Montessori from the Start: The Child at Home, from Birth to Age Three

452 Pages·2003·2.72 MB·English

by  Paula Polk Lillard

ALSO AVAILABLE FROM SCHOCKEN
Montessori: A Modern Approach by Paula Polk Lillard
Montessori in the Classroom by Paula Polk Lillard
Montessori Today by Paula Polk Lillard
Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook by Maria Montessori
The Montessori Method by Maria Montessori
ALSO AVAILABLE FROM SCHOCKEN
Montessori: A Modern Approach by Paula Polk Lillard
Montessori in the Classroom by Paula Polk Lillard
Montessori Today by Paula Polk Lillard
Dr. Montessori’s Own Handbook by Maria Montessori
The Montessori Method by Maria Montessori

To John Lillard and Ned Jessen,
the best of “Montessori husbands”
for their wise counsel and unending
support, patience, and humor
Contents
Preface
Psycho-Motor Development Time Line
Introduction
ONE The Completion of the Human Being
TWO Welcoming the Newborn
THREE Discovering the World
FOUR The Hand and the Brain
FIVE Crawling to Coordination
SIX Practical Life
SEVEN Personal Care
EIGHT Language and Intelligence
NINE The Developing Will
TEN Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Contents
Preface
Psycho-Motor Development Time Line
Introduction
ONE The Completion of the Human Being
TWO Welcoming the Newborn
THREE Discovering the World
FOUR The Hand and the Brain
FIVE Crawling to Coordination
SIX Practical Life
SEVEN Personal Care
EIGHT Language and Intelligence
NINE The Developing Will
TEN Conclusion
Acknowledgments
Bibliography
Preface
Every morning when they come to school, we greet the children and
their parents in the hallway. One spring morning a young mother said
goodbye to her two older children at their classroom doors. She then
stopped to tell us how much she was enjoying her third baby born just a
few weeks earlier. “I want to thank you for what you have done [in a
course we teach for parents]. When you start off with that first baby
you’re scared. You have made being a mom fun instead of scary.” She
paused and looked pensive for a moment, then continued, “Not just ‘fun’;
more interesting and rewarding. You have given me the self-confidence
to do this job. I get teary just talking about it.” She turned away then,
but as she started down the hall, she added in a soft voice, “You showed
me what to do.” Moments like this, and similar ones with other parents
who have taken our parent child course, inspired this book.
We are two women, each from a different generation: a mother, Paula
Lillard, and a daughter, Lynn Jessen. Yet, we share a common mission in
life: to understand childhood and its purpose, and to share this
knowledge with parents so that they can help their children reach
childhood’s goals. We are both Montessori primary school teachers,
certified to teach children from ages three through six years by the
Association Montessori Internationale (AMI), headquartered in
Amsterdam, the Netherlands. Additionally, Lynn is an AMI-certified
Assistant-to-Infancy teacher, trained to aid the development of children
from birth to three years old. Paula holds a Master of Arts degree in
Montessori education from Xavier University in Cincinnati, Ohio, and
has written three earlier books on Montessori education: Montessori: A
Modern Approach (Schocken Books, 1972, highlighting education for
children three to six years), Montessori in the Classroom (Schocken Books,
1980, presenting Montessori principles applied to a kindergarten
classroom), and Montessori Today (Schocken Books, 1996, describing the
Montessori program for elementary education).
Together with Jane Linari, a former colleague of Paulas from Lake
Forest Country Day School, we cofounded Forest Bluff School in 1982.
Forest Bluff is a Montessori elementary and secondary school for
children from eighteen months to fourteen years. Additionally, for the
past six years we have co-taught a parent child course at Forest Bluff
that focuses on the developmental needs of children from birth to age
three. It is this course that the mother was referring to in the hallway
that spring day.
Each of us came to Montessori by a different path and at a different
time in our lives. To give you further insight into the experiences that
led us to Montessori, we would like to share briefly our personal
histories. Paula, a mother of five daughters, now a grandmother of eight
grandchildren, ranging in age from newborn to twenty-one years, tells
her story:
I married soon after graduation from Smith College and raised my
children in the 1950s and 1960s. In those days before Betty Friedan’s
The Feminist Mystique, women aspired to be at home as full-time wives
and mothers. My generation did undertake significant volunteer work,
however, and it was in this capacity that I first became interested in
Montessori education. The elementary school that Lynn, age six, and her
older sister, Lisa, age eight, attended was beginning a Montessori
preschool class. I was skeptical about this “old-new” educational
approach with its emphasis on “freedom” for children. When the school’s
principal asked my husband and me to enroll our third child, Pamela,
who was then three years old, in the class, I volunteered to be the
Montessori teachers assistant. I was uncertain about my daughters
response to this very different type of education, and my being in the
classroom would give me a chance to know firsthand how she was
faring. I also wanted to see for myself how it was possible for children as
young as three years old to handle “freedom” in a Montessori classroom.
I was a former public school teacher and nothing in my previous
experience indicated that young children should be left “free” to direct
their own education.
In the following months, I discovered that Montessori education is
about much more than freedom for children. It requires a prepared
teacher who understands how children develop and who is experienced
in establishing a structured environment that meets their needs at each
successive age. The children are not “free to do as they like,” as I had
assumed. Instead, they are free to “work”: to engage in sustained and
productive activity while, at the same time, learning how to behave in a
community of others.*
Gradually, I began to realize something that I had only suspected
might be true when I had my first baby at age twenty-two; there is more
to being a mother than just feeding, bathing, dressing, playing with, and
loving babies and little children. These little ones under six years old are
not miniature beings simply growing larger, as a seed grows into a full
flowering plant. They are in the process of forming themselves into new
beings through a series of predictable planes of development. For me,
being a mother was transformed from largely custodial, albeit loving,
care into a stimulating, productive discovery of a new being in formation
and how I might aid that process. I was engaged in an intellectual and
scientific task of the most immense proportions and significance.
In the ensuing years, modern science has verified that indeed the
infant brain is engaged in an extraordinary feat of formation and that
the outer environment in large measure determines what that formation
will be. This is heartening news. Parents now know that their role is not
just important; it is the decisive factor for their child’s future. However,
there is a dark side to this realization, and we come now to the reason
why I am so determined to convey the information in this book to
others. Whereas my generation had only one child care book—the
original edition of Dr. Benjamin Spock’s Common Sense Book of Baby and
Child Care—telling us what to do (and to be honest, we felt free to
ignore much of it, having absorbed the wisdom and experience of our
own mothers and grandmothers), todays mothers are inundated with
thousands of books on child rearing by psychologists and others. This
plethora of books, representing so many people with differing
backgrounds and experience, gives contradictory advice and too often
leads mothers to find themselves in conflicting roles. Add to the
confusion over what advice to follow, the guilt so frequently experienced
by mothers who work outside the home, and the task of raising children
is transformed from a joyful, if challenging, journey of discovery to a
tedious and arduous experience.
What to do? In this book, we go back to the discoveries made at the
turn of the twentieth century by a young medical doctor and pioneer