Читать книгу A Montessori Mother онлайн

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When I emerged from this brown study, the little girls had finished their task and there stood before me tables set for twenty little people, set neatly and regularly, without an item missing. The children, called in from their play in the courtyard, came marching along (they do take collective action when collective interests genuinely demand it) and sat down without suggestions, each, I suppose, at the place he had occupied while working at those same tiny tables. I held my breath to see the four little waitresses enter the room, each carrying a big tureen full of hot soup. I would not have trusted a child of that age to carry a glass of water across a room. The little girls advanced slowly, their eyes fixed on the contents of their tureens, their attention so concentrated on their all-important enterprise that they seemed entirely oblivious of the outer world. A fly lighted on the nose of one of these solemnly absorbed babies. She twisted the tip of that feature, making the most grotesque grimaces in her effort to dislodge the tickling intruder, but not until she had reached a table and set down her sacred tureen in safety, did she raise her hand to her face. I revised on the instant all my fixed convictions about the innate heedlessness and lack of self-control of early childhood; especially as she turned at once to her task of ladling out the soup into the plates of the children at her table, a feat which she accomplished as deftly as any adult could have done.