Sensory learning and experiences: the child uses all five senses - touch, taste, smell, sight, and hearing - to understand and absorb information about his or her environment. The absorbent mind: the mind soaks up information like a sponge. MontessoriMom uses the following chart (cited by permission):
There are many descriptions of the sensitive periods and their ages. More importantly, she believed, adults should observe the behavior and activities of children to discover what sensitive periods they are in. However, in her lectures to teacher trainees she set out several periods with the approximate ages to which they applied. Montessori was not very specific in her published works about the precise number, description, or timing of these sensitive periods. The child must then be taught the ability, resulting in expenditure of conscious effort, and not producing results as great as could be produced if the sensitive period had been taken advantage of. Once the sensitive period for a particular ability is past, the development of the brain has progressed past the point at which information can be simply absorbed. She describes these as "sensitive periods", a phrase coined by de Vries during his studies on animals.Īccording to Montessori, during a sensitive period it is very easy for children to acquire certain abilities, such as language, discrimination of sensory stimuli, and mental modeling of the environment. Montessori observed several overlapping periods during which the child is particularly sensitive to certain types of stimuli or interactions. She felt this was especially true during the first few years of life, from birth (or before) to the time of essentially complete development of the brain, about age 6 or 7. Drawing on the work of de Vries, she attributed these behaviors to the development of specific areas of the human brain, which she called nebulae.
Sensitive perios montessori series#
Montessori believed that every human being goes through a series of quantum leaps in learning during the pre-school years. Sensitive periods is a term coined by the Dutch geneticist Hugo de Vries and adopted by the Italian educator Maria Montessori to refer to important periods of childhood development.
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