Mario played a great deal, and I noticed, as I watched him critically, that his play was of a very strongly imaginative kind.

He was one of the youngest of the little ones at the Trionfale Children’s House, and it had taken him a rather longer time than it had the other children to gain control of his impulsive hands, his little truant feet, his vagrant-tending mind. During this first period of his Montessori schooling, when his attention was scattering and he found difficulty in making muscular co-ordination and differentiating form and color clearly, he seemed also to have difficulty in amusing himself. His play impulses at this time seemed to be very primitive; he took pleasure in idling in some sunny spot, kitten-like, or he arranged and rearranged the pieces of wicker furniture which filled the salon corner of the schoolroom, or he found entertainment in interfering with the work of the other little ones. There seemed to be no element of creativeness or originality in his play.

Presently, however, Mario began to show a steady intellectual development in his work. Through the physical exercises of Montessori, through the rhythmic exercises carried on with music and through exercises of usefulness in keeping himself and the room neat and waiting upon others, he learned an important lesson of muscular co-ordination.

He learned to make his body respond to the command of his brain.

Through the sense exercises in recognizing fine differentiations of color and form and weight and sound and texture, Mario found a clear mental vision. A month before, the hill back of the school had been a blur to his mental vision. Now it was, for him, a clear percept made up of various component parts. He saw it tall, broad, steep, colored in varying tints of green and brown; its outlines were broken for him by the sunshine, the gardens, the red and yellow tiled houses; he could almost smell the sweet perfume from its orchards and vineyards.

The sense-training of the Montessori system had quickened and clarified the little boy’s perceptive faculties.

Following side by side with Mario’s new mental development came as marked a development in his play. His play impulses were no longer scattering but had objectivity. He was, in fancy, a steam engine puffing along or the little father of a group of other children.

As he swung himself over the parallel bars in the school yard he felt that he was a famous acrobat entertaining an applauding audience. In a second he slipped into another path of fancy; as he piled stones into a pyramid, he was a great builder. More than this, Mario’s newly-found play impulses carried him into a unique plane of idealism. Crouched in a sunny corner of the playground, he was a sleeping seed; slowly and with spontaneous grace the little body rose, arms upstretched, as Mario felt in dreams the growth of root and branch and flower. No one had taught four-year-old Mario the skill of making real these fantasies. How had he taken his way alone into the fertile fields of the imagination?

It has been suggested that the Montessori system does not take into account the stimulating of the child’s imagination. Daily instances of very original, undirected imaginative play on the part of Montessori children show a subtle force at work in the method which results in a spontaneous unfolding of the imagination. The games and plays which we teach our children in kindergarten and primary school are carried on by the Montessori-trained children without adult supervision. Leaving their work, they run to the garden or playground, imitating with great freedom and beauty of imagination the activities of the gardener, the baker, the artisan, the street vender, and the traveling musician. They even impersonate in a more idealistic way, playing, as did little Mario, that they are birds and flowers.

This natural expression of imagination in very young children is an important development of the method, and a suggestive one.

We are all familiar with the timid, shrinking little child in the center of a game circle who doesn’t want to be a chickadee, but who is urged by the teacher in charge of the circle. The child persists in her disinclination; she is overawed by so large a ring of spectators; it is possible that she has never seen a chickadee. The teacher, also, persists. She goes to the child and tries to teach her the motions of bird flight, but the child sees only an adult running about and waving her arms in an unusual way. She does not connect the spectacle in any way with the free flight of a bird, and when she does take courage and tries to follow the directions of her teacher, the little one is not giving expression to her own mental image, but is endeavoring to imitate a rather ungainly adult.

Is this play of the imaginative type?

It would seem as if we have lost sight of the real character of this elusive, subtle, unexplainable fruition of the mental faculties, the imagination. It is the unforeseen mind power which makes poets and painters and sculptors and conquerors. It is a mind vision which sees success beyond defeat, worth hidden in rags, and good blossoming out of evil. It makes us hear the piping of Pan as the wind blows the reeds beside the river; it promises us a pot of gold if we can build ourselves a rainbow bridge across every cloud of despair; it shows us the lineaments of God in the guise of sorrow and poverty.

Imagination in the child finds varied expressions. There are a great many instances where a child who is lonely and longs for companionship sees and holds daily intercourse with an invisible playmate whom he can describe with great accuracy of detail. In the majority of cases this invisible playmate in disposition, appearance, and tastes is unlike any member of the family or any friend of the child’s. Where did the child find this fancy?

A child has the power of a seer to develop the unknown potentialities in apparently dead things. This dry brown leaf, frost-killed of the sap of life, is, in the child’s fancy, a gnome, jumping along in the path in front of him to warn the birds of the coming of winter. An acorn is a golden goblet brimming with fairy nectar; a hollow tree is a magic place in which to set up a domicile. No one schooled the child in these tricks of thought. How did he find them?

Dr. Montessori explains the growth of child imagination.

The child is born with a certain defined mental equipment. He has instincts, inherited memories they might be called, and he struggles to feed these instincts. He has capacities for acquiring good or bad habits very early. He has a race-old longing to gain knowledge by means of his senses. Our part in the education of the child is to study his instinctive activities, giving them opportunities for free expression where they are important for the child’s best mental development. A child likes to play in the dirt because his ancestors lived in caves and tilled the soil; it is necessary for the child’s best development that he play in sand and model in clay and plant little gardens. A child instinctively fights because his ancestors survived only by warfare; this child instinct we must inhibit.

We must establish good habits in a child early. We must help him, through various sense exercises, to gain clear percepts of his environment. We must try not to force our adult view-point upon the child, but endeavor to establish in him a habit of independent self-active thought.

