Heuristic Activities: questions from Prague

Some thoughts on activities of 

independent discovery

Babies of 6-9 months exploring everyday objects - DVD by Elinor Goldschmied

https://vimeo.com/90218407

More than a year has passed since the International Congress in Prague and the questions from the presentation on July 29, 2017 about the relationship between Heuristic “Play” and Montessori “Work” are still waiting to be answered...

People Under Three: Young children in Day Care - a book by Elinor Goldschmied and Sonia Jackson

As well as answering your questions in the next few weeks, I will post some thoughts by Grazia Honegger Fresco about independent discovery and the history of this combination of pedagogies here in Italy (Montessori, Emmi Pikler and Elinor Goldschmied).

The questions from the audience in Prague on integrating 

Goldschmied and Montessori:

• I love the “heuristic play” and to watch it unfold. How does it fit into the Nido (3 months to 15 months) classroom, especially in an AMI classroom that is only to have items from the guides’ albums and trainings?

• I am an AMI Montessori trained teacher for 0-3, working in a toddler environment. In our training we learned about the standard Montessori materials, but the open ended materials I saw in the videos were not mentioned. For me, this seemed more like a play-based learning facility. I am curious about how we can integrate this kind of material in our environment.

Scooping oats to make muffins

scooping polenta activity "without a purpose"

• Could you please address the balance between sensorimotor, open, heuristic activities, and purpose driven activities of practical life, and keeping “material” order and “neatness” of the environment, especially how we introduce/present this? 

• Can you please briefly guide me to find out more about the aspect about the observations regarding the genes and the stages that all the children all over the world goes through, regarding the comment by Grazia in the film Cosmic Task 0-3 “it is written in their genes”?

the treasure basket according to Elinor Goldschmied has 40-50 items

• How to understand the norm for number of materials in the toddler class? At our AMI course we were taught that large amounts of materials distract the child’s attention.

• Montessori emphasized the importance of “completion of the cycle of activity” in purposeful work. The activities of exploration (featured in the film) are purposeful, for the children’s creativity and critical thinking, but why not give them “real things” and “real work” which will accomplish the same goal and offer real life experiences that they see adults do?

Pouring water into a drinking glass at 18 months

but she had three glasses because at 18 months the urge is strong to pour "without a purpose" or to pour and then repeat the process - which resulted in deep concentration

• I had understood that children in 1-3 environments should not have pouring exercises or spooning exercises as these should be in the Practical Life area of 3-6, however the film showed such materials in use (not for actual drinking but as an exercise). Can you please elaborate?

Pouring water (or sand, polenta, etc) back and forth using a funnel is called travasare in Italian Montessori 0-3 and results in 20 minutes or greater periods of concentration

For me, the question of how to integrate other work that is evidence-based into our Montessori environments requires first fully understanding the work others have done in their studies of the child. Next we have to be willing to experiment and learn through direct experience.

 Elinor Goldschmied, photo from www.amicidielinor.it

Elinor Goldschmied - the woman who came up with the “heuristic play” activity (what we saw in the films but in a Montessori environment and according to Montessori values) - did a lifetime of observations and thoroughly studied how the youngest children learn. What Elinor came to understand can be seen everywhere, in the park, in the home, anywhere you go, if the youngest children between 12 and 20 months are allowed to explore freely. Children between these ages will use anything they find to deposit, to insert, to manipulate, to relate together, to transfer from here to there, to stack, to pour. Providing collections of containers and collections of things that can be inserted and deposited is like offering an “object permanence box” times 1000, it is an exponential experience in hand-eye coordination and the integration of the will, allowing for development to be diverse, and based on each child's interest: Follow the child.

