clear script on slips of paper. The child spells the word out letter by letter, and then pronounces these sounds more and more rapidly until he runs them together and perceives that he is pronouncing a word familiar to him. This is always a moment of great satisfaction to him and of encouragement to his teacher.
After this has continued until the children recognize single words quickly, the process is extended to phrases. Here the teacher goes very slowly, with great care, to avoid undue haste and lack of thoroughness. There is a danger here that the children will fall into the mechanical habit (familiar to us all) of reading aloud a page with great glibness, although the sense of the words has made no impression on their minds. To avoid this the Montessori Directress adopts the simple expedient of not allowing them at first to read aloud. She carries on, instead, a series of silent conversations with the children, writing on the board some simple request for an action on their part. “Please stand up,” “Please shut your eyes,” and so on. Later longer and more complicated sentences are written on slips of paper and distributed to the children. They read these to themselves (not[90] being misled by their oral fluency into thinking they understand what they do not), and show that they have understood by performing the actions requested. In other words, these are short letters addressed by the teacher to the children, and answered by silent action on the part of the children. Like all of the Montessori devices, this is self-corrective. It is perfectly easy for the child to be sure whether he has understood the sentence or not, and his attention is fixed, not on pronouncing correctly (which has nothing to do with understanding the sentences before him), but on the comprehension of the written symbols. As for the teacher, she has an absolutely perfect check on the child. If he does not understand, he does not do the right thing. It means the elimination of the “fluent bluffer,” a phenomenon not wholly unfamiliar to teachers, even when they are dealing with very young children.