Question:
"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."
For
those who were not in Prague last year and who did not see the videos we presented I will explain how we made this film. I went to
Italy for the first time in 2010 and I found out that Centro Nascita
Montessori, founded by Adele Costa Gnocchi in 1960, was actively
training educators for 0-3 and had prenatal and postpartum classes
for new moms.
The people at Centro Nascita Montessori told me that I would need to meet Grazia Honegger Fresco if I wanted to learn about the history of the Montessori Assistants to Infancy work and 0-3 in Italy. In 2012 I went back to Italy to take a course with Grazia and observe in the Nidos in Rome directed by Centro Nascita Montessori and in 2014 to observe in several Nidos in Northern Italy. I discovered that there was a second organization that comes directly from Adele Costa Gnocchi's years of study, this one founded by Grazia in the 1970's. As you may know, Grazia was a direct student of Maria Montessori's (the last course given by Montessori in Rome in 1951) and she was also in the first group of students to study 0-3 in 1947.
The people at Centro Nascita Montessori told me that I would need to meet Grazia Honegger Fresco if I wanted to learn about the history of the Montessori Assistants to Infancy work and 0-3 in Italy. In 2012 I went back to Italy to take a course with Grazia and observe in the Nidos in Rome directed by Centro Nascita Montessori and in 2014 to observe in several Nidos in Northern Italy. I discovered that there was a second organization that comes directly from Adele Costa Gnocchi's years of study, this one founded by Grazia in the 1970's. As you may know, Grazia was a direct student of Maria Montessori's (the last course given by Montessori in Rome in 1951) and she was also in the first group of students to study 0-3 in 1947.
I went back to Italy and again observed in these programs in 2016 and in 2017 we decided to take videos during the second part of the year and create a film, narrated with Grazia's comments on this phase of development. This is the film we showed in Prague. It is not a film about the Montessori Method from 0-3 rather about developmental characteristics of this first phase of development.
LINKS TO THE TRAILERS FOR THE COSMIC TASK FILMS IN PRAGUE:
I use the word Nido to mean a Montessori 0-3 program, in the way it is used
in Italy, and this is confusing since AMI uses Nido to
mean infant care and Infant Community to mean the Youngest
Children or the Toddlers.
The
two programs we filmed are not AMI nor are they even Montessori
schools, they are public childcare programs (nidi comunale) that
serve about 60 children each. However, these educators and program
directors have spent years working under the guidance of Grazia and
other trainers for Percorsi per Crescere, the 0-3 Montessori training
group in Northern Italy. You can go to the Cosmictask0-3.education website to read more about the history of Percorsi per Crescere.
The
open-ended materials that are being offered to the children in these
two Nidos are referred to as “unstructured” materials meaning
that they do not have one purpose, but can be used in varieties of
ways. They answer the developmental instinct we can see anywhere and
everywhere when children are allowed to explore freely with the
objects they find. These unstructured materials allow children to
develop concentration, creativity, critical thinking and require no
presentation because there is no one correct way to use them.
These
are materials that create much activity and movement and can be
understood as sensorimotor or psico somatic materials. These materials
provide for the integration of the will and purposeful movement as
each child following his or her inner drives uses these materials
to discover how things relate. For children between the ages of 18
and 24 months they offer active play and much scientific exploration,
which is why it looked like a play-based program. But many of the children in these videos are practically in a trance of concentrated attention.
They are given freedom to use the materials as they desire and one can easily see how they are learning about shape, form, dimension, and relationship from exploring these materials, for example how they line up blocks of different size putting them in order according to size, or shape, not because they have been presented this but because this comes as a natural instinct.
They are given freedom to use the materials as they desire and one can easily see how they are learning about shape, form, dimension, and relationship from exploring these materials, for example how they line up blocks of different size putting them in order according to size, or shape, not because they have been presented this but because this comes as a natural instinct.
This
is a phase that asks for maximum movement
opportunities. Once this phase is satiated, they found that the older
toddler is ready to be working without moving about constantly and wants to work at the table,
using trays of materials that have been set up for a specific use - "structured
materials" such as cutting paper or painting or sorting or spooning,
depositing or threading small beads, transferring lentils from one small
bowl to another, spooning or pouring back and forth. They have found that having exhausted this previous psychomotor active work (gross motor integration with the will) the children are much more integrated in their fine motor hand-eye coordination work at the table.
This research, using the Montessori modality, is what we presented with the Cosmic Task 0-3 video. A Montessori 0-3 environment is the perfect laboratory to study natural development.
How
to integrate these materials in your Montessori 0-3 environment?
I
was told by an educator recently in Mexico where I was consulting
that she was allowing the children to play with the “developmental
aids” materials as they wished every
Friday. On all the other days she would intervene and say to the
child “this work is to be used with this tray ...” and attempt to keep
order to the materials by showing the child again where to deposit
the object. On Fridays she let the little ones play freely and put
things in places they 'didn't belong' and at the end of the day the
objects were “inserted” into spaces and holes here and there.
Is this disorder?
If we observe the child as she works, who found it so interesting to test out diverse opportunities to insert, what do we see? Do we see a concentrated child? Do we see a scientist testing a 'theory'? In this example, there were no new materials introduced rather a new freedom to use the existing materials as their instincts directed them to.
Is this disorder?
If we observe the child as she works, who found it so interesting to test out diverse opportunities to insert, what do we see? Do we see a concentrated child? Do we see a scientist testing a 'theory'? In this example, there were no new materials introduced rather a new freedom to use the existing materials as their instincts directed them to.
When
we observe and refrain from intervention we can see many universal
developmental characteristics at work.
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