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 Early
intervention is critical to the development of children with learning
disabilities and autism spectrum disorders (Autism, PDD-NOS, Asperger Syndrome,
ADD/ADHD). The critical period for language development is from birth to
three, the time when children are absorbing the language of their environment
and essential brain wiring takes place.
The Montessori Toddler program which focuses on these critical areas of
development is the perfect environment for implementing early intervention
programs. At Broad Horizons we work closely with First Steps Providers who
come to our site to work with your child. In a coordinated effort between
therapists, instructors and parents, your child gets a well rounded and
intensive support system for developmental programs aimed at language, motor,
and social development.
 According
to Montessori, "A child's work is to create the person she/he will
become." Children are born with special mental powers which aid in the work
of their own construction. But they cannot accomplish the task of
self-construction without purposeful movement, exploration, and discovery of
their environment - both the things and people within it. They must be given the
freedom to use their inborn powers to develop physically, intellectually, and
spiritually. A Montessori classroom provides this freedom within the limits
of an environment which develops a sense of order and self-discipline.
 That
environment is a physically beautiful, child sized room of enticing activities,
quiet reading spaces, mirrors for self-observation, differing textures,
opportunities for independent exploration all under the watchful eye of the
teacher/guide. In addition to the classroom, the facility includes motor
rooms with indoor swings, rocking boards, therapy balls, and other sensory
integration materials as well as a large outdoor play area. The outdoor
environment offers a natural garden, sandy spots for digging, swing sets,
slides, climbing activities, room to romp and opportunities for organized games.
In the summer we add water activities and take the classroom activities
outdoors. In the winter, snow presents natural opportunities to explore
sledding, snow balls, and building snowmen. Hunting for nuts, raking
leaves and jumping in them add to the autumn outdoor adventures. In spring the
gardens come alive and are expanded by plantings where the children participate
in the care and cutting of our many varieties of flowers and plants.
 Also
basic to Montessori's philosophy is her discovery of Sensitive Periods in
children's development. During these periods children seek certain stimuli with
immense intensity, to the exclusion of all others. So it is during this time
that a child can most easily master a particular learning skill. Dr. Montessori
devised special materials to aid children in each Sensitive Period. It is the
responsibility of the teacher to recognize these periods in individual children
and put them in touch with the appropriate materials in the classroom
environment
.
In a specially created environment that matches the developmental needs of
the children enrolled, highly trained teachers through observation and informal
assessment work to assist each child in acquiring the skills they lack while
supporting their strengths. Many of our students have extremely scattered
skills, and as with our preschool and elementary programs we do not hold back
the child who is ahead of his peers in any area. At the same time, through
the use of
ABA
(Applied Behavior Analysis) techniques,
PECS
(picture-exchange communication system), ASL (American Sign Language) and other
appropriate programs, we insist on improvement in communication, cooperation,
daily living and social skills. This is done gently with positive
reinforcement for effort and no reinforcement for avoidance or tantruming
behaviors.
We accept children beginning at 18 months, a time when the sensitive period
for language development is in full swing. Our toddler area is equipped to focus
on language development through many specialized materials and activities which
entice even the most resistant toddler. Music, art, sensorial experiences,
books and a variety of hands on activities and games are just a few of the
options available to the young child in our Toddler program.
The focus of Montessori education continually changes to adapt to the child's
natural stages of development. Montessori described these stages as Planes of
Development, which occur in approximately six year intervals, each of which is
further subdivided into three year segments. These Planes of Development are the
basis for the three-year age groupings found in Montessori school classes: ages
birth to three; three to six; six to nine; nine to twelve; and twelve to
fifteen. At Broad Horizons, your toddler can progress to the next developmental
plane without having to change schools or familiar surroundings.
 Both
full and half day programs are available for our toddlers. Most early
intervention programs recommend 20-40 hours a week of therapy. While, that
can certainly seem extreme to a new parent, we believe that the child friendly
and individually focused environment we have created using the Montessori Method
is the next best thing to HOME. Parents are always welcome to participate
in the classrooms and can gain valuable training that carries over to home by
working with our instructors side by side.
