Читать книгу A Montessori Mother онлайн

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No one had suggested that they leave their work-tables to play in this way (indeed a few too absorbed to heed the call of the music still hung intently over their former occupations), no one suggested that they step in time to the music, no one corrected them when they did not. The music suddenly changed from a swinging marching air to a low, rhythmical croon. The older children instantly stopped stamping and began trotting noiselessly about on their tiptoes, imitated again as slavishly as possible by the admiring smaller ones. The uncertain control of their equilibrium by these littler ones, made them stagger about, as they practised this new exercise, like the little bacchantes, intoxicated with rhythm, which their glowing faces of delight seemed to proclaim them.

I was penetrated with that poignant, almost tearful sympathy in their intense enjoyment which children’s pleasure awakens in every adult who has to do with them. “Ah, what a good time they are having!” I cried to myself, and then reflected that they had been having some sort of very good time ever since I had come into the room. And yet even my unpractised eye could see a difference between this good time and the kindergarten, charming as that is to watch. No prettily-dressed, energetic, thoroughgoing young lady had beckoned the children away from their self-chosen occupations. There was no set circle here with the lovely teacher in the middle, and every child’s eyes fastened constantly on her nearly always delightful but also overpoweringly developed adult personality. There was no set “game” being played, the discontinuation of which depended on the teacher’s more or less accurate guess at when the children were becoming tired. Indeed, as I reflected on this, I noticed that, although the bigger ones were continuing their musical march with undiminished pleasure, the younger ones had already exhausted the small amount of consecutive interest their infant organisms are capable of, and, without spoiling the fun for the others, indeed without being observed, had suddenly stopped dancing and prancing as suddenly as they began and, with the kitten-like fitfulness of their age, were wandering away in groups of two and three out to the great, open courtyard.