Maria Montessori Language Arts Rationale Essay Example | Topics and Well Written Essays - 750 words

Maria Montessori Language Arts Rationale - Essay Example A child learns to listen by hearing the various sounds that the adults around him and also learns to speak by imitating the various sounds that the adults make around him.as Maria Montessori said: There are three main areas where children are prepared for reading and writing. The first is physical skills where a child learns to balance using their hands and coordination of the hand and the eye works. The child also learns to concentrate and focus on the practical issues of life, recognizing sizes and shapes, working with paints, crayons, pencils and practice in talking. The second skill that a child learns is the mental skills where the child learns to absorb and how to use language and how to learn the sounds that each letter of the alphabet makes. This can be made easy by playing games to break up words into sounds (Montessori, 2010). The third skills are the social skills where people living in homes sit down and have conversations instead of watching the television or using the computer to learn language. A directress would know that a child is ready to learn a sound if they try to repeat what has been said to them by an adult around them. The child will also be making sounds on their own that they have heard before. Sounds are taught to children by repeating the sounds over and over until the child is able to differentiate it from other sounds. In learning the different sounds, he child is taught the various sounds of the different letters of the alphabet. There are different rules for the letters and children are very receptive towards rules. Therefore, they are first taught the rules than the different sounds of the letters of the alphabet (Montessori, 1909). The child is taught the phonetic words first and once they have mastered the phonetic part of the alphabets, they are next taught the non-phonetic part of the language where there are no rules whatsoever. A child learns to blend sounds by learning the individual