First Step Montessori

The “Montessori method” developed from experimental research that Dr. Maria Montessori conducted with disabled and mentally challenged children in the early 1900s. She began this research using the basic idea ofscientific education that was developed and employed in the 1800s with special needs children by French physicians Jean Itard and Edouard Seguin. A student and associate of Itard, Seguin extended Itard’s initial idea of observing children in their natural, free activity by adding a series of exercises with specially designed self-teaching materials. Based on Dr. Montessori’s success using this same approach in her initial research with disabled and physically challenged children, she began to look for an opportunity to study how it might be applied to benefit the education of more ordinary children as well.

In 1906, the opportunity presented itself when Montessori was asked to establish a day-care center for young children (2–6) in a low-income housing area of Rome’s San Lorenzo district. She opened the center in 1907, calling it a Children’s House,and began observing the children in the scientific manner indicated before by Seguin. In this process, Dr. Montessori soon discovered that the children responded to the materials with a deep concentration that resulted in a fundamental shift in their way of being, changing from the ordinary behavior of fantasy, inattention, and disorder, to a state of profound peace, calm and order within their environment. Observing this change occurring with all the children in her environment, she concluded that she had discovered the child’s true normal nature. Later, Dr. Montessori referred to this change as normalization and the new emerging children as normalized.