The Role of Language (or French) in the Montessori Curriculum

Part 2: Why We Forget Our French: Going Beyond Conjugation Tables and Dictations

We’ll continue our series of articles on the role of language in the Montessori curriculum by tackling the two big elephants in the room: conjugation and spelling. How many of you have seen the little notes your children bring home, written by other children, and nearly choked on your coffee? We have a little secret to share with you: we don’t correct your children’s written work in the early

elementary years. This aligns with the principle of error correction, which comes not from the adult but from the materials. Remember the cylindrical blocks in the 3-6 class? Or the math fingerboards in the 3-6 class? These two materials, like everything else in the classroom, share a common element essential to the method’s effectiveness: they are self-correcting. The child does not need a third party to tell them that they have not done the work correctly; the materials show them this. Either they realize their mistake and correct it, or they do not realize it, meaning they are not yet cognitively ready to correct it. The same applies to spelling and conjugation in elementary school (as well as the rest of their learning).

Whether the correction is done kindly or not, correction imposed by a third party remains useless in the long run. If you are familiar with the work of Stanislas Dehaene, Karin James, or Robert Bjork, you know that learning through error is the only kind that is truly lasting and profound. A mistake is not a failure; it is essential information for the brain to recalibrate its predictions. By letting the child correct their own work, we develop their neurological resilience: we only truly learn when our brain processes a discrepancy and manages to resolve it on its own. When we correct a child, we momentarily short-circuit their brain.

Not only is immediate correction by the teacher, in this case, unnecessary, but such correction acts as a barrier to creativity and fosters dependence on adults. Do you remember the famous question, “Is my drawing nice?” By age 6 or 7, this becomes: “Is my problem good? Did I spell my word correctly?” The child no longer uses all the resources they possess out of fear of making mistakes. In

the case of language, for example, they will start reusing the same words over and over because those are the ones they know how to spell. This applies to all areas: the child will only do what they’ve mastered 100% to be sure they don’t make mistakes. In Montessori, we prefer a child who makes 10 mistakes and discovers 2 on their own, rather than a child who produces perfect work because they were corrected on every line. Imagine if you had stopped your child every time they fell when they first started walking? Did you lecture them on exactly where to place their feet or how to balance better? Did you scold them

because they fell too much? And what about riding a bike? Did you spend your time holding the bike steady for your child? Or did your child eventually have to figure it out on their own and fall several times before managing to keep their balance—alone—by letting themselves be guided by bodily and sensory

feedback? So why not continue to rely on our children and trust them if we provide them with materials that include built-in corrections?So what are these magical tools that allow your children to learn to write/spell correctly in an

independent, self-directed, and creative way?

We are a long way from rote memorization (consider the term: our entire school system is geared toward one exam: the baccalaureate. That’s also a topic for another time…) found in other schools where, let’s be realistic, in our society, the schedule is more than just a calendar—it’s a safety net. There’s a deeply ingrained relief in believing that if a child spends hours poring over conjugation

tables and preparing for dictations, the knowledge will be acquired. On average, in first, second, and third grade, children have 10 hours of French per week, which drops to 8 hours in fourth and fifth grade and to 5 hours in sixth grade. The total number of weekly class hours in these grades averages 24 hours. This represents nearly 50% of total school learning time devoted to a single subject. This highlights the excessive emphasis placed on pursuing very specific objectives, at the expense of all other knowledge or cultural information, as well as the anxiety associated with it.

Experience, real life—and the Montessori method—show that this foundation is, in fact, no foundation at all. Traditional teaching relies on random memorization. While this may seem productive during a Friday test, the long-term reality is far less impressive. Children must prepare for a Friday dictation by studying the same text all week from various angles (vocabulary, grammar, conjugation, spelling) and, much to the delight of most parents, by reviewing it one last time on Thursday evening at home. This certainly prepares children to spell a specially prepared text correctly, but does it really help them understand the mechanics of how language works so that they naturally become good at spelling, even when writing a spontaneous text without prior preparation?

Certainly, there is repetition. And Montessori educators value repetition. The more a child repeats with a material, the more they internalize it and can discover the various lessons it contains. The more they repeat, the better they master it, and the more they integrate the concept conveyed by the material. A child who does not repeat remains on the surface, never truly internalizing the new concept.

If information is learned without its application in daily life being understood or utilized, the brain classifies it as temporary (Custers, E. J. (2010). “Long-term retention of basic science knowledge: a review study”). According to him, to break this pattern, spaced repetition and practical application of the information are required. What does this mean for school-age children? Children must be able to repeat the same activity AND apply it to real life.

In Montessori environments, not only are lessons repeatable, but adults encourage children to repeat them over and over again, so that they can fully understand the work—eventually without adult assistance—and discover for themselves the “rules” or information that the materials are meant to convey. Self-discovery takes precedence over simply having information stated by someone else. When children memorize lists of spelling rules as isolated facts, the brain treats them as “junk files”—that is, temporary information to be discarded once the “task” (the exam) is complete. The brain is naturally a pattern-recognition tool, not a recording device. To truly learn, we must stop treating French as a list of rules and start treating it as a living system.

In a Montessori environment, we move from passive memorization to active learning and spaced retrieval of information. On the one hand, we do not teach French. We make it available to the children, just like the rest of the subjects in the classroom. Take, for example, one of the first basic rules studied around age 6: singular and plural. The children have access to materials—small labels

that they must sort together once the presentation is given: singular words and plural words. Theymust match the articles to the corresponding nouns and then work with them. For each child, the work will be different: copying the words, rearranging the labels many times and reviewing the words, mini quizzes among the children, presenting the words in small booklets, on a poster, etc. We never tell them, “In the plural, you add an ’s.’”, we have a presentation on the plural where the material is set up for them to realise that in the plural, nouns take an ’s’. At some point (fairly quickly), they discover it on their own. We even have a small box with the rule that corresponds to the small box containing the labels. Once the child has discovered the rule, they can extrapolate, go further, and make their own lists of words to put their discovery into practice in a motivated,

interested, and immediate way. You can apply this principle to all the language skills we cover in class: spelling rules, verb conjugation, grammar, vocabulary.

On the other hand, we don’t ask the children to work exclusively with language or math materials during the morning. We expose them to and encourage them to work with the eight areas of the classroom: language, math, geometry, biology, history, geography, art, and music. They must use language when working on other subjects: they must read, they must write, they must understand

what they read, and they must be able to reread their work. Imagine you’re in the middle of a presentation on dinosaurs, and you can’t read your notes—or those written by your classmate: this experience will motivate you, more than any correction or cramming, to write more clearly, to practice reading better, etc.—even at age 6. Our learning tools remain concrete and hands-on, even beyond ages 3–6. We do away with workbooks, replacing them with movable alphabets, manipulative labels, and small instruction cards that are open-ended and endlessly adaptable.

We give children the opportunity to learn at different levels: not only visually, but also by using their hearing (they work in groups: they talk to each other, they read words, instructions, and their work aloud), their sense of touch, and their stereognostic sense. This also helps children who still struggle with reading and writing to access a wealth of information and knowledge without creating

psychological barriers or undermining their confidence. And if, after a certain age, a child’s brain still cannot grasp certain rules or internalize certain concepts, this is an issue that needs to be addressed separately and discussed with the teachers.

Yes, but my child, who is well over 6 years old, keeps forgetting to add the ‘s’ in plurals even though I know they know the rule. Ask yourself: does your child know the rule but forget it in the heat of writing? Did they not pay attention to what they were writing? Simply ask your child to reread their work, and don’t forget to use your sense of humor.

When we introduce corrections, we do so by involving the child in the process: we underline a few of the most common mistakes on the page and note in the margin what type of mistake it is (Spelling: look it up in the dictionary or check the rule; Conjugation: check the materials or the Bescherelle, etc.). We teach the child to self-assess. And we do this once the automatic process of writing has been established, once the child is comfortable putting their thoughts into writing in a fluid and spontaneous way, and once the child has enough experience with a good number of spelling and conjugation rules to be able to recall the rules and apply them on their own. When older children start using the Bescherelle, it is not to memorize conjugation tables; rather, it is a tool that allows them to work independently and autonomously, in an intelligent way, using their

skills and foundational knowledge to continue improving their work—not because an adult willgrade them, but because they want to produce the best work possible, having understood that their writing reflects who they are to the outside world.

The goal of this approach is not merely to pass a dictation on Friday, or for your child to come home with pretty cards bearing identical little messages, all perfectly written because they’ve been reviewed and corrected a good dozen times. It is about shifting the study of the French language from “declarative memory” (knowing that a rule exists) to “procedural memory” (knowing how to use it instinctively). Once again, keep the little notes your children write to you here and there from time to time. Keep them for 2, 3, or 4 years. Then compare them. Note the progress in handwriting and spelling.

When a child understands the mechanics of a language, they don’t just memorize a rule; they internalize a skill, much like when they learn to ride a bike. They don’t just learn French; they become French. And they can apply this to any other language they learn later on. Because, just as a newborn is born with the ability to speak any language in the world, a child has the ability to

understand how language works.