AMS flashcards
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32 cards. Read the term and the definition here. The deck at the top of this page is optional.
- Absorbent mind
- The young child's capacity to take in the environment effortlessly; unconscious from birth to three, conscious from three to six, forming the personality and intellect.
- Sensitive periods
- Transient developmental windows of intense interest during which the child acquires specific skills, such as order, language, and movement, with unusual ease.
- Normalization
- The observable state of a child who concentrates on freely chosen work, showing discipline, sustained attention, and spontaneous sociability.
- Polarization of attention
- Deep, self-chosen concentration on an activity, repeated until satisfied; it is the central indicator of healthy development in the Montessori view.
- Three-period lesson
- A teaching sequence of naming, recognition, and recall; the third period is attempted only after the child reliably identifies the object in the second.
- Human tendencies
- Universal drives such as order, exploration, work, repetition, exactness, and communication that the prepared environment must serve for development to proceed.
- Control of error
- A feature built into the material or process that lets the child detect and correct mistakes independently, without adult judgment or intervention.
- Grace and courtesy
- Short, scripted role-plays teaching social conventions such as greeting, interrupting, offering, refusing, and apologizing, practiced in small groups.
- Isolation of difficulty
- Presenting one new element at a time while other variables are held constant, so the child can focus attention on the specific skill being learned.
- Preliminary movements
- Practical life exercises teaching basic physical control, such as carrying a tray, rolling a mat, opening and closing containers, and using a chair.
- Indirect preparation
- Activities whose immediate purpose differs from the skill they build, such as pouring building wrist control for later handwriting.
- Stereognostic sense
- Identifying an object's form by touch alone, without sight, trained with the mystery bag and geometric solids.
- Pink tower
- Ten pink wooden cubes graded from one to ten centimeters, stacked to isolate size and build visual discrimination of dimension.
- Sound cylinders
- Paired cylinders filled with different materials, matched and graded by the sound they make when shaken, training auditory discrimination.
- Constructive triangles
- Five boxes of colored triangles assembled into plane figures, teaching equivalence, area conservation, and the relationships among geometric shapes.
- Movable alphabet
- Loose letters used to compose words from known sounds before the child can write, because analysis of sounds precedes synthesis into reading.
- Sandpaper letters
- Tactile letters traced with two fingers while the sound is spoken, teaching letter-sound correspondence rather than letter names.
- Pink series
- Reading material for three-letter phonetic words with short vowels, the first decoding stage after sound analysis is secure.
- Metal insets
- Ten metal frames and inserts traced and filled to develop pencil control, lightness of touch, and left-to-right directionality for handwriting.
- Grammar symbols
- Colored shapes representing parts of speech, such as the black triangle for noun and red circle for verb, used in function-of-words lessons.
- Golden beads
- Base-ten material of unit, ten, hundred, and thousand beads used to teach place value, exchange, and the four operations concretely.
- Number rods
- Ten graded rods, one to ten units long, teaching quantity and number names before the written symbols are introduced.
- Stamp game
- A bridge material using colored stamps for thousands, hundreds, tens, and units to move from golden beads toward written algorithms.
- Hundred board
- A grid of one hundred squares with tiles numbered one to one hundred, extending linear counting and skip counting.
- Land and water forms
- Paired trays modeling island and lake, peninsula and gulf, isthmus and strait, teaching geography vocabulary with a control of error.
- Botany cabinet
- A cabinet of leaf-shape insets with nomenclature cards, teaching leaf forms and classification in the botany curriculum.
- Five vertebrate classes
- Mammal, bird, fish, amphibian, and reptile, taught with parts-of-animal nomenclature and external characteristics in zoology.
- Clock of eras
- A long timeline showing the sequence of eras of life on Earth, giving elementary children a visual sense of deep time.
- Montessori bells
- Thirteen bells, eight white and five black, used for pitch matching, grading, and naming the scale before notation.
- Silence game
- A group activity in which children remain still and quiet to sharpen auditory attention and self-control, not merely to rest.
- Prepared environment
- A child-sized, orderly space with open low shelves and sequenced materials, designed so the child can choose and complete work independently.
- Uninterrupted work cycle
- A protected block of about two and a half to three hours allowing choice, concentration, repetition, and completion without interruption.