Chapter 7 - The vital years

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The vital years	261

Francisco - a New Zealand television crew, videotaping the world's best learning ideas, found a Montessori center catering to America's poorest working families, Mexican fruit and vegetable pickers.40 Both parents work the fields from 4:30 or 5:00 each morning - for a family income of around $7,000 a year.
  Yet their children are benefiting from preschool education that ranks with the top in the world. Their center is one of 18 set up as a research experiment by the California-based Foundation Center for Phenomenological Research*. In the grounds of the French Camp center you'll see migrant youngsters dancing, singing and playing. Inside you'll see them engrossed in a wide variety of activities adapted from Montessori's original ideas.
  They sit in child-sized chairs, at child-sized tables, use tools and implements specially designed for small hands. They also learn advanced mathematics the Montessori way, and are absorbed in it, using wooden rods of different lengths and colors to do decimals and numbers up to 2,000.
  Among many other innovations, Montessori pioneered cut-out sandpaper letters so infants could learn by touch as well as sight. And at French Camp you'll find a full range of similar sensory experiences. Each room has a variety of live animals and fish that help the learning process. Well-trained parents are always on hand to assist, but overall the youngsters are encouraged to be self-learners.
  Says one of the Foundation's organizers, Antonia Lopez: "The major job of the adult is to provide the children with as many opportunities in all of their areas, whether it's cultural, or science, art, music, mathematics or language - to provide as many opportunities that are age-appropriate and sequentially developed."41 Something to eat is served every two hours, with each meal a lesson in diet and nutrition: low-fat soups, whole-wheat tortillas instead of white-flour tortillas. Children set the tables as they learn to count the spoons and forks and plates. Each meal is a cultural delight.
  And it doesn't stop with nutrition. All family members - male, female, siblings and children - get a physical examination each year.

* Like so many effective pioneering ventures, lack of finance has since forced the Foundation Center to close many of its preschool centers, including the one visited at French Camp. Some have been taken over by other groups. And in mid-1999 the Foundation Center was building four new centers in Sacramento: based on the same principles outlined here.

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