Then, after we have strengthened the general intellectual processes of the child mind, Dr. Montessori points to us a miracle. Dovetailing instinct and habit and perception, the child intellect begins to build. Clear percepts become concepts; mental images become ideals, imagination appears, building from the clay of everyday-mind stuff a golden castle of dreams.

Imagination cannot be taught. It can scarcely be defined. It can never be prescribed and trained. It is that flowering of the mind processes by means of which a bit of brown sod appears tinted with light and color to the artist, full of potentialities of growth to the gardener, smells of home to the wanderer. If the three types of minds, as children, had been told that a similar piece of sod was a blanket for the sleeping seeds, one questions if it would have been gilded for them in adult life with this glow of individual fancy. On the contrary, the painter has been trained to see color, the gardener has experienced the cultivation of life in the earth, the home lover’s hungry senses grasped the memory of former sense stimuli.

Dr. Montessori tells us that the imagination develops variously in different individuals. There may be a child who will never be able to pierce the veil of reality and find his way into the court of fantasy. There will be also the child who develops a seerlike quality of idealism. He moves in a world of blissful unrealities; he sees angels’ wings in the clouds and angels’ eyes in the stars. Our part in the education of little children is to build the tower for a possible poising of the child’s wings of fancy. Then we will wait hopefully for the wonder flight.

The various parts of the didactic apparatus of Montessori presented to a child in their proper relation to his stage of mental growth have a definite place in strengthening the mental processes which lie at the basis of imagination.

We are so unaccustomed to offering any sort of mind food to the child of two and a half or three that we have allowed the little child to go mind hungry. At this early stage of a child’s development the right kind of mental training will lay a foundation for the constructive and intellectual processes of imagination and reasoning.

The child of two and three years of age is at the sensory-motor stage of mind development. He longs for experiences which he can turn into action; his mind craves ideas which will express themselves in useful muscular co-ordination and the ability to adjust himself to his environment. To put into a child’s hands the materials for this sensory-motor education early is not to overtax his mind; instead, it satisfies his very important mind hunger.

The didactic materials of Montessori that supply this sensory-motor need of the very young child and should be presented early include the various dressing frames, the solid insets, the sound boxes, the blocks of the tower, the broad stair and the long stair, the latter without the use of the sandpaper numerals. As soon as the little one has made his own the muscular co-ordination and ideas of form in relation to size involved in this material and has begun to find the will power to correct his own mistakes, other home activities involving these mental faculties should be added to the use of the Montessori apparatus. The child may dress, undress, bathe himself, dress and undress a doll, build with large blocks, sort various objects of different shapes and sizes, as seeds, nuts, spools, button molds; handle and learn the uses of the furnishings and equipment of the home: toilet utensils, brush, broom, duster, dustpan, kitchen appliances, and the like; he should receive simple ear-training in discriminating different bell tones, high and low, loud and soft notes played on the piano, and hear good models of speech, both in diction and modulation.

At the age of three to four years, the sensory element in the child’s mental life is even more prominent, but it is separated a little from motor activities. If the child has had adequate training, he has obtained a large degree of muscular control; he can handle objects without breaking them, he can run without falling down, he can minister to his own bodily needs. Now his mind is hungry for sense images. He wishes to study his environment with the aim of securing a series of definite mind pictures. Ideas are to be stored in the workshop of the child mind for future use in building the power of constructive imagination.

The Montessori didactic apparatus suited to this ideo-sensory stage of the child’s development includes the color spools, the geometric insets, the baric sense tablets, the sandpaper boards, and the textiles. The sense-training involved in the child’s use of these should be applied in various ways: finding and matching home and outdoor colors, noting the size, shape, and form of various everyday objects, block building with an idea of form, cutting form to line with blunt-pointed scissors, clay-modeling, and constructive sand-play.

The child from four years to five shows a dawning of the constructive imagination. The spool with which he played like a kitten in baby days has new potentialities in his eyes. Having learned that it is wooden, round, and will roll, and having made a mental comparison of it with the wheel of his toy cart, which is also wooden, round, and will roll, he calls the spool a wheel. This is a very important break in the child’s mental life. It demonstrates to us that the child now has ideas in the abstract. Dr. Montessori meets this with those of her didactic appliances, which will lead a child by natural, easy steps from objective to abstract thinking. She strengthens the sensory life of the child and guides him toward a grasp of the symbols of thought. Those parts of the didactic apparatus which should be presented at this point to the child are the long stair, with the sandpaper letters, and the various arithmetic exercises to be had with the rods; the counting boxes and frame, the sandpaper letters, the movable alphabet, and the drawing tablets.

Now, the child shows individualistic thinking. The direct mental training of Montessori has built a solid foundation for the growth and unfolding of the imagination. Our place is to watch for the special trend of his mind development and help this as far as lies in our power.

Does the child show special interest in the symbols and combinations of number? We should help him to play store, provide him with numerical games, give him a chance to spend and account for a weekly allowance, do home errands, use a tool box, construct cardboard toys, and learn any other possible application of number in its relation to life. Does he make a quick mastery of the symbols of language? We should transfer him as quickly as possible into simple reading books, offering him a great variety of these, that he may feed his imagination with good stories.

It has been said that the average American child exhausts the possibilities of the Montessori apparatus at the age of five years. Of course he does. Dr. Montessori planned it as a means of lighting the flame, touching the torch, opening the switch.

With a marvelous completeness it does this. Our part lies in keeping the flame burning, guiding the express train of the child mind into the higher places of reason, imagination, and personal achievement.