The final test for a student’s language skills usually rests on his creative writing abilities. He language seems to follow a defined natural laws or patterns which Maria Montessori termed as ‘the natural laws of devlopment’. The acquisition of language occurs over a period of time and the more opporunities he gets to express himself in school or at home, the better will be his chance of developing an interest to pen down his thought in writing.

This is a piece of creative writing practice from an 8 year old child wh happens to be quite imaginative and expressive. She was asked to write about  80 words based on the pictures given. She ended up with 167 words. Towards the end of her story,you will see she takes herself away into a path of imagination.

“The parents followed the tracks and found their son lying  on a hospital bed. He had not been seen for 2 weeks.”

Well in real world, we would have expected the parents to file a missing person report to the police!

“Would you come with me please?”

“Would you like to come with me please?

“Would you like to come with me to the work area?”

“Would you like to follow me to the work area?”

I find that I get the same response whether or not I use the word ‘Please’. In fact, if I drop the word please, it goes unnoticed and then child will respond just as well.

I watch children educational programmes Dora The Explorer, Diego, Hi-5, Barney or Blues Clues. There are no deliberate attempts to use the word ‘Please’ to get the viewers to stay tuned to the programmes. All the characters used in the programmes manipulates the psychology of the mind with speech modulations, articulations, graphics, songs and drama to edutain (educate-entertain) the child. There is no need to use the word ‘Please’ to get them to dance, sing along or play pretend. The power to move the child does not rest on this one so called magic word.

Would you like to try some? Please??

YET, when a child forgets to use the word ‘Please’, they get a quick reminder to rephrase and repeat. It happens all the time to children. Let me highlight 2 things relating to the real life experiences between a child and the adult:

You don’t always get what you want even after using ‘please’. My daughter wants to watch television after dinner at 6 p.m. and has asked me permission. My response has been “No dear, you have homework to do and school in the morning.” She wants to drink coca cola with her McDonald’s meal, she doesn’t get it. I saw a 3 year old boy who struggled with his mother who refused to let him sip his apple juice before he takes a bite off this burger. He stared at his mother who talked down at him, “Say please first.”

You don’t earn your respect from a child just because you say please. Some children are just boisterous and need a lot of room to express themselves.

“I want to eat now,” says the boy.

“How do you say it?” asks the mother.

“May I eat now?” asks the boy.

“No how do you say it politely,” the mother asks.

“May I eat now please.”

“That is better.”

There is nothing wrong with ‘May I eat now?” The boy knows no difference between saying please and not saying it. However, adults are apt to stretch children’s psychological development so much so they become egocentric at teaching a child to use the word ‘please’ in his request for favours. The child who has been rejected once or twice whilst he has used the word ‘PLEASE’ can no longer understand why he should serve the selfish desire of his parent to feel respected before receiving a harmonious response.

I used to think ‘Please’ is a magic word. I think it is probably only a word that reconstructs the psychological freedom path the child is walking on. If the child asks, ‘May I eat now?’ in a soft, comfortable polite tone, he should already be rewarded for his effort to express his wish in proper correct sentence. Anything more to correct it, will only lead him to question its relevance and the paradox becomes greater and more confusing.

This is not deviance: it is a sort of deviation from the norm, which to us is the human person we want our kids to become. Patience, understanding and empathy help to reach out to a 3 year old who is constantly demonstrating zest for learning and experience. When we have the faith in him to grow at his own pace, he will calm down because he starts to feel he has the attention. It does not matter at this point what you have to do to help him listen to you. Our first step is calm ourselves down when our 3 year old toddler misbehave.

In a classroom setting, 3 year old kids have reportedly taken as long as 3 months to overcome separation anxieties and settle down for classes. Teachers have to literally carry the child to the mat to join the rest of his friends during circle time, and teachers do this repetitiously to demonstrate (not tell) the child, that is what is expected of him when we sing to the class “Everybody sit down sit down, just like me.”

Punishment or reward will not help a child to grow out of this phase. To him, he is just like us, a human being with the same potentials which he needs to use at his own will. We want him to be independent yet a deviant child shows his desire to be independent in the best way he can.

The simplest solution to deal with 3 year old kids who do not seem to behave, is to prepare a stress release corner. This is a retreat not an isolation chamber. Here the child gets to release his boredom and stress doing mindless activities like playdough, cutting, chopping, pressing or hitting on drums. Make use of recycled materials and do not leave sharp objects unattended. He should be allowed to use a pair of scissors and shown how to handle it too. A 10 minute lesson goes a long way in educating child the importance of handling a pair of scissors than an hour of nagging about who is to be blamed for not noticing the child is holding one in his hand.

