Montessori philosophy focuses on using realistic images as part of toys and activities for babies, toddlers, and young preschoolers. Today, I’m diving deeper into why.
The answer goes back to the concept of the absorbent mind, which is the cornerstone of Montessori early childhood education. Montessori separated planes of human development in six-year increments, from birth through age 24, which aligns with modern research so amazingly that I almost can’t believe it! (Consider, for example, that 24 is a common cutoff age to rent a car). I won’t talk about all of the planes here because we’re focused on the youngest kids, but as an aside, I will say that it has been amazing to watch my kids make their way through them as they’ve aged.
Montessori named the period from birth to age six the “absorbent mind,” with birth to three as the unconscious absorbent mind, and three to six as the conscious absorbent mind, and those really are just what they sound like: the absorbent mind from zero to six is absorbing everything it experiences because everything is new. Babies and toddlers are constructing their reality as they experience the world for the first time. And multiple exposures to the same thing help narrow down concepts in some ways and widen them in others.
I started this post because it’s National Cat Day, and it made me think of the cat we have out in our classroom (see above) in these weeks surrounding Halloween. As adults, we can think of a cat as having certain features: fur (most of the time), a particular shape of face, a long tail, a particular way of movement, maybe some certain personality traits that you might like or might not so much depending on whether you call yourself a cat person. Over time, we have heard the myth of a cat’s nine lives. We know that a cat says meow. We know that when a cat meows, it actually is not saying meow, but it makes a sound that sounds a little bit like meow. I could keep going. A cat is this wide construct, and we’ve arrived at this from thousands of exposures to something like a cat over our entire lifetimes.
But Montessori’s assertion was that we are, from age zero to six, primed neurologically to build these understandings. So when we expose a child to a rendering of a cat that behaves like a cat really behaves, we’re helping children begin to understand what a cat is.
Here’s where the realistic images come into play. From zero to three, this understanding is what Montessori called unconscious. The child is not yet cognitively ready to articulate the curiosity: “What is a cat? Let me learn about a cat.” The child is absorbing the cat, the concept of cat, without even meaning to or knowing that it’s happening. About age three, (not exactly, but somewhere in there), the child begins to articulate curiosity about specific ideas.
And this may be when kids start to want to check out every cat book at the library, stop and look at every cat, ask questions about cat. This is also when the child might be ready to understand the concept of imaginative play, wanting to pretend to be a cat or care for a cat (instead of meowing like a cat because that’s a fun sound to make.)
So if we share a picture of a real cat with a child, or an actual cat, and then later on a story where a cat can talk like a human, or a cat can fly, or any number of other inventions, Montessori believed that this would interfere with the child’s ability to construct a robust concept of cat. If you pay attention in the classroom, you’ll notice that all of our books feature what we call realistic images: a cat looks a lot like a cat. It may not be a photograph, although we do include plenty of those–it may be a line drawing, it may be painting, or maybe a 3D rendering, like a figurine in a matching lesson, but most of the time, a cat looks like a cat. And it does things that a cat would do, like live as a pet, climb a tree, or lay in a sunny window.
However–the cat in question is a cartoonish cat. In the classroom, I have the picture of a real cat to match with this cartoon cat, along with a spider and a bat and cards, to help the child connect the idea that this caricature is meant to represent an actual cat. A Montessori purist might argue that what I’m doing is not what ought to be done, and that we should only expose children to images of a real cat. And to that I say: children are exposed to a lot of images that aren’t realistic everywhere in our world. So my goal here is to, hopefully, help the child make a connection that sometimes we can see an object that isn’t realistic, and that can still be a part of that construct. Having this activity out in the classroom provides an opportunity for that conversation.
What does this mean for families at home? Maybe not much beyond awareness:
(Part of being a certified Montessori teacher is that I get to think about these kinds of questions and then incorporate my decisions into the environment in ways that I think are most supportive to kids and their development. And that makes me the person with the most wonderful job imaginable. It also means that you can come to a baby or toddler class confident that I’ve considered all of this!)
I’m not suggesting that you relentlessly purge any book that has a cat who can fly. Instead: as much as possible, or at least in a hearty amount, exposing kids to and talking about objects as they the real world helps them build understanding, and that purposeful exposure allows them to work their brains in a way that develops these thought processes and makes these connections to optimize that early absorbent time.