Maria Montessori's Ideas for a Children's House

• Child-scaled furniture
• The concept that children learn through play
• The idea of developmentally appropriate education materials
• The "ungraded" class, which groups children by interest and ability rather by age, provides individually paced instruction, and gives each child freedom to proceed at his/her own rate
• The idea of the child as different from adults, not just a smaller edition
• The observation that infants are learning from birth onward, that age six is late to start thinking of a child's education and three is too early to begin schooling of the right kind
• The importance of the environment in which learning is to take place
• The significance of early stimulation for later learning and its implications for the education of the culturally impoverished child
• The observation that children take a naturla pleasure in learning to master their environment and that this mastery is the basis of the sense of competence necessary for independence
• The judgement that real learning involves the ability to do things for oneself, not the passive reception of a body of knowledge
• That the child benefits from learning materials that are intrinsically interesting, reality oriented, and designed to facilitate self-correcting and the refinement of sensory perceptions
• That imposing immobility and silence hampers children's learning and that, given interesting work to do, children will establish their own order
• The concept of "sensitive periods," phases of development appropriate to the learning of specific motor and cognitive skills.
• The right of every child to develop his or her own fullest potential and the idea that the school exists to implement that right