Language - Montessori Materials

There are a lot of differences between the materials being used in the regular Danish folkeskole and the materials developed especially for Montessori schools. During the month that I’ve been studying in Ireland I’ve been following a material class, concerning the language materials used for pupils of the age from 6-9, which I found very interesting.

Most of the materials for this age are for teaching the different parts of speech are colour-coded, so nouns have the colour black, verbs have red, adjectives have blue etc. Later on they also get shapes, as they also do in Denmark when we learn to put commas in the sentences, but not the same ones as in Denmark.

When the pupils start in the class 6-9 they have already gone through the most basic parts nouns, verbs and adjectives, so they know what parts of speech is all about.

They start out by learning about the noun. There are some noun boxes full of small laminated notes. In the first box there are laminated notes (black, of course), each with one noun on it.  This is for the children to learn what nouns are.

The second box has the headings of masculine and feminine on white notes and then nouns on black notes. Here the pupils have to divide the nouns into sexes.

The third box contains the headings singular and plural so the children can learn that.

When the nouns are all done the pupils go over to the verb box, which works in the same way but contains the tenses past, present and future.

The boxes go on like this and whenever you finish one group of words you put one of those words in a sentence. It’s really interesting that you can see the sentences building up. Ex. When the pupils learn the preposition there are also 2 small figures, a cat and a horse, in the box. The pupils are asked to put down the two figures on the table. Then they have to put 2 nouns (the same two as the figures), 2 articles and 1 verb (in form  of the laminated notes). The sentence could become “A horse is the cat”, which would make no sense to the pupil, so they could see that the preposition is needed. So if the figure of the horse is behind the figure of the cat the preposition would be “behind”. Of course the pupils could build on the sentence with adjectives if they want to.
I think this is a really good method as the pupil is allowed to see the sentence being built up, and he is also allowed to build it up himself, which is really good for the learning process!

The greatest goal for a Montessori teacher is to teach her pupils to be independent, so when introducing a new material, she always starts out showing the pupils where to find the material is to be found. The goal is to make the pupils interested in the materials, so that they will work with them independently.

I really like these materials as they are very tactile and it beats writing and erasing several times in a booklet.