Many Montessori schools have the great benefit of a full complement of programs. Toddler students, as young as 18 months old, will stay at their school for as many as thirteen years before they graduate as 8th graders. A lesser few Montessori schools may even have programs for infants on one bookend and high school at the other. The familiarity with the building and grounds, the people, and certainly the pedagogy, is of great comfort to both children and their parents. But familiarity is also of great benefit in an educational sense. Piaget, himself the president of the Swedish
Montessori Society, did a well-known test called the “mountains study.” He put children in front of a simple plaster mountain range and then asked them to pick from four pictures the view that he, Piaget, from where he was sitting, would see. The test was initially used to show a child’s development in visual-spatial awareness, namely that children younger than age seven were egocentric and unable to see another’s viewpoint. However, a follow-up study using a scene familiar to children, the setting and characters from Sesame Street rather than the completely foreign Swiss Alps showed that the familiarity of setting had a dramatic effect on the child’s learning.

A Montessori environment makes use of this principle in a myriad of ways. A most visible example of this concept would be the “hierarchical colors.” In Early Childhood classrooms, for 3-6 year olds,, an arithmetic material introduces a mnemonic color-coding to place value. Units are green. Tens are blue. Hundreds are red. Thousands? They’re green, because thousands are still units; just units of thousands. These hierarchical colors are then used as a constant device as the child moves towards more complex and abstract math. The Stamp Game, for all four operations, utilizes wooden squares, “stamps”, to solve in all four operations. The bead- frame (for addition, