Maria Montessori created self-correcting card materials for children to use independently to understand the function of sounds (phonics), the meaning of words (vocabulary and word study), and the function of words (mechanics, grammar, and sentence analysis). What is amazing is that she did this in Italian over a century ago, and the Montessori method of presenting language concepts works beautifully in all cultures around the world where it is presented.
For this blog post, I will focus on phonics, word study, and grammar. A buzzword in education for the past twenty years or so has been “phonemic awareness”, the ability to hear, isolate, blend, and replicate sounds and sound combinations. Since one of the tenets of Montessori education is the presentation of concepts in their most concrete form, phonics are presented as “the building blocks of language”.
For the past several years – both at the private Montessori school where I previously worked and in my current Montessori-hybrid charter environment – I have had great success with weekly “sound games” which introduce the concepts which are also present in Montessori language materials, such as the amazing collection of phonics drawers made by Waseca. This material is also consistent with the Orton-Gillingham method in its application for children with dyslexia, which often occurs undiagnosed at the 6-9 age, and is also helpful for children of all abilities.
What is a “sound game”? I have introduced this lesson mainly as a brainstorming session with students about the sounds we hear, the tongue placements and breathing associated with sounds, and whether we consider those sounds vowels or consonants. As children, most current adults did not learn how to be “phonemically aware”; instead, we simple memorized which letters were vowels and which were consonants. Unfortunately, we were taught incorrectly.
Vowels and consonants are sounds; letters are pictographs associated with sounds. The word “vowel” is Latin for “vocalize”, and the word “consonant” is Latin for “with sound”. This is why vowels are sounds made with an open mouth, and consonants are sounds which involve an ejection of air or vibration. Along with tongue placement (which is most notably used in speech therapy), Montessori children understand by touch, visual input, and sound what kind of phoneme they are making or hearing.
Sometimes in “sound games”, we make a chart with three columns for beginning, middle, and end placement of the sound in a word. In the past, as a primary extension, I have used a ball of yarn passed across a circle of our community to connect all these sounds together; I started and ended the circle, and at the end, we lifted and released our yarn to make a crazy shape. Currently, I ask children to offer a word with the sound in it, identify its location (beginning, middle, or end) in the word, and challenge the child to use the word with the sound in a sentence. This primary extension challenges children to understand, use, and create meaning from sounds. A secondary extension might be making a chart of their own words the following week, as a way of measuring memory of the lesson and continued application.
Maria Montessori’s phonics materials, which are often used first in 3-6 year-old classrooms, are integral to many 6-9 year-old’s confidence with both writing and the decoding process involved in reading. These materials have phonemes such as short vowels in one color (blue, to match the vowel color of the Movable Alphabet used in 3-6) with other letters in words in black. With consonant blends, the same two letters will be in red with other letters in black.
Primary phonics card materials allow children to match vocabulary with an image card, while elementary phonics card materials allow children to decode as many as ten different words with a shared phoneme. After being introduced to the materials, children feel confident working independently or sometimes collaboratively with a peer. They read the words aloud to an adult, and sometimes they will challenge themselves in a self-selected manner in order to ingrain the vocabulary more deeply.
Word study encompasses many different functions of language, from syllabication to synonyms to rhyming words to homographs. Children study root words with prefixes, root words with suffixes, and compound words. The comprehensive Word Study Skyscraper made by Montessori Research and Development contains 5,000 matching cards, with each concept including up to ten drawers each for multiple practice.
This Montessori material encourages children to broaden and deepen their sense of the English language, especially with the use of reference materials such as a children’s illustrated dictionary and thesaurus. Children may also challenge themselves in a self-selected manner by writing sentences or sets of words.
Finally, Montessori grammar is a beautiful endeavor in storytelling that Maria Montessori designed with her ever-present eye for detail. Each of the nine grammar symbols – noun, verb, article, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction, and interjection – has its own color, shape, and story. For example, the story of the noun is about one of the biggest things on Earth – the Great Pyramid of Giza. The story of the verb follows the exciting adventures of a red sphere, which most children see (and treat!) as a ball. With the exception of the article and adjective – which, together with the noun, are introduced as the Noun Family story – each symbol has its own impressionistic key experience. A miniature environment such as a farm is often used in a Montessori 3-6 or 6-9 classroom as a physical place for children to make meaning with parts of speech.
Just as Montessori children come to recall the color coding of the bead cabinet and the stamp game, they enjoy remembering the shapes and colors of the grammar symbols, eventually coding them in written form on paper using a grammar stencil. (Again, Waseca makes a great one that is accessible for small hands.) Children get creative and have fun while learning, making connections and discoveries as they construct meaning from the world around them.
The children featured here are reacting to eating a slice of grapefruit, as part of our Noun Family lesson. One offered this sentence: The sour grapefruit is disgusting.
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