The Montessori approach to language and literacy development in early childhood is grounded in the belief that children learn best through hands-on, experiential learning. In a Montessori classroom, children are encouraged to explore language and literacy through a variety of activities and materials.
Montessori schools place a strong emphasis on developing literacy skills in young children, with the goal of creating confident, independent readers and writers, with a passion for the written and spoken word. By providing a dynamic and engaging learning environment, Montessori educators help children develop a love of reading and writing that will last a lifetime.
Table of Contents
- Language Learning in the First Plane of Development
- Oral Language
- Writing
- Reading
- Montessori and The Science of Reading
- Conclusion
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Language Learning in the First Plane of Development
The Absorbent Mind
During the First Plane of Development, which spans from birth to age six, children have an Absorbent Mind that allows them to effortlessly absorb the language spoken around them. They do not need to be explicitly taught grammar or syntax; rather, they subconsciously learn the rules of language through their natural interactions with their environment. Montessori educators take advantage of this developmental stage by providing children with a rich language environment that includes a variety of materials and activities designed to promote the development of oral language skills, even before a child starts to read or write.
The Sensitive Period for Language
Maria Montessori identified many “sensitive periods” within the First Plane of Development, during which children have a heightened sensitivity and interest in particular activities or concepts. The Sensitive Period for Language spans from birth to around age six.
During this time, children have an intense interest in language and are highly receptive to learning it. This period is characterized by a heightened ability to distinguish between different sounds and a natural inclination to imitate and communicate with others. During this period, children are particularly receptive to learning language and can easily acquire new vocabulary and grammar rules. Montessori language materials and activities are designed to take advantage of this sensitive period and provide children with opportunities to develop their language skills in an engaging way.
The Human Tendencies for Communication and Expression
Humans have natural tendencies for communication and expression, which are particularly evident in young children. Montessori believed that children have an innate desire to communicate and express themselves, and that this desire drives their language development during the first plane of development. By providing children with a rich language environment and opportunities for self-expression, Montessori educators help to facilitate and support their language development.
Oral Language
In the Montessori language curriculum, the development of oral language is the foundation for reading and writing. As soon as children enter the Montessori Primary classroom at the age of 2.5 to 3 years old, they are surrounded by rich, dynamic language. Children are encouraged to speak and listen in a supportive and nurturing environment, which helps to build their confidence and self-esteem. In the Montessori classroom, children engage in a wide range of activities that promote the development of oral language skills. These include sound games, storytelling, singing, poetry recitation, Grace and Courtesy lessons, and conversation.
Sound Games
Sound games in the Montessori classroom are interactive activities designed to help young children develop phonemic awareness and auditory discrimination skills. These games involve the exploration and recognition of different sounds in spoken language. Children listen attentively to identify and isolate sounds within words, enhancing their ability to distinguish phonetic elements. Sound games lay the foundation for reading and writing, fostering an early understanding of the connection between sounds and letters, which is crucial for literacy development in the Montessori approach.
Songs, Poems and Books
Songs, poems, and books foster a rich language environment and stimulate a love for literature and communication. Through songs and poems, children experience the rhythm, melody, and cadence of language, enhancing their phonological awareness and memory. Books, carefully selected to align with the child’s age and interests, encourage a passion for reading and storytelling. They provide opportunities for exploration, vocabulary expansion, and comprehension skills development. In a Montessori classroom, these literary elements are integrated into various lessons, enhancing language development and nurturing a lifelong love of language and literature.
Oral Storytelling
Oral storytelling fosters imaginative thinking and language development as children engage with rich narratives and vivid descriptions. Montessori educators tell real stories to children, helping them develop their understanding of the world around them and exposing them to stories with a beginning, middle and end.
Grace and Courtesy
Grace and Courtesy lessons instill respect, empathy, and social awareness, laying the foundation for positive relationships and conflict resolution skills among peers. Through modeling and practice, children learn the vocabulary for polite greetings, sharing, and cooperation, fostering a harmonious and inclusive classroom environment.