Still trying to figure out how kids learn so well?

Test

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Written by: Annie Cook

Kids look at things differently.
A table does not have a top because we cannot see it
We think the legs of the table are the table;
we accept that not being able to see the table is not a big deal,
we see the legs of those who sit on chairs when they eat at the table,
and we are given our very own high chair too, so how could we complain?

The seat of the adult chair is too tall and uncomfortable
because our legs keep dangling in the air when we are seated;

The pencils and sharpeners are not stationery,
They are magic tools; with them our hands become useful
We can draw, scribble and make pictures,
We can tell others what we imagine.

Food we eat are not source of our physical growth and energy,
Running, jumping and walking are what make us energetic
and help us grow.

Books are not our main source of our intelligence
People and the environment are our teachers

We yearn to grow and become adults
because we want to be able to sit without our legs dangling in the air

We want to use the pen and all other stationery without
being told they are too sharp or we are too small to handle them properly
That include the scissors which we know so well,
will shape anything with a single cut. Desparate!

We have the freedom, but there is only thing that freedom cannot help us,
It cannot make us grow taller or bigger even if we will it.

We have to wait, the voice whispers in our ears, constant and angelic,
Oh no, we cannot wait for that to happen!
We have to try to be taller, so we try this trick: tip-toe,
Hey that works, and to add to that height,
we extend our hands to reach out,
Hey that works even better, we try even harder
The effort we take to feel taller is showing,
our body is stretched, our neck is stretched,
as far they can, and we tip-toe even more,
The end of our the fingertip is the highest point to us,
And at the highest point reached,
our face is a signature of joy and happiness,
that we have done it
Our eyes are fixed on the space higher than
than the highest point which our fingers have reached.

We stand tall before we are tall, and when all is done
our two feet feel the floor again,
but just for the moment, that we felt tall,
we could remember exactly how it worked.
The next time we want to feel tall again,
we know how, we know we can stand tall even before we are tall.

- Annie Cook

You really can’t do without the internet anymore, they are in your face all the time. For more information, go to “www.mydomain.com”. You are now expected to give away your email address when you register for your child’s education at school. No email? You just have to get one from a hotmail because the school teachers are no longer going to call you on your mobile phone; they’ll give you their email and website addresses and expect you to follow up on events at school. When you call the school for further information, they’ll ask you if they could send you a text message later. If it is not important, you will not receive a letter in the mail, because mailing costs time and money. You might have arrived here after searching for a solution to your problems as well. That is how the internet is for. You came searchng for solutions, you read about other people’s opinions about certain subjects which interest you, then you try to look for better solutions to perfect your day.

I used the internet when I was studying the Montessori programme; and I never wanted to see the computer ever again. Then I started to hear computer and internet jargons coming out of pre-school kids, words which teachers will not use at circle time. “Mum, did you get sms from dad.” “Dad, I want to invite my friends to my birthday party. Can we get their emails?”

Ok you get my point.

You have to get ahead of the kids. Before you even have a gmail account, your kid would have started socialising on websites to do what other kids are already doing and uploading videos.

“The hands are the intelligence of the mind.” Maria Montessori. The Absorbent Mind.

But the kids are not using much of their hands anymore; they learn to use their fingers for touch typing on the keyboard and remote controls. They prefer to know that when they hit the letter a, it appears automatically on the screen and never have to worry about how their ‘a’ looks like. When they type a word or sentence, it always come out in a straight row. Who needs the eraser and pencil? This is what kids do these days. They stop practising their skills at doing things with their hands. They want to write faster, quicker and learn ever more speedily because hey need to race off to play. They do their homework on the bed like they would when they play computer games or cuddle up on the sofa ten fingers on the PSP game machine.

People talk about how the way kids learn have changed and usually with a tinge of madness in their voices. “Kids learn so fast these days.” Then they would say things like, “I was not in school till I was 5 years old.” Or “I never had a computer at home but these kids have one in each room.”
So how do kids become so well trained in their heads to learn so fast?

Maria Montessori seemed to have all the answers because her work is now well known all over the world. I am going to try to explain to you in the best of my ability. In the meantime you have to read some of her works. Click here.