Language Arts in the Montessori Classroom

Dr. Maria Montessori wrote about the young child’s “explosion into reading” to describe the excitement of the child and the seemingly suddenness with which reading skills come together.  A four and a half or five year old child may one day tell her parents, “I learned to read today.”  Yet her teacher knows that preparation for writing and reading begins from her first days at school.  The well-educated Montessori teacher prepares the classroom with activities that refine eye-hand coordination, visual tracking, listening and speaking skills, vocabulary development, spacial orientation, and many other skills needed for the complex process of reading.

Pre-reading activities allow the child to match identical objects, group objects which go together (a favorite set in our school is one which includes small kitchen items – a toaster, toast and jam, a container of small ice cream balls and scoop, a mixing bowl and spoon).  Then the child will match an object to a picture of the object.  When ready to use cards, the child can match and/or sort a variety of types of cards: opposites, sequencing, parts of the whole, small and large, contrasting sets, and three part cards.  Three-and-a-half to four year olds can follow up by drawing pictures and/or words seen on the cards.

When a child is between two-and-a-half and three years of age, and shows interest, the teacher will introduce her to the concept that symbols (letters) are associated with specific sounds.  We work with lower case letters first, and short vowel sounds.  The child is shown how to trace the letter form using sandpaper letters (see pictures above).  While tracing, the child says the sound of the letter (c as in cat), and repeats with two other letters.  

The young student has three containers of objects, each containing items of a specific initial sound.  For example, the jar labeled ‘c’ will contain small objects such as a cat, car, can, cow, comb, cradle, and corn.  The student mixes objects from three jars and then sorts them according to their initial sound and associates the objects and symbols.  The classroom may also contain 26 small booklets, each showing pictures of a specific sound.  The child can also use blackline masters, called rainbow letters, to practice writing the letters using three different colored pencils.

When the child knows the sounds of 8-10 letters, she can begin to build words.  She will put out small objects on a large felt mat and build the sounds that correspond with the object.  She names the objects, which are three letter phonetic words, then sounds out the words for each one and places letters using a material called the Moveable Alphabet.  These are pre-formed letters that facilitate a young child’s word building process because they don’t have to be able to write the words at this point in time.  Students really enjoy this process!

Join us for the next step in the Language sequence when we discuss special games that the teachers play with the three-and-a-half to four year old child to support the blending and reading process.