The Montessori Elementary Material The Advanced Montessori Method

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[Transcriber's Notes: Bold text is surrounded by =equal signs= and
italic text by _underscores_. Superscripted text will be precede by a ^
and surrounded by {braces}.

Two symbols were used to show stressed and unstressed syllables. These
have been represented by U and --.]


THE MONTESSORI ELEMENTARY MATERIAL

[Illustration: The first Montessori Elementary Class in America, opened
in Rivington Street, New York, May, 1916.]




_THE ADVANCED MONTESSORI METHOD_

THE MONTESSORI ELEMENTARY MATERIAL

BY

MARIA MONTESSORI

    AUTHOR OF "THE MONTESSORI METHOD," "PEDAGOGICAL
    ANTHROPOLOGY," ETC.

    TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY
    ARTHUR LIVINGSTON
    ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ITALIAN AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY

    _WITH FORTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
    AND WITH NUMEROUS DIAGRAMS_

[Illustration]

    NEW YORK
    FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
    PUBLISHERS




    _Copyright, 1917, by_
    FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY

    _All rights reserved, including that of translation into
    foreign languages._




ACKNOWLEDGMENT


The patent rights in the Montessori apparatus and material are
controlled, in the United States and Canada, by The House of Childhood,
Inc., 16 Horatio Street, New York. The publishers are indebted to them
for the photographs showing the Grammar Boxes.




TRANSLATOR'S NOTE


So far as Dr. Montessori's experiments contain the affirmation of a new
doctrine and the illustration of a new method in regard to the teaching
of Grammar, Reading and Metrics, the following pages are, we hope, a
faithful rendition of her work. But it is only in these respects that
the chapters devoted to these subjects are to be considered a
translation. It will be observed that Dr. Montessori's text is not only
a theoretical treatise but also an actual text-book for the teaching of
Italian grammar, Italian reading and Italian metrics to young pupils.
Her exercises constitute a rigidly "tested" material: her Italian word
lists are lists which, in actual practise, have accomplished their
purpose; her grammatical categories with their relative illustration are
those actually mastered by her Italian students; her reading selections
and her metrical analyses are those which, from an offering doubtless
far more extensive, actually survived the experiment of use in class.

It is obvious that no such value can be claimed for any "translation" of
the original material. The categories of Italian grammar are not exactly
the categories of English grammar. The morphology and, to a certain
extent, the syntax of the various parts of speech differ in the two
languages. The immediate result is that the Montessori material offers
much that is inapplicable and fails to touch on much that is essential
to the teaching of English grammar. The nature and extent of the
difficulties thus arising are more fully set forth in connection with
specific cases in our text. Suffice it here to indicate that the
English material offered below is but approximately "experimental,"
approximately scientific. The constitution of a definitive Montessori
material for English grammar and the definitive manner and order of its
presentment must await the results of experiments in actual use. For the
clearer orientation of such eventual experiments we offer, even for
those parts of Italian grammar which bear no relation to English, a
virtually complete translation of the original text; venturing meanwhile
the suggestion that such studies as Dr. Montessori's treatise on the
teaching of Italian noun and adjective inflections--entirely foreign to
English--may prove valuable to all teachers of modern languages. While
it might seem desirable to isolate such superfluous material from the
"English grammar" given below, we decided to retain the relative
paragraphs in their actual position in the Italian work, in order to
preserve the literal integrity of the original method. Among our
additions to the text we may cite the exercises on the possessive
pronouns--identified by Dr. Montessori with the possessive
adjectives--the interrogatives and the comparison of adjectives and
adverbs.

Even where, as regards morphology, a reasonably close adaptation of the
Italian material to English uses has been possible, it by no means
follows that the pedagogical problems involved remain the same. The
teaching of the relative pronoun, for instance, is far more complicated
in English than in Italian; in the sense that the steps to be taken by
the child are for English more numerous and of a higher order. Likewise
for the verb, if Italian is more difficult as regards variety of forms,
it is much more simple as regards negation, interrogation and
progressive action.