For over 100 years now, the Montessori Method has been in practice.
Sadly but not surprisingly scientific research has been slow to confirm her
amazing insights into the brain and the process of cognitive development.
Most of her philosophy now has sound scientific research behind it, confirming
the sensitive periods of development and the absorbent mind of infants.
From The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori
"Our day has seen a
great awakening of interest in the mental life of the newly born. Some
psychologists have made special observations of the baby's growth from the first
three hours after birth. Others, as a result of careful study, have come to the
conclusion that the first two years are the most important in the whole span of
human life.
The greatness of the human personality begins at the hour of birth. From this
almost mystic affirmation there comes what may seem a strange conclusion: that
education must start from birth. Strange, because, how, in a practical
sense, can we educate a newborn babe, or even an infant during the first two
years of his life? What lessons shall we give to this tiny being who understands
nothing of what we say, and cannot even move his limbs? Or do we mean only
hygiene, when we speak of this little one's education? Not at all. We mean far
more than that.
During this early period, education must be understood as a help to the
unfolding of the child's inborn psychic powers. This means that we cannot use
the orthodox methods of teaching, which depend on talk.
It has been widely shown, by recent research that tiny children are gifted with
a psychic nature peculiar to them. And this points out a new path to the
educator. It is something out of the ordinary, something not hitherto
recognized, yet something which vitally concerns mankind. The child's true
constructive energy, a dynamic power, has remained unnoticed for thousands of
years. Just as men have trodden the earth, and later hidden in its depths, so
the men of our day make progress after progress in civilized life, without
noticing the treasure that lie hidden in the psychic world of infancy.
Form the earliest dawn of man's life on earth, these energies have been
repressed and nullified. Not till today has any intuition of their existence
begun to find expression. Only recently, for example, has Carrel written: 'The
period of infancy is undoubtedly the richest. It should be utilized by education
in every possible and conceivable way. The waste of this period of life can
never be compensated. Instead of ignoring the early years, it is our duty to
cultivate them with the utmost care.'* Today we are beginning to see
the value of these ungathered fruits, more precious than gold, for they are
man's own spirit.
The first two years of life open new horizons before us, for here we may see the
laws of psychic construction hitherto unknown. It is the child himself who
presents us with these revelations. He brings to our knowledge a kind of psychic
life totally different form that of adults. Here is the new path! No longer is
it for the professor to apply psychology to childhood, but it is for the
children them selves to reveal their psychology to those who study them.
This may seem obscure, but it becomes clear as soon as we go more deeply into
details. The child has a mind able to absorb knowledge. He has the power to
teach himself. A single observation is enough to probe this. The child grows up
speaking his parent's tongue, yet to grown-ups the learning of a language is a
very great intellectual achievement. No one teaches the child, yet he comes to
use nouns, verbs, and adjectives to perfection.
To follow a child in his language development is a study of the greatest
interest, and all those who have devoted themselves to it agree that the use of
words, of names, the first elements of language, falls at a fixed period in the
child's life, as if a precise timekeeper were superintending this part of his
activity. The child seems to follow a severe programme imposed by nature, so
faithfully and punctually as to improve upon that of any old-time school,
however well organized. Still following this programme, the child proceeds to
learn all the irregularities and grammatical constructions of his language with
irreproachable diligence.
There is, so to speak, in every child a painstaking teacher, so skillful that he
obtains identical results in all children in all parts of the world. The only
language men ever speak perfectly is the one they learn in babyhood, when no one
can teach them anything! Not only this, but if at a later age the child has
to learn another language, no expert help will enable him to speak it with the
same perfection as he does his first.