Emmi Pikler - the inspiration behind the RIE method (Magda Gerber)

see the website: Pure Pikler

Emmi Pikler studied the progression of movement development when the child is allowed to follow his inner time table and is not assisted and helped to achieve positions, observing hundreds of orphan's and documenting what she saw. She documented that this freedom to progress in movement development produces a somatic competence and self-esteem, "I did it myself!", the ideas that  Adele Costa Gnocchi and Montesssori understood through observation. Her books have not been translated into English but on the link to the website Pure Pikler (above) you can find all of her books in all of the languages they have been translated into. This is the roots of the RIE program, though they are not the same thing by any means. Magda Gerber was not formally trained by Emmi Pikler, she came to know Pikler as her child's pediatrician and later as a friend. When she emigrated to the USA she took these ideas and created an infant care program.

In 2009 in India, when I was observing at the 0-3 Montessori school after the International Montessori Congress in Chennai, I saw two boys scooping sand with a tiny cup and depositing the sand in the gaps in the cement block perimeter wall. 

For 20 minutes of concentrated work time, these two boys scooped and poured and then even removed the sand in a binary activity cycle (fill/empty): purposeful work for developing concentration, hand-eye coordination, socialization, collaboration and repetition. 

When I traveled three hours south of Chennai after the Congress, I went to Pondicherry where I saw a poor family, the mother working as a street sweeper and her 2 and 4 year old children sitting and "playing" nearby. The two year old was stacking rocks in deep concentration.

Grazia tells me the story about her grandson as a 18 month-old, inserting coins into the VCR opening without anyone noticing, until they tried to use it and it didn't work anymore and the repair man said, “it is full of coins!”

With the materials such as the object permanence box - the younger infant takes interest in them for a while, but then the interest wains... 

"With the spread of Montessori 0-3 in the 1990’s, not only in Italy, several companies producing Montessori materials were now making intelligent and beautiful toys for infants and toddlers that were very much of interest to the littlest ones. However, by the second year these materials were no longer of interest. This was the case for both the beautiful commercially built ones and our modest homemade ones. We asked ourselves many times what these youngest children truly needed and kept designing new materials until finally we began to see." (from the Cosmic Task of 0-3 article, GHF)

 A "developmental aid" with one use is often abandoned after the child has finished exploring its use. As there is not a variety of possibilities, the work of exploration is exhausted only after a short time.

The heuristic objects allow for infinite variations, so the interest is potentially never exhausted, each child finds the ways that depositing or stacking is most interesting to him or her and repeats that, in deep concentration, then finds another way, using new combinations, etc. The youngest ones do the rings on-off and the balls in-out or discs in the slot to be retrieved from the inside of the box, but as the infant increases his or her potential for exploratory behavior the things that require only one kind of action are abandoned. How many times have we seen them using the materials in the "wrong" way and discover they have found places to deposit that we didn't intend. An example of this as told by Valentina, an educator with Percorsi per Crescere:

“I had prepared an activity for infilare- a box with some colored sticks that could be put into holes in a small wooden board, and what did the children do? They put them into the holes in the cover of the water turtle aquarium that we have in the room. I would put them back and some of them would put them in there again. What was I to do? So I let them do it and I started returning them to the box only after they had left for home, and they could do it again the following day, which they did. Then some time later they stopped doing it.”

In a Montessori setting, everything we do must fit into the value system of a prepared environment, freedom of choice, respecting the threshold of intervention, learning from one's own activity... and we can use these questions to measure it against these core ideas:

• Does it follow Montessori values?
• What do we see if we offer this?
• Are the children doing purposeful work?
• Are they free to choose what they do throughout the day?
• Are they following inner rhythms?
• Are they concentrated?
• Do they need to be directed, assisted often?
• Are they peaceful? Do they collaborate?
• Do they repeat their work spontaneously?

As adults we learn from what we do, and as we all know, children learn from what they do. Why would we offer them freedom to learn and self-correct and not give ourselves the same?

We have to be willing to experiment and try things out and decide what works and what doesn't work, constantly using the guidelines set up by Montessori: little or no intervention unless absolutely necessary, freedom of choice, purposeful activity, concentration, repetition.