Enrichment of Vocabulary Activities
Through enrichment of vocabulary activities like naming objects in the environment, identifying qualities in the environment, and playing response games, children gain the vocabulary to talk about their observations and experiences in the classroom environment.
Writing
Preparing the Hand for Writing
Montessori education places a strong emphasis on the preparation of the hand for writing. From the moment they enter the classroom, children are introduced to a range of activities that help to develop their fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, from the button frame and pouring to sewing and pin-punching. Activities in the Practical Life and Sensorial areas help children develop control of movement, a sense of order, and the hand strength essential for writing. These activities also help children develop concentration, focus, and attention to detail, skills that will help them when they work on longer lessons in the Language area.
Practical Life activities
Practical Life activities such as pouring, polishing, scrubbing, and threading help develop fine motor skills and hand-eye coordination, laying a solid foundation for handwriting. By engaging in these purposeful tasks, children strengthen the muscles in their hands and fingers, enhancing their dexterity and control, which ultimately supports their ability to hold a pencil and write with ease.
Sensorial activities
Sensorial activities like tracing shapes from the Geometry Cabinet and pairing and grading Tactile Tablets refine children’s tactile perception and hand movements, which are essential for writing. Through these experiences, children develop a heightened awareness of shapes, textures, and spatial relationships, facilitating their ability to form and recognize letters with precision and confidence.
Metal Insets
The first time a child holds a pencil in the Primary classroom is in the Metal Inset work. This activity helps the child to develop hand strength and control, left-to-right tracking, and fine motor skills that include a tripod pencil grip, lightness of touch, evenness of pressure, continuity of line, and control of line.
“Thus we would use a kind of gymnastics to prepare the mechanisms of the hand. This preparation can be compared, in view of its goal, to the other, intellectual preparation for writing, achieved by means of the moveable alphabet. The mind and the hand are prepared separately for the conquest of written language and follow different roads to the same goal.”
– Maria Montessori, The Formation of Man
Montessori Materials for Writing
In Montessori education, writing is taught before reading because it allows children to express themselves and develop their language skills in a natural way. When children learn to write, they are able to express their thoughts and ideas in a concrete way, which helps to develop their language skills and prepares them for reading. Writing is also an easier mental process than reading. Writing requires children to know the sounds of the letters and put them together to form a word. Reading requires an extra step: children must know the sounds of letters, string them together to form a word, and attach meaning to that word, in order to understand an author’s intent.
Writing also helps children develop an understanding of the relationship between sounds and letters. By teaching writing first, children can begin to associate sounds with specific letters and learn to form letters correctly.
The Sandpaper Letters
Learning Letters
Learn how to present the Montessori sandpaper letters and corresponding sound games to develop phonemic awareness skills.
One of the foundational tools used in the Montessori environment to teach writing is the Sandpaper Letters. The sandpaper letters are wooden boards with sandpaper letters on the surface. Children trace the letters with their fingers, feeling the texture of the sandpaper as they learn to form the letters correctly. This tactile experience helps children develop muscle memory of the letter. They also absorb the visual form of the letter, as well as the sound of the letter, so they receive sensory input about the letter through three senses.
The Moveable Alphabet
The moveable alphabet is another essential material in the Montessori environment for teaching writing. The moveable alphabet is a set of wooden letters that children can use to create words and sentences. Children can move the letters around to create words, which helps them develop an understanding of the relationship between letters and sounds. They can begin working with this material before they’re able to read words, and before their hand is able to form the letters using a pencil.
“The exercises with the moveable alphabet place the whole language in motion. They provoke a real intellectual activity…These continuous exercises, therefore, by means of which both spoken and written words are built up, do not only prepare the way for writing, but for correct spelling as well.”
– Maria Montessori, The Formation of Man
Writing Stages
Children progress through several stages of writing in the Primary classroom, building on the skills and hand strength they have developed in other areas of the classroom.
