THE MONTESSORIELEMENTARY MATERIAL
THE MONTESSORI
ELEMENTARY MATERIAL
MARIA MONTESSORI
AUTHOR OF "THE MONTESSORI METHOD," "PEDAGOGICAL
ANTHROPOLOGY," ETC.
TRANSLATED FROM THE ITALIAN BY
ARTHUR LIVINGSTON
ASSOCIATE PROFESSOR OF ITALIAN AT COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY
WITH FORTY-FOUR ILLUSTRATIONS FROM PHOTOGRAPHS
AND WITH NUMEROUS DIAGRAMS
FREDERICK A. STOKES COMPANY
PUBLISHERS
Frederick A. Stokes Company
All rights reserved, including that of translation into
foreign languages.
ACKNOWLEDGMENT
The patent rights in the Montessori apparatusand material are controlled, in the United Statesand Canada, by The House of Childhood, Inc., 16Horatio Street, New York. The publishers areindebted to them for the photographs showing theGrammar Boxes.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
So far as Dr. Montessori's experiments contain the affirmationof a new doctrine and the illustration of a newmethod in regard to the teaching of Grammar, Readingand Metrics, the following pages are, we hope, a faithfulrendition of her work. But it is only in these respects thatthe chapters devoted to these subjects are to be considereda translation. It will be observed that Dr. Montessori'stext is not only a theoretical treatise but also an actualtext-book for the teaching of Italian grammar, Italian readingand Italian metrics to young pupils. Her exercisesconstitute a rigidly "tested" material: her Italian wordlists are lists which, in actual practise, have accomplishedtheir purpose; her grammatical categories with their relativeillustration are those actually mastered by her Italianstudents; her reading selections and her metrical analysesare those which, from an offering doubtless far more extensive,actually survived the experiment of use in class.
It is obvious that no such value can be claimed for any"translation" of the original material. The categories ofItalian grammar are not exactly the categories of Englishgrammar. The morphology and, to a certain extent, thesyntax of the various parts of speech differ in the two languages.The immediate result is that the Montessori materialoffers much that is inapplicable and fails to touch onmuch that is essential to the teaching of English grammar.The nature and