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In our increasingly competitive world, the key to professional success is linked to our ability to be creative. Everyone will agree that creativity stems from a well-developed imagination. Before one can create any one “thing”, it must have been imagined by someone. Dr. Montessori opined, “We often forget that imagination is a force for the discovery of truth.”1 Imagination, like so many other things, has its sensitive period in early childhood. However, there are no dolls, talking animals or fairy tales in a Montessori classroom. As Dr. Montessori observed, when given freedom of choice and the opportunity to have real-life experiences, the children under her care were naturally attracted to reality. These children walked away from a teacher who was telling a fairy tale in order to examine bugs in the garden, turned away from pretty dolls for a chance to serve real tea to adult visitors and, ignored an expensive dollhouse and instead chose to tidy the classroom.
She further observed the children’s natural drives and realized that a child develops knowledge based on impressions fixed in his mind by his experiences in reality. “The children’s mind between three and six can not only see by intelligence the relations between things, but it has the higher power still of mentally imagining those things that are not directly visible.” 2 For instance, through hands-on work with the Montessori materials, a child understands the quantity represented by each number from 0-9 (many of the sensorial materials represent our Base 10 system). Therefore, when a child is introduced to addition, he will be able to focus on the process of putting numbers together and not worry about the concept of the numbers themselves. It will be easier to master addition/subtraction, etc. because the concept of the numbers are already clear in his mind. This type of learning will continue through the more advanced concepts of math (and other areas of learning). Our goal as parents and