Montessori Philosophy & Practice

AGE 3-6+ YEARS—Toys


The following is the text from this section of the 2009-2010 edition of Child of the World, Montessori from Three to Six Years
To see other sections of this publication return to: http://www.michaelolaf.com/CWcontents.html

THE SENSES
The young child is vividly aware of the world, taking in impressions through all of her senses. It is also the time of life when lifelong preferences are formed. If we want to lay the groundwork for the child's later ability to create an organized, peaceful and calm, but interesting, challenging, life-supporting, and beautiful environment, we must provide just such an environment now.

This is the reason we take special care in providing toys made of a variety of lovely, natural materials for the young child—interesting toys rich in variety of weight, color, texture, and purpose, of the best quality available. We make sure these toys engage the child's intelligence as well as his body.

COOPERATIVE GAMES
Cooperative games teach children to work together, to help each other, to consider the good of the other person or the group as well as oneself, instead of fostering competition and winning. Competitive play cause players to feel isolated or left out. The action is secretive and can result in feelings or arguments.

In environments where children work and play independently and cooperatively, they learn the most valuable kind of socialization—helping each other. In the home, or in the classroom, cooperative games helps to lay this groundwork. In cooperative games, children and adults feel good about themselves because they enjoy sharing, helping each other, and making joint decisions.
In short, the challenge shifts from defeating to helping each other.
After a group of children or a family learns to play cooperative games, it becomes easy to change the rules of any other game to make it less competitive. We consider this true socialization and preparation for positive interaction throughout life.

ACTIVE PLAY
We have to understand that the world can only be grasped by action, not by contemplation. The hand is more important than the eye. It is the hand that drives the subsequent evolution of the brain. I have described the hand when it uses a tool as an instrument of discovery. We see that every time a child learns—to lace his shoes, to thread a needle, to fly a kite or to play a penny whistle. With the practical action there goes another, namely finding pleasure in action for its own sake—in the skill that one perfects by being pleased with it. This at the bottom is responsible for every work of art, and science too: our poetic delight in what human beings do because they can do it. The hand is the cutting edge of the mind.
—Jacob Bronowski, The Ascent of Man

MOVEMENT
It takes work on the part of the adult to withstand the temptation to let the child spend hours in front of the television or the computer, but it is well worth the effort to support the natural development of the child. Television accustoms the child to be a passive receiver of information rather than an active questioner or researcher. And the intelligence of computers does not hold a candle to the kind of creativity inborn in the human being. The child needs large muscle movement and gradually more and more refined large and small muscles—legs, trunk, arms, hands, to the pincer movement of thumb and fingers.

SENSORIAL MATERIALS, TOYS
There are special toys or sensorial puzzles in the 3-6 class, such as the pink tower, the color tablets, and the sound boxes, that illustrate concepts such as large and small, hot and cold, loud and soft and so on. These materials have a specific way to be used because it is in this way that the child develops an understanding of the concept each is designed to teach. They can be thought of as puzzle toys because of the specific way to use them or to put them together. This work, and the understanding of the concepts, lead to an incredible level of creativity of the child in the home and school. It is rather like an artist who learns to use the canvas, the brushes, and the paints in very specific ways, and then creates remarkable individual pictures as a result is the basic work.

These sensorial materials are not necessary in the home, where parents can find other ways of introducing these experiences in the daily life of children—feeling the temperature of the bath water, exploring tastes while baking, and color or size with toys, etc.

Along with these puzzle toys are those with open-ended use, but even these will have basic skills to learn before the creativity stage begins. For example a child learns how to hold a nail and use a hammer safely before she makes pictures with the hammer board. Learning how to carry blocks and put them away is an important part of block play. When picking out toys it is helpful to imagine how long a child can play with them. If a child is included in the regular food preparation in the family and the real table setting and dish washing, he is not going to be interested in pretending to do these things with toys. If children are raised without early exposure to television and computers, they get used to the wonderful feeling of physical movement and work, and of reading and interacting with people, and have much less patience for passive entertainment.

The most important element in selecting toys and creating an environment for children is to include materials which will engage the child's mental faculties along with movement of the body and work of the hands, activities during which the child will enjoy the experience of focusing and concentrating, and find joy in the activity.


© Susan Mayclin Stephenson, 2010 (www.susanart.net)
Permission to reprint or link to a website is granted if these words are include:
"Shared with permission of The Joyful Child Montessori Company: www.thejoyfulchild.us"


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