Carolyn Sherwin Bailey

softness and roughness, smoothness and coarseness.

They are to arouse and awake into activity habits of quick perception, keen appreciation, and constructive invention.

we will have developed an observer who knows how to use his senses in the practical living of life.

there were sixty-four of these flat, white wooden spools, wound with eight colors and eight of each color, showing almost all the grading of color that makes this old earth of ours so lovely.

Some of us steal bread when we are hungry. Some of us steal love when we are famished for it. Children steal because we or the world have starved them of something which they crave for their natural, best development of body, mind, or soul

Every child is color hungry.

have thought that we were teaching our children color when we called their attention to a colored object. A child is much more apt to associate taste with the apple which we show him when we try to give him a color lesson, and quite
possibly we make a false statement when we say that the apple is red. Very few apples are red; they are dark red, light

, Dr. Montessori’s own box of sixty-four color spools that include almost all the tints and shades of the prismatic colors, black to gray, and the scale of browns. If we are not so fortunate as to be able to use this apparatus, which is a most careful and scientific analysis of color, we can try to study color ourselves, and point it out to children as it is found in the home in textiles, silk and worsted, papers, flowers, and colored crayons and paints.

Dr. Montessori says that teaching must be simple and objective. There hasn’t been enough of “calling a spade a spade” in our American schools and homes.

Show your child red, or the letter A, or a moral fact—it doesn’t matter much which—and name it red, or A, or right.

Ask him to tell you just what you told him about it.

Ask him to pick out red from other colors, or A from other letters, or a moral act from immoral acts. This is Montessori teaching reduced to A B C, but it is teaching that is successful.

To be able to think down the color scale from blue to a blue that is mixed with gray; to be able to think in another kind of mental scale from cause to effect—these are both chromatic mind operations.