_seme_ (_seed_): semina, semenze, seminare, semenzaio, seminatore, riseminare, seminazione, disseminare, seminatrice
_wood_: wooden, woodworker, woody, woodsman, woodland
_earth_: earthen, earthy, earthly, earthborn, earthward, earthquake, earthling
_fish_: fishing, fisherman, fishery, fishy, fishmonger, fishnet
_war_: warrior, warlike, warship, warhorse, war-whoop, warsong, war-cry
_play_: player, playful, playhouse, playmate
_politic_: politics, politician, political, polity, politically
_hard_: hardly, harden, hardness, hardship, hardy, hardihood, hardware
_close_: disclose, closet, unclose, closure, foreclose
The child sees that the mother word is always the shortest. The _root_ remains in one color.
[Note:--The English language presents a far simpler situation than the Italian as regards the agreement of article and adjectives. Gender itself being, in the case of English nouns, more a matter of logical theory than of word-ending, adjectival agreement in the formal sense in practically unknown to English grammar. Likewise the formation of the plural is much simpler in English than in Italian, where the singular and plural word-endings are closely associated with gender. It is a question, in fact, whether the whole subject of the gender of English nouns should not be taken up somewhat later in connection with the pronouns, where English shows three singular forms masculine, feminine, neuter (him, her, it) as against the Italian two, masculine and feminine (_lo_, _la_, plural _li_, _le_, etc.). Signora Montessori's discussion of the situation in Italian still remains instructive to the teacher of English as an illustration of method. We retain her text, accordingly, in its entirety.--TR.]
As we have already said, the words chosen for grammatical study are all printed on small rectangular pieces of cardboard. The little cards are held together in packages by an elastic band and are kept in their respective boxes. The first box which we present has two compartments. In the holders at the back of each compartment are placed the cards which show the part of speech to be studied, in this case _article_ and _noun_. The article cards are placed in the article compartment and the nouns in the noun compartment. When the children have finished their exercise they replace the cards--the nouns in the place for the nouns and the articles in the place for the articles. If the words _article_ and _noun_ are not a sufficient guide for the child, the color at least will make the task easy. In fact the child will place the black cards for the noun in the compartment indicated by the black guide-card (marked _noun_); the tan cards for the article with the tan guide-card (marked _article_). This exercise recalls the child's experience with the alphabet boxes, where one copy of each letter is pasted to the bottom of the box as a guide for the child in replacing the other letters. The child begins to speak of the _article-section_, the _noun-section_, and the _article-cards_ and _noun-cards_. In so doing he begins to _distinguish_ between the parts of speech. The material must be prepared very accurately and in a definitely determined quantity. For the first exercise, the children are given boxes with the articles and nouns shuffled together in their respective compartments. But there must be just enough articles of each gender to go with the respective nouns. The child's task is to put the right article in front of the right noun--a long and patient research, which, however, is singularly fascinating to him.