We spent five minutes with Melissa Rohan, president of Waterfront Academy, learning about an important aspect of Montessori teaching methods, spooning.
There are several different transfer materials like beans and water. Spooning is another transfer method. It requires control of your fine motor skills so you don’t lose the contents within the spoon. You have to also be able to spoon up the material, because you can’t just push the materials around.
When children spoon, they do it from left to right. You’re training the brain to start reading. There are fine motor skills involved, as well as senses. We start with big things then work our way down. In this photo the transferring material is rice, which is something small that requires more skill.
What’s also interesting in this photo, which is why I loved it, is he’s got his tongue sticking out. You can just see the amount of concentration and focus in this
child. The way he’s holding the spoon, you can see he is making sure that rice is not going to fall out of that spoon! You can see all those things I just described above in the face of that child in this snapshot.