Every day is exciting in a classroom with 3 to 6 year olds, but none is more exciting when one of the children reads for the first time. Watching as they decode each of the sounds, stringing them together and then figuring out the message is an inspiring privilege. Recently in the class we have had an entire group of children who have made the jump from building words to reading them. This results in a frenzy of requests around whose turn it is to read to one of the adults in the room and it is exciting to see the classroom working so well.
There are a few elements you may have noticed in the description above that are worth exploring a little more, first is the frenzy of requests and the second is the idea that children build words before reading them.
The desire of the children to do their work is one indicator of a classroom that is working well. It is not something that occurs 100% of the time with 100% of the children but if it is not happening it is one of the most significant tasks of the Montessori teacher to figure out how to create an environment for each student that unleashes their desire to learn. This does vary from child to child and often includes very individual motivations such as a modeling one of their peers or siblings or, in the case of reading, to get to read a favourite story. For my own son one of his motivations was the read more stories of knights and castles. So again the theme of following the child to find areas they want to explore is key. In our classroom there is currently a number children who do want to model their peers (not in an envious or jealous way, but, because reading is exciting). That excitement is another area that teachers and parents can contribute to. For instance, in our classroom you don’t “have to do math and language and culture” every day. You only “get to do one math and language and culture” until you have done a variety of work. This is not strictly the same idea with a better marketing department: The learning and work in the classroom truly is exciting to them and taking away the assumption that school is unpleasant allows that to shine through. Parents, in particular those new to child centered learning such as Montessori, most often ask “how do you get the children to do work they don’t like” and reversing the idea to the concept that learning is really what comes natural and can be seen as exciting is one significant part of the answer to that question.
While we do avoid the myth of school work as unpleasant we don’t avoid the concept of work being challenging or significant, though we are as we have discussed in other posts careful around the concept of praise. By recognizing the task the child can begin feel the internal sense of accomplishment. The phrase “those are such big words, you are such a good reader” tends to emphasize the difficulty accomplishing and external acknowledgement for accomplishments so we tend to use language more like “being able to read is exciting, do you like being able to figure out the stories?”.
In terms of challenging work that is a constant balance for each child, to ensure they have the tools to be successful for the next step in the process while ensuring interest is maintained: the tasks should remain both significant and attainable. In terms of reading and word building this is the second significant implication I want to explore from the experience of reading in our classroom: The inversion of “writing” and “reading”. Outward verbal communication (in education jargon known as “expressive language”) and inward verbal understanding (in education jargon known as “receptive language”) are useful to consider separately, but, they are not truly separate. For instance, much of an infant’s ability to understand language comes from the process of creating their own noise, initially babbling then seeing and hearing feedback and moving to creating the sounds they hear and through that process beginning to attach meaning to the words. It would be difficult to learn language without the opportunity to produce language and hear feedback. This observation on verbal language underlies the Montessori approach to written language that begins with building words from the sounds of the letters. This process takes advantage of the fact that the children typically already have verbal language so the process of attaching meaning to words is much simpler than an infant learning to talk. However, the feedback process involved in building words is foundational to reading as it assists with recognizing a word by reconstructing it during early reading which initially involves phonetically sounding it out in this process. This same process also explains the unusual habit of teaching letter sounds rather than letter names as it becomes easier to directly produce words from the letter sounds rather than having the extra step relating sound and letter name.
All the children are working on important activities in the classroom and this fall so far has been very exciting for many of the children who have passed the very visible milestone of beginning to read. I hope that this post has explained a little more about how that excitement happens and the process we use in allowing children to explore language. We have been very excited to see them enjoying their success.
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