Chapter 7 - The vital years

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The vital years	263

  Those who criticize Glenn Doman's early reading program would probably gasp with amazement when they hear that French Camp children are writing fluently before they are five. Says Lopez: "Montessori tells us that children at about four and a half literally seem to explode into writing. Now that's the official 'I can-write-a-sentence-and-a-word' version of writing. But our children are really being introduced to writing and to reading much earlier. Even as young as two and a half, they're being introduced to pre-writing experiences: they're doing things left to right, top to bottom; learning relationships. And they're obviously exposed to rhymes and story-telling and all kinds of talking - so they're ready to explode into writing well before they are five."
  It's perhaps significant that both Montessori's and Doman's initial research began with youngsters who were severely brain-damaged - and they then realized that these children, after multi-sensory stimulation, were often performing much better than "normal" children.
  Montessori set out to fashion materials and experiences from which even "intellectually handicapped" youngsters could easily learn to read, write, paint and count before they went to school. She succeeded brilliantly; her brain-damaged pupils passed standard test after test.42
  Under the Montessori method, however, a small child is not "taught" writing; she is exposed to specific concrete experiences that enable her to develop the "motor" and other skills that lead to the self-discovery of writing. Montessori specialist Pauline Pertab, of Auckland, New Zealand, explains: "As early as two-and-a-half years of age, a child will be encouraged to pour water and do polishing, developing hand and eye coordination; to paint and draw, developing pencil control; and later to work with shapes and patterns, tracing the inside and outside of stencils and to work with sand-paper-covered letters about nine centimetres in depth - three to four inches - to get the feel of shapes." 43 The "explosion" occurs when a youngster discovers, by himself, that he can write.
  As Maria Montessori was proving in the early 1900s, the key to early childhood deprivation lies overwhelmingly in providing a total supportive environment for all children to develop their own talents.
  She demonstrated conclusively that if children can grow up in an environment structured to encourage their natural, sequential development, they will "explode" into learning: they will become self-motivated, self-learners, with the confidence to tackle any problem as it arises in life.

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