Saturday 12 November with the newspaper the first issue: the volume by Silvia Vegetti Finzi dedicated to emotions and a notebook of games and activities. Adequate tools to better understand the development of children Priority attention to the dimension of being together every day. Here the presentation of the curators of the series
This series was created with the aim of providing parents with some tools to better understand the development of their children. Inspired by Maria Montessori, it has a slender and accurate cut and pays particular attention to the dimension of making together in the concreteness of the house or other spaces of everyday life. There will be no summaries or facsimiles of the method that Montessori elaborated for the kindergarten and elementary school, but proposals to discover or renew the pleasure of being with children, sharing moments of play, learning, discovery and reflection.
For some years the method developed by Maria Montessori has been enjoying extraordinary success. Although more than a hundred years have passed since she began to observe the first children in the Roman district of San Lorenzo, there are no counting of training courses and new schools (or sections of schools) that are opened throughout Italy, often at the explicit request of groups of parents. It is questionable whether an approach developed in the early 1900s can offer adequate responses to the needs of today’s children. And with serenity it must be answered that from an evolutionary point of view there is not much difference between a child in today’s Rome and one born in Rome a hundred years ago or, even, from the time of Marcus Aurelius.
Just take a look at the marbles of the imperial era to find children who pull the cart with the sheep or turn to a master who listens attentively, statues or high-reliefs with newborns in the arms of their fathers or mothers, mythological children who are nursed or ready to bathing in a basin, little ones stealing the ball or throwing nuts. What instead changed the world and with it the challenges that parents find themselves facing every day, divided between ideal models, work or economic difficulties, personal aspirations and, sometimes, narcissisms that are not easy to keep at bay.
Montessori has worked very hard so that the special energy of childhood is not wasted and this work testifies not only to the Method she developed, but to her having been present in her own historical time, identifying the contradictions and relating them to educational processes. A rereading of the brilliant conferences on education for peace could be enough to make her a source of pedagogical reflection as timely as ever. which he held throughout Europe in the 1930s, while an air of oppression and war blew everywhere. But she went further, making peace the background, and at the same time the goal, of her educational approach, at the center of which is the development of the individual no less than that of society as a whole. As if to say that education is never a private matter but a social question that calls into question an idea of the world. And her was and still very clear.
The series was born as an ideal continuation of a successful edition in fifty volumes that Grazia Honegger Fresco, student and Montessori scholar, he took care of before leaving us two years ago. The desire that guides us, at the behest of the publisher himself, is to try humbly to reap his inheritance by bearing the witness of his educational and cultural sowing action, much of which spent alongside families and listening to their concerns and questions. . Following his teaching, we invited the authors to use a simple (but not simplifying) language, helping parents to speak little, keep their hands in their pockets and observe the children, in order to finally be able to see their skills and true needs. And we have chosen to give space to her voice on the side of children by publishing in each volume articles taken from Il Quaderno Montessori (graziahoneggerfresco.it), the magazine that Grazia founded and directed for more than thirty years, dialoguing with parents and educators and collecting important documents on the pedagogy of the twentieth century and, in particular, on Montessori itself.
In her long life as an educator, trainer and popularizer, Grazia has always rejected methodological and dogmatic closure. Profoundly secular also from the pedagogical point of view, has welcomed and valued the voice of all those who place respect for the child, careful observation of their behavior, understanding of their needs at the center of their educational action. In our turn, we have kept in mind this laicity by calling experts of the Method to collaborate in this new series, but also people who, despite not having made Montessori teaching the center of their professional life, share in their pedagogical action the idea that Montessori she had children and looking for a way to be with them without rewards, punishment or manipulation.
First issue – The power of emotions as seen by Silvia Vegetti Finzi
Silvia Vegetti Finzi’s book is out on Saturday 12th with Corriere della Sera and La Gazzetta dello Sport The emotions, on sale at a price of € 8.90 plus the cost of the newspaper. This is the first volume of the new unpublished Montessori Paths series: above we publish an extract from the general presentation of the series, written by the curators Sara Honegger, Valeria Ferloni and Rosa Giudetti.
Attached to the volume, which remains on newsstands for two weeks (the others in the series instead for a week), readers will also find a notebook for children with games and activities of various kinds: In an era dominated by digital – explain the curators – we propose an “ancient” register where cutting, pasting, reading, solving, experimenting, writing, coloring, classifying, ordering, portraying, observing, distinguishing, pinning, amazed and more is at home.
The whole initiative, as the title says, is directly inspired by the work of the great Italian educator Maria Montessori (1870-1952), creator of a method for relating to children that has found followers and followers all over the world. The second issue of the series will be on newsstands on November 19th. It is about Me and the others by Costanza Buttafava.
November 11, 2022 (change November 11, 2022 | 19:37)
© Time.News