Writing Sandpaper Letters on a chalkboard
Children begin by feeling and writing sandpaper letters on a plain chalkboard. This gives them a large surface on which to practice creating the shapes of the letters, and the impermanence of chalk allows them to feel comfortable with error.
Placement of letters on a line
Once children are comfortable writing letters, they receive a lesson on the placement of letters on a line. They learn to group lowercase letters based on whether they are “short” letters (such as a, e, o), whether they extend below the line (such as p, y, q), or extend above the line (such as f, l, d). This lesson is usually given with the wooden Moveable Alphabet letters and a rug or mat with horizontal lines, on which children can place the letters.
Writing letters on lined paper
After children have received a lesson on the placement of letters on a line, they begin to practice writing letters on lined paper. At first they use paper with wide lines, and then advance to paper with more narrow lines as their hand strength and control increases.
Capitals and Punctuation
Once children have experience with writing words and sentences on paper, they learn about capitals and punctuation. Children learn about the different types of punctuation and how to use them correctly. They also learn about capital letters and when to use them. This helps children develop their writing skills and prepares them for more advanced language work.
Reading
The Montessori approach to reading is unique in that it focuses on the development of a child’s total reading ability. This means children do not only learn how to read words, but also how to understand and appreciate what they are reading. The progression of “total reading” in Montessori language education is divided into three stages: mechanical, interpretation, and appreciation.
Phonetic Reading (Mechanical)
The mechanical, or “decoding,” strand of Total Reading begins with oral language, even before children learn to read. Activities that support this include sound games, and eventually the sandpaper letters and the moveable alphabet. This stage also includes phonetic reading, as it teaches children how to read words by sounding out each letter and blending them together. When they first begin to read, children sound out words phonetically. Children continue to work with a variety of materials, such as phonogram reading folders, and decodable books to learn phonetic sounds and recognize graphemes, to help them continue to decode past phonetic reading.
Phonetic Reading
This course shows you how to present the reading materials and includes all the printables needed to set up your reading area.
Object boxes
The first phonetic reading materials that children work with are the object boxes. Object Box 1 contains small objects that have simple consonant-vowel-consonant (CVC) names, such as a cow, pin, and net. Object Box 2 contains objects whose names include phonograms, such as fish, boat, and broom. Children practice matching the labels to the objects and experience reading for the first time.
Action cards
Action cards are another early learning activity in which children read one-word verbs, or “action” words, and then act them out. These verbs have simple constructions, such as jump, run, skip, and hop. By integrating reading with movement, children get a multi-sensory experience of reading.
Phonetic Books for Beginning Readers
When children begin reading, we offer them simple “decodable” books. Decodable books cater to emergent readers by presenting words that adhere to the phonetic rules they have learned so far. These books serve as valuable tools for practicing phonemic decoding and blending skills, gradually increasing in complexity to support the development of reading fluency and self-assurance. They allow children to build their confidence as readers and have the valuable experience of completing a book.
Beyond Phonetic Reading (Interpretation)
Once children have mastered mechanical reading, they move on to the second stage of total reading in Montessori language education: interpretation. This stage teaches children how to read for meaning, rather than just reading words. In this stage, children learn to recognize patterns in language, such as sentence structure and word order. They also learn to use context clues to understand the meaning of unfamiliar words. They read for information and for meaning, working with materials that include classified reading cards, action cards, and definition stages cards.
Puzzle words
Puzzle words are commonly encountered words that do not follow typical phonetic patterns and therefore cannot be easily decoded by sounding out individual phonemes. These words are often taught as whole units rather than through phonetic reading. Examples of puzzle words include high-frequency sight words like “the,” “was,” and “are.
Classified cards
Classified cards are sets of cards that represent a specific subject or theme. These cards feature pictures or illustrations along with corresponding labels or descriptions. Children learn the vocabulary for these card sets as an oral language activity before they learn to read. They then revisit this activity when they have learned to read, matching labels to the picture cards.
