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12 JANUARY 2009
NO 1386
Reading
Experience has taught me to make a clear distinction between reading and writing, and it has shown me that the two acts need not be absolutely contemporaneous. Our experience, however, has been that writing precedes reading although this is contrary to what is commonly held. I do not call it reading when a child attempts to verify a word he has written, that is, when he retranslates the symbols into sounds since he already knows the word, having repeated it many times to himself as he was writing.
By reading I mean the interpretation of an idea by means of graphic symbols.
A child who has not heard a word spoken but who recognizes it when he sees it put together on a table in movable letters and knows what it means, that it is the name of a child, a city, an object, and so forth, really reads.
The reason for this is that what is read in writing corresponds to what is heard in speech and is a means of understanding others.
A child does not read until he receives ideas from the written word.
We can say that writing, as we have described it, is an act in which the psycho-motor mechanisms prevail. In reading, however, we are engaged in purely intellectual work; but it should be evident that our method for teaching writing prepares the way for reading so that the difficulties are almost unnoticeable. Actually, writing prepares a child for interpreting mechanically the combined sounds of the letters which compose the word which he sees written. In other words, a child can read the sounds of the words. One can notice the fact that when a child composes words from a movable alphabet or when he writes, he has time to think of the symbols which he must pick out or draw. Writing a word takes a much longer time than reading it.
When a child who can write is confronted with a word which he has to read and interpret, he is silent for some time and usually reads the component sounds as slowly as if he were writing them. The sense of the word, on the other hand, is grasped when it is pronounced rapidly and with necessary intonation. Now, in order to inflect it properly, a child must recognize the word, that is, the idea which it represents. A higher intellectual activity must therefore brought into play.
Accordingly, I proceed in the following way for practice in reading and what I am going to describe is a substitute for the old spelling book. I prepare pieces of ordinary writing paper upon each of which is written in cursive script one-fourth of an inch high a well-known word that has been frequently pronounced by the children and represents objects that are either present or well-known, for example, mamma. If a word refers to a present object, I place it under the child's eye to assist him in interpreting the writing. Here I may note that most of these objects are toys. The Children's Houses possess not only a miniature kitchen, kitchen utensils, balls, and dolls, as I have already had occasion to note, but also cupboards, couches, and beds, that is, all the necessary furniture for a doll's house. There are also cottages, trees, flocks of sheep, papier-mache animals, celluloid ducks and geese that will float on water, boats with sailors, soldiers, wind-up trains, country estates, stables, cattle in spacious enclosures, and so forth. For one house in Rome an artist gave me beautiful porcelain fruit.
If writing serves to correct, or rather, to direct and perfectt the mechanism of speech in the child, reading assists in development of ideas and language. In brief, writing helps child physiologically and reading helps him socially.
MARIA MONTESSORI
Montessori, M. (1967). The Discovery of the Child. New York. Ballantine Books. pp. 229-230.
