Montessori Childrens House
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Montessori 101:  Sensitive Periods

Posted on Friday, September 26, 2008

Last week I wrote about the Absorbent Mind, the all important formative period in a child’s life.  Let’s talk about the Montessori concept of “Sensitive Periods”.  The process of the Absorbent Mind is served by “Sensitive Periods”.  Sensitive Periods are transitory periods in the child’s early life during which the child’s brain and the senses are prompted to focus attention on certain aspects of the environment sometimes to the exclusion of all other things.  Sensitive Periods assist in developing of specific faculties of the brain such as language, movement and coordination, social skills and cultural awareness.

Learning during a Sensitive Period is effortless, but these periods are also transitory and irretrievable. Once they are past they never return.  This doesn’t mean that a child will never learn that skill, but learning after the Sensitive Period has past will always be less easy.  This is why learning a new language is most easy for a child before the age of six.  The Sensitive Periods give specific energy and time for areas of the brain to develop and be enriched without the confusion of other information coming into the brain.

The intense and prolonged activity prompted by the Sensitive Periods does not fatigue the child rather; they give the child renewed energy.  They give him direction and when properly fulfilled increase independence and cognition.  By means of this work the child’s brain is creating its cognitive road map, the neural pathways for understanding and processing information.  This process also leads to more abstract thinking based on information taken in through the Absorbent Mind and the Sensitive Periods.  Later in the child’s development (around 7 years of age), the brain will begin to organize this information and prune away neural pathways that are not important to the child’s adaptation and assimilation to his time, place and group. 

Montessori teachers are trained to observe and watch for Sensitive Periods in the development of the child.  The Montessori classroom is specifically designed to enrich theses periods with developmentally appropriate activities that feed into those special times of intense focus and concentration.