Phonogram reading folders
Phonogram reading folders offer children the keys to non-phonetic reading. Through this material, children learn that one phonogram can make multiple sounds – and the same sound can be created by different letter combinations. For example, the sound “ai” as in “rain” can also be spelled “ei” (vein), “ay” (play), and “a_e” (bake). This material allows children to progress from phonetic reading to non-phonetic reading.
Labeling the environment
In this activity, children read labels of materials and objects in the Montessori environment and place them around the classroom. Like action cards, this activity integrates reading with movement as they walk around the room. An added benefit of this activity is that other children can read the labels in passing when they see them around the classroom.
Application of Reading (Appreciation)
In the Montessori environment, reading is not just a skill to be learned; it is a tool to be used and enjoyed. In this stage, children learn to appreciate the beauty and complexity of language. In addition to reading for meaning, children develop the ability to interpret the tone, style and intention of what they read, so that language becomes a tool of expression, not just functional communication. They read literature from a variety of genres and cultures, and learn to analyze and interpret what they read.
Function of Words
Function of Words activities focus on helping students understand the roles and functions of different parts of speech within sentences. These activities involve exercises that teach children to identify and categorize words based on their grammatical functions, such as nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions. Children attach a color and a shape to each word based on its function: for example, a verb is represented by a large red circle, and a noun is represented by a large black triangle.
Word Study
Word Study cards help children understand various constructions and patterns in their language. Through this material, they learn about different ways of forming plurals, different ways of forming masculine and feminine endings, compound words, word families, suffixes, and prefixes.
Reading Analysis
Reading analysis activities help the child to think about how all of the functions of words work together to form meaning in full sentences. Like the function of words activities, they attach a color and shape to each word in a sentence, based on how it relates to the verb. They learn to diagram a sentence in a sensorial, interactive way, deepening their understanding of language and the parts of speech.
Montessori and The Science of Reading
Montessori literacy is a unique approach to teaching reading that is grounded in the science of reading. The Montessori method emphasizes a phonetic approach to reading that is based on the natural development of language. Children are taught to read by learning the sounds of letters and then blending those sounds together to form words.
Montessori and the Science of Reading
Explore concepts and find evidence based activities to teach skilled reading.
Phonics is the science of reading that focuses on the relationship between letters and sounds. In Montessori language education, phonics is taught through a variety of materials such as sandpaper letters, moveable alphabets, and sound games.
Research has shown that phonics instruction is an effective way to teach children how to read. A study conducted by the National Reading Panel found that explicit phonics instruction improves children’s reading comprehension, spelling, and word recognition skills.
In Montessori language education, phonics is taught in a systematic and sequential manner. Children are first introduced to the sounds of the letters, then they learn how to blend those sounds together to form words. This approach helps children to develop strong decoding skills, which are essential for reading fluency.
“The composition of words caused some real surprises. Children showed a great interest in the spoken language which they already possessed and sought to analyze it.”
– Maria Montessori, The Discovery of the Child
Conclusion
Language and literacy are a core part of the Montessori Primary curriculum. The Montessori approach emphasizes oral language development from an early age, building a strong foundation for learning to read and write. Montessori is also a phonics-based approach, which is in line with the science of reading.
Montessori education focuses on fostering a love for language and literature in children. This approach not only helps children to become proficient readers but also lays a foundation for lifelong learning.
Gabrielle Kotkov is an AMI-trained 3-6 Montessorian and educational consultant. She has a Master's Degree in Child Studies and is certified in TESOL (Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages). She is particularly interested in the intersection between Montessori education and multilingualism, which led her to create the Multilingual Montessori website and podcast. Gabrielle has taught in schools in NYC, Sicily, London, and Austin, and is currently on the teaching faculty of the West Side Montessori School Teacher Education Program, an AMS training center in NYC.