So there must be a special psychic force at work, helping the little child to
develop. And this not only for language; for at two he can recognize all the
persons and things around him. If we consider this, it becomes ever clearer that
the child does an impressive work of inner formation. All that we ourselves are
has been made by the child, by the child we were in the first two years of our
lives. Not only has the child to recognize what he sees about him, and to
understand and adapt himself to our way of life, but also, while still
unteachable, he has to build up in himself all those complex formations that
will become our intelligence, the foundation for our religious feelings and of
our particular national and social sentiments. It is as if nature had
safeguarded each child from the influence of adult reasoning so as to give
priority to the inner teacher who animates him. He has the chance to build up a
complete psychic structure, before the intelligence of grownups can reach his
spirit and produce changes in it.
By the age of three, the child has already laid down the foundations of his
personality as a human being, and only then does he need the help of special
scholastic influences. So great are the conquests he has made that one may well
say: the child who goes to school at three is already a little man.
Psychologists have often affirmed that if our own adult ability be compared with
the child's , we should need sixty years of hard work to what he does in three;
and this they have expressed in the words just used: 'At three the child is
already a man.' Yet he is still far from having exhausted this strange power
that he possesses of absorption from his surroundings.
In our first schools the children used to enter when three years old. No one
could teach them because they were not receptive; yet they offered us amazing
revelations of the greatness of the human soul. Ours was a house for
children, rather than a real school. We had prepared a place for children
where a diffused culture could be assimilated from the environment, without any
need for direct instruction. The children who came were from the humblest social
levels, and their parents were illiterate. Yet these children learned to read
and write before they were five, and no one had given them any lessons. If
visitors asked them, 'Who taught you to write?' they often answered with
astonishment: 'Taught me? No one has taught me!' At that time it seemed
miraculous that children of four and a half should be able to write, and that
they should have learned without the feeling of having been taught.
The press began to speak of 'culture acquired spontaneously.' Psychologists
wondered if these children were somehow different from others, and we ourselves
puzzled over it for a long time. Only after repeated experiments did we conclude
with certainty that all children are endowed with this capacity to 'absorb'
culture. If this be true, we then argued, if culture can be acquired without
effort, let us provide the children with other elements of culture. And then we
saw them 'absorb' far more than reading and writing: botany, zoology,
mathematics, geography, and with the same ease, spontaneously and without
getting tired.
And so we discovered that education is not something which the teacher does,
but that it is a natural process which develops spontaneously in the human
being. It is not acquired by listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in
which the child acts on his environment. The teacher's task is not to talk, but
to prepare and arrange a series of motives for cultural activity in a special
environment made for the child.
My experiments, conducted in many different countries, have now been going on
for forty years, and as the children grew up parents kept asking me to extend my
methods to the later ages. We then found that individual activity is the one
factor that stimulates and produces development, and that this is not more true
for the little ones of preschool age than it is for the junior, middle, and
upper school children.
A new figure had arisen to greet our eyes. Not just a school, or an educational
method, but MAN himself: MAN whose true nature is shown in his capacity for free
development, whose greatness became visible directly mental oppression ceased to
bear upon him, to limit his inner work and weigh down his spirit.
Therefore I hold that any reform of education must be based on the personality
of man. Man himself must become the center of education and we must never forget
that man does not develop only at the university, but begins his mental growth
at birth, and pursues it with the greatest intensity during the first three
years of his life. To this period, more than to any other, it is imperative to
give active care. If we follow these rules, the child, instead of being a
burden, shows himself to us as the greatest and most consoling of nature's
wonders! We find ourselves confronted by a being no longer to be thought of as
helpless, like a receptive void waiting to be filled with our wisdom; but one
whose dignity increases in the measure to which we see in him the builder of our
own minds; one guided by his inward teacher, who labours indefatigably in joy
and happinesses, following a precise timetable, at the work of constructing that
greatest marvel of the Universe, the human being. We teachers can only help the
work going on, as servants wait upon a master. We then become witnesses to the
development of the human soul; the emergence of the New Man, who will no longer
be the victim of events but, thanks to his clarity of vision, will become able
to direct and to mould the future of mankind."
To learn more about the Montessori Method and Philosophy
check out some of the excellent books below. Local residents may borrow the
materials in the school library, or you an order your own by clicking on the
link to Amazon.com or Future Horizons on the Resources page of our web site.
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