Montessori Metal Insets, Writing, Reading
Montessori's Writing Road to Reading
As you can see from the photo, this child is absorbed in his metal inset work, so it is the correct work for him now. He also needs the work because we can see that he is still developing his skills making the lines.
His excellent teachers at Morgan Creek Montessori gave him the correct material that let him develop good handwriting. Many schools make the mistake of introducing tracing and writing material with the wrong type of implement and material. In that case, the child develops the HABIT of bad handwriting. This is very, very hard to correct. And there is no need to create the bad habit in the first place.
You know, it was very hard for me to find a photo online of correct metal inset use, so kudos to this Canadian school! The internet is full of incorrect presentations and metal inset use. Who knew?
Whenever schools seek me out for consulting, it is usually because something has gone wrong. The teachers complain that their students have all these problems. But it is always due to a teacher making a mistake in the beginning that created a problem later on.
It is easy enough to avoid these mistakes: Follow the page order within each album.
Note that for Practical Life and the Science work, the page order is not set, so you can use your judgement.
History
100 years ago in the US, everyone studied several foreign languages before they graduated from high school: Latin, Greek, French, German, and sometimes Spanish.
My mother’s first classroom had vocabulary and card work in these five languages!
For people educated in those days, the writing road to reading was obvious: You learn to read a foreign language by writing the words, saying them, and then reading them in context.
Now, I find that many teachers in the US are puzzled by the use of writing to read, not understanding why it is important. Finally I realized that this is due to the lack of foreign language mastery.
Most people outside the US have mastered a foreign language, frequently more than one, so the idea of writing words as a process of learning them is natural and intuitive.
Suggestions
Join your child in study!
I attached Chinese cards below.
Why Chinese? It became one of our school’s foreign languages after a friend of ours became badly brain damaged after a bike accident. He was Chinese-American, but his family had come to the US over 200 years ago! So no one in his family knew Chinese. When his college offered Chinese, he took a course.
After the bike accident, he could not speak, read, or write, so no one could tell what was happening in his brain, and he couldn’t communicate at all. BUT he started to speak in his Chinese 101 words from college! Fortunately, the parents recognized the sounds, and they found a Chinese speaker to communicate with him. They discovered that his thought processes were intact, albeit with much confusion, and he was in much pain. Plus, he had a horrible headache that he recognized as caffeine withdrawal!!! He woke begging for a coffee.
His brain was never able to access the English language part of the grey matter. Finally, he moved to China, studied more Chinese frantically, got a job, and got married. He can now only speak a little, heavily accented English like a child. His parents began studying Chinese, so they could speak to him and their grandchildren.
I found his story interesting and terrifying. If he hadn’t taken that college class, he would have had no language at all. No life, no job, no wife, no children.
The neurologists think his story is due to the fact that Chinese uses both parts of the brain due to the tones and the nature of the written language.
Many children who have dyslexia find that they can easily learn character-based languages such as Japanese and Chinese. I know one student who decided to attend high school in Japan because his reading in English was so terrible.
Brains are mysterious and fascinating!
This is a fascinating post. I am glad the two people you mentioned found a way to do well even with their issues. It is encouraging.