Pre-writing activities designed to prepare the child’s hand for handwriting can be found throughout the entire Montessori classroom.
Practical Life – Tools
Exercises of Practical Life help the child strengthen finger muscles as the child manipulates different tools. Activities include tonging, tweezing, stringing, and twisting. These require dexterity and control. More fine motor work includes using “little fingers” to roll a rug or socks. “Little fingers” include the thumb and first two fingers – the same ones that hold a pencil. All activities are precisely demonstrated, using proper finger placement.
Art – Coloring and Painting
As the child uses art materials for free expression, he is gaining important writing skills. He connects that his hand movements produce a mark on the page and that he can control them. Those marks at first appear random, then with maturity, become more controlled and purposeful. Letters, as well as shapes, will start to appear. Lessons in this area focus on the proper use of the various art media, including markers, pencils, chalk, and paintbrushes. Scissors activities also provide pencil control. Coloring activities can often also be found in geography, culture, and science areas.
Sensorial – Knobbed Cylinders and Touch Tablets
The thumb and first two fingers are used when grasping the knobs of the knobbed cylinders, much in the same way one holds a pencil. Tactile exercises, including rubbing the sandpaper of the Touch Tablets, refine the child’s sense of touch. She is then better able to feel the shape of the sandpaper letters.
Sandpaper Letters – Letter Shapes
The sandpaper letters are found in the language area. When observing a lesson, it appears the child is merely being introduced to the letter sounds. The teacher guides his first two fingers along the letter, saying the sound. As he feels the shape, he is repeating the sound. But the first two fingers with which he traces the letters are the same two he uses when holding a pencil. As he traces, he is following a prescribed path, which happens to be in the proper formation of the letter. The procedure is repeated at every lesson, thus imprinting itself in his brain.
Moveable Alphabet – Letter Shapes
Phonetic spelling practice is done using the moveable alphabet. These letters are frequently cut out of wood, sometimes plastic. As the child is laying out the sounds in a word, she needs to be conscious of their placement. She is also feeling the shapes of the letters as she lays them out.
Metal Insets – Pencil Control
Metal insets were designed by Maria Montessori to teach handwriting. Fundamentally they are metal stencils of ten basic shapes: circle, ellipse, oval, curvilinear triangle, quatrefoil, square, rectangle, triangle, trapezoid, and pentagon. The thick, sturdy metal frame teaches the child control of her pencil as it acts as a guide. Again, the child is instructed to follow a prescribed path around the frame – counterclockwise, the same direction most round letters are formed. Later lessons include tracing the inset and drawing lines within the shapes, that mimic later strokes used in forming letters.
Pinpricking
Some classrooms provide pre-drawn shapes. Others may allow the children to create their own. Still others may allow for a combination of the two. The commonality is that the child will use a stylus (or thumbtack) to poke a series of holes along the lines. He gains pencil control by precisely following the line. He strengthens his grip as he manipulates the instrument.
As the child moves throughout the Montessori environment, she is preparing her hand for writing as she manipulates the various materials.
Andrea Coventry - Andrea Coventry is a Montessori child, now Montessori educator, with 25 years' experience with children, publishing online since 2007.
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