Language
“Explosive epoch” -- These were Dr. Montessori’s words to describe the language development that occurs between the ages of two and three. It is from this explosion that reading and writing stems in the three to six year old classroom. This organization begins in our Children’s House classes. In the time before children are able to synchronize fine motor control enough to form letters or coordinate them with the formation of words, language is developing rapidly. Children begin expanding language in the classroom with the seemingly simple act of pairing names with objects and by organizing those objects into categories such as similar, opposite, and chronological. Children will move on to Sandpaper Letters to learn the sounds, the Moveable Alphabet to begin short-vowel word formation. As the child begins to read she is introduced to digraphs, blends, phonograms, and silent "e". Older children are often absorbed with creative writing and the satisfaction of putting their own stories onto paper. The functions of words,or grammar, are introduced through a variety of materials. Children may go on to work in sentence analysis, where they learn to identify subject, verb, direct and indirect objects, and different kinds of sentences. Each child emerges into reading and writing at their own pace but there is no limit to how far they may progress. |
"Touching the letters and looking at them at the same time fixes their images more quickly because of the cooperation of the senses." |
