Montessori from the Start: The Child at Home, from Birth to Age Three

On the other hand, being out-of-doors in natural settings gives infants and young children hands-on experiences that are concrete and reality based.

All of these behavioral tendencies—exploration, orientation, order, abstraction, imagination, manipulation, exactness, repetition, control of error, perfection, and communication—operate throughout our lives. However, they manifest themselves differently as we grow older.

to observe is to think like a “scientist”: to be completely open to what you are seeing with no preconceived ideas in mind.

role of emotion in establishing memory is the reason we remember what is interesting to us during the process of learning in school and readily forget what is boring, no matter how thoroughly memorized for the moment the latter material might be.

Hence, the first mobile portrays flat, black-and-white geometric shapes and reflected light from a glass sphere. Subsequent ones are introduced in ordered sequence: three octahedrons of colored metallic paper, ideally each in a primary color; five Styrofoam balls covered with embroidery thread in gradations of the same color and hung in ascending o

We need to be able to give our full attention and energies to the new task at hand: assisting the development of a new self in the first days of life.

The parents’ challenge is to establish a home environment that encourages the development of concentration from the child’s infancy and that supports flow experiences for all family members.

These attractive materials have special appeal to the precision of the hand and introduce the child to every aspect of our cultural heritage:

Therefore we want to stress again: repetition is key to the learning process at all ages. Rotation, not substitution, is the answer to the process of habituation to objects.