Sensitive Period

Borrowing ideas from eminent biologists and philosophers who preceded her, Dr. Maria Montessori discovered in her St. Lorenz Pre-school that a crucial relationship exists between children and their environments. Furthermore, children are, by nature, self-motivated to learn from their environment in view of the fact that they carry with them from birth an individual potential for physical and cognitive development. This individual potential develops through what Montessori referred to as “the sensitive periods.”

Each sensitive period is a specific kind of natural force which motivates a young child to seek objects and relationships in his or her own environment which will fulfill his or her own unique inner potentials.  As a result, the environment must be properly prepared if children are to fully develop their unique human potentials.

            When Montessori teachers speak about children being “inner directed,” they are referring to an inner compulsion relative to a sensitive period. A Montessori teacher would say, for example, “The child is in her sensitive period for order.” This refers to each child’s predisposition to follow her own daily classroom routine in which she chooses the same materials in the same sequence.

            Dr. Montessori identified eleven different sensitive periods occurring from birth through age six. Each refers to a predisposition compelling the child to acquire specific characteristics as described below. The following ages of the onset and conclusion of each sensitive period are approximate and benchmark the subsequent general description.

1. Movement – Random movements become coordinated and controlled: grasping, touching, turning, balancing, crawling, walking (birth – one)
2. Language – Use of words to communicate; a relative progression from babble to words to phrases to sentences, with a continuously expanding vocabulary and comprehension (birth – six)
3. Small Objects – A fixation on small objects and tiny details. (one – four)
4. Order – Characterized by a desire for consistency and repetition and a passionate love for established routines. Children can become deeply disturbed by disorder. The environment must be carefully ordered with a place for everything and with carefully established ground rules (two – four)
5. Music – Spontaneous interest in and the development of pitch, rhythm and melody (two – six)
6. Grace & Courtesy – Imitation of polite and considerate behavior leading to an internalization of these qualities into the personality (two – six)
7. Refinement of the Senses – Fascination with sensorial experiences (taste, sound, touch, weight, smell) resulting with the child learning to observe and with making increasingly refined sensorial discrimination (two – six)
8. Writing – Fascination with the attempt to reproduce letters and numbers with pencil or pen and paper. Dr. Montessori discovered that writing precedes reading (three – four)
9. Reading – Spontaneous interest in the symbolic representations of the sounds of each letter and in the formation of words (three – five)
10. Spatial Relationships – Forming cognitive impressions about relationships in space including the layout of familiar places. Children become more able to find their way around their neighborhoods, and they are increasingly able to work complex puzzles (four – six)
11. Mathematics – Formation of the concepts of quantity and operations from the uses of concrete material aids (four – six)