Sensitive period of order

Maria Montessori says children as young as 18 months have a strong sense of order. This sensitivity to order starts at around 18 months and is at its peak between then and 2.5 years. There exists a very fervent need for established routines and any kind of disorder may disturb a child.

I witnessed such a thing with a child a few days ago. I normally pick up the children of my school and this boy is the first child to get into my bus. Everyday this child sits in the front middle seat of the bus but on this particular day I decided to make him sit on the second row seat as I had to pick up the other teacher too. But as I made him go behind, he showed displeasure and so I let him sit in the same place. But then he still kept crying. I tried talking to him, distracting him but nothing worked. He wasnt looking at me and this perplexed me because he never did that before. Then suddenly I remembered that I had tied up my hair that day, so I opened up my hair and then made him look at me. He turned and then stared for a bit and stopped crying that very instant. It was amazing. After 5 more minutes he was back to his cheerful normal self and I knew what Montessori said was true!

"Order is one of the needs of life which, when it is satisfied, produces real happiness” - Dr Maria Montessori

Perseverance is the key

Yesterday my perseverance with child A paid off. Child A is interested in activities where there is extensive work and while doing the work he enjoys it and concentrates on it but when the work is done, he feels lazy to pick up the carefully laid out material and put it back in its place. I've been asking him to put back his stuff and reasoning with him for a long time now. I decided to be firm about the rule and not be angry or unhappy.
Yesterday I wished he would work with the knobless cylinders and pointed them out to him but he was disinterested. So I took a mat myself and tried out a variation of the cylinders myself. After sometime when he had satisfied himself with the activities he had planned to do, he too thought he's work with the knobless cylinders and as usual tried an extensive variation. He brought 4 mats and brought the 4 knobless cylinders one by one to each mat and carefully and slowly built a tower of each on their individual mats.

Then he admired his work and told us to leave it as it is. I just observed and didnt comment. Later after 30 minutes, he went and put back all the knobless cylinders back in their boxes without toppling any tower and without making a mess. He then kept the boxes one by one and rolled all the 4 mats and kept them back himself. I was happy beyond words!
Lesson I learnt is to give the child time and persevere until it strikes him that he has to do it himself!

Patience the Montessori way

When children enter the school, they start planning what to do right at the door step. Inspite of being very eager to start off with their plan, they manage to take off their shoes put them in the right place and take out their water bottle and place their bag in their cubby hole. This patience comes as part of a routine set by themselves for themselves. If they have to work with any material they need to take a mat and enter the carpeted area. So they know they have to remove their shoes. Since they need their hands to work, they need to make them free of other things. Yes they can throw the bag on the floor and that happens too but children need order so when one child sees anothers bag on the floor, he will be unable to do anything else until the bag is back in its place.


The environment of the child too plays a major role in developing patience in the child. If the environment is already a mess, the child will be unable to work in the mess and the mess will demotivate the child to correct it or help with correcting it. The child might think "This is too difficult a task for me to do, so I might as well play and make it more messy" If there is only a small part of the environment which needs to be cleaned up or laid neatly, the child will feel he can do it and will make the effort and show the patience for it.

I've noticed it with kids while working with dry pouring. Kids who spill a little will repeat the exercise few times and will show patience during the spills as well as during the pouring. Its the opposite for someone who spills a lot accidentally. They give up on the exercise and even though they clean up the spill, their motivation to do the exercise is gone. So what do we do when a child chooses an activity which he is not ready for? We let them try and then when they spill, we tell them that they can try it on another day. The child knows now that the work is too difficult for him to manage and will back off on it for some days.

Patience comes with practice and as teachers and parents, we need to make sure that the environment which we offer children has activities that they can do and give them the freedom to do them again and again and again if they wish to. In our hurry to teach them many things, we stop being patient as well as make them impatient!