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

Part 3: From Hand to Mind: Building Language Skills to Better Structure Thinking

Let’s start with what is often said about Montessori schools :

“In Montessori schools, children have poor spelling skills. They don’t go through the same stages as in conventional schools and don’t spend as much time studying French, so their proficiency is lower, and it will take them a long time to catch up once they return to a traditional school later on.”

Let us now look at a highly condensed comparison of what is covered in broad terms in a multi-level Montessori classroom and over the years in conventional schools (in France):

Comparative table of progress milestones

Grammar Concepts	Age / Montessori Level (6–12)	Age / National Education Level
Parts of Speech (Noun, Verb, Determiner, etc.)	6–8 years old (1st–2nd grade)	6–10 years old(1st–5th grade)
Conjugation: Simple Tenses (Present, Future, Imperfect)	7–8 years old (2nd grade)	7–10 years old(from 2nd to 4th grade)
Conjugation: Compound Tenses & Modes (Subjunctive, Conditional)	8–10 years old (3rd/4th grade)	11–13 years old (6th/7th grade)
Functions: Subject Attribute	8-9 years old (3rd grade)	9-10 years old (4th/5th grade)
Analysis of complex sentences (Subordinate clauses)	9-11 years old(4th/5th grade)	12-14 years old (7th / 8th grade)
Figures de style et Versification	10-12 years old (5th/6th grade)	12-15 years old (Middle School: 7th grade onward)

Let us now begin with what Maria Montessori wrote:

“The study of grammar is the analysis of language, and language is the expression of thought. The analysis of the sentence is therefore, in reality, the analysis of thought.” Maria Montessori The Advanced Montessori Method, Vol. 2: The Montessori Elementary Material.

Once again, we can only acknowledge the obvious, without sounding pedantic: children in Montessori schools benefit in every way. We will not even touch on the obvious chronological order of the lessons and presentations in the Montessori curriculum. We will dive straight into the heart of why the method is developmentally appropriate and advanced when it comes to language learning and children.

Elementary school children are curious, endowed with immense imagination, and have an irrepressible desire to discover, explore, learn, “play,” and create. Why not combine all of this with language study at the same time?

True to herself and her discoveries regarding the child as a sensory explorer in the 3-6 age group, Maria Montessori built upon this foundation to gradually nurture the child’s imagination and mind in an increasingly structured, abstract, and complex manner, so that the child could identify, name, explain, organize, and finally create.

The child entering the 6–12 age range still has one foot in the 3–6 plane: with eyes wide open, they are entering the vast world of imagination; they are starting to reason with and explain everything they have absorbed and organized over six years, and they want to CREATE. They have absorbed and organized a language that is specific to their culture and environment, and they are eager to play with it, to understand it—fundamentally, intrinsically—so they can create even more with it.

Spelling is a written code: it is the way a word is written. Grammar is a set of rules: it is a communication system in its own right; it is the structure of a language.

Mastering spelling is one aspect of mastering written language. Mastering a language’s grammar means understanding how it functions as a whole, both orally and in writing. And in the French language, we face a double challenge: spoken and written language are not the same; we do not write the way we speak (we introduce verb conjugations to children by distinguishing literary tenses from simple tenses). And at Montessori Hossegor, we face a triple point of interest: we add English to the mix.

Once the language is integrated orally, like the mother tongue, the child begins to produce it orally. Simultaneously, in the 3-6 age group, since this period coincides with learning to read and write in the mother tongue, the English also begins to be mastered in writing. The transition to writing and reading follows logical stages that align with the child’s brain development and disregard the many historical variations in how language was written down by previous generations over the centuries: hence the learning of phonetic writing and phonetic reading (and the spelling mistakes that will ensue for a few years) .

The transition to the 6-12 plane arrives. The child moves into an advanced intellectual stage, yet still retains this need for sensory engagement, despite the beginning of a shift toward abstraction through the introduction to reading and writing. The grammar boxes make their debut, and with them begins a joyful journey of studying the structure of language. The grammar boxes focus on studying the nature of words and, to do so, use colorful, concrete, manipulable tools: the famous Montessori grammar symbols. The child can literally SEE the structure of the sentence, manipulate it, change it, see and hear what makes sense or doesn’t: identify, name, order, and then explain the basic structure of the sentence.

I’m not going to give you a detailed breakdown of every language lesson in this article—that would take an entire book. But you get the idea.

Maria Montessori has once again made concrete the abstractions invented by human beings (the terms verb, noun, article, etc.) in order to make the child aware of how a tool that they have been using daily since birth works: language, the means of communication between human beings.

Scaffolded learning is most effective when it feels effortless. By building new concepts on top of established ones, the Montessori method make education both fun and instinctive. The goal is for this knowledge to become a natural tool in a child’s world: not only can he use what he is learning in with the language material while working on other projects (biology, history, maths, etc..), but it can be used for everything from writing a letter to grandparents and calling a museum in Bayonne to assembling a hamster cage.

Not only does the child learn to understand and play with the structure of their native language, or that of the country in which they live, but they also learn to navigate and play with an additional code, another language, an entire other world that enriches and diversifies their way of thinking, and consequently, their identity. That is one of the reasons children are in near-total English immersion in the 3-6 program is the ease with which children under 7 absorb the language around them, regardless of the language, as long as it is used as an effective and direct means of communication with the child (in daily life, actively used and understood to facilitate the development of that daily life through spoken language). But that is the scope of another article.

Children, regardless of what school they are in, make mistakes. The difference is that we choose not to correct them systematically until their creative spirit, the volume of their work, and their tools have gained the necessary strength to understand why we make these corrections—and eventually correct them on their own. In the long run, if we have not stifled their creativity and confidence, Montessori children grow up to be teenagers who write better than their peers spontaneously, write more and at a much higher level in terms of sentence structure and vocabulary, read with great pleasure, and at Montessori Hossegor, hold the keys not to one language, but to two (or even three if their native language is neither French nor English).

Our aim is to develop the love of French language, and any other language for that matter. When the child achieves this love, they lift the French language to the heights it deserves. Think about that and think about how you feel about your own experience with the study of your language in school. Aren’t our children lucky?

©️Ludmila Katz