Dr. Montessori urges that those toys which we buy be selected having in mind helping the child to be an actor in a little drama of home life. A plaything, she feels, should be a work thing, capable of bringing a life activity down to the primitive plane of the child’s thinking.
Our toy shops offer us now a very wide variety of such educational toys from which to choose. We may find large dolls, modeled from life, and wearing clothes similar to children and requiring the same muscular co-ordination in fastening and unfastening. There is large furniture for these dolls, built on good lines and teaching a little girl to make a bed neatly and keep the doll’s bureau drawers in order. There are good-sized washing sets, including tubs, basket, lines, clothespins, ironing board, and sad irons; we find very complete dolls’ houses, sewing materials with dolls’ patterns and small sewing machines, kitchens where the child can pretend to cook, complete sets of cooking utensils, and lifelike toy animals.
These toys Dr. Montessori urges us to use, realizing that the child’s deepest play impulse is to dramatize in the theater of the home playroom the everyday utilitarian occupations of the race.
Mario played a great deal, and I noticed, as I watched him critically, that his play was of a very strongly imaginative kind.
He was one of the youngest of the little ones at the Trionfale Children’s House, and it had taken him a rather longer time than it had the other children to gain control of his impulsive hands, his little truant feet, his vagrant-tending mind. During this first period of his Montessori schooling, when his attention was scattering and he found difficulty in making muscular co-ordination and differentiating form and color clearly, he seemed also to have difficulty in amusing himself. His play impulses at this time seemed to be very primitive; he took pleasure in idling in some sunny spot, kitten-like, or he arranged and rearranged the pieces of wicker furniture which filled the _salon_ corner of the schoolroom, or he found entertainment in interfering with the work of the other little ones. There seemed to be no element of creativeness or originality in his play.
Presently, however, Mario began to show a steady intellectual development in his work. Through the physical exercises of Montessori, through the rhythmic exercises carried on with music and through exercises of usefulness in keeping himself and the room neat and waiting upon others, he learned an important lesson of muscular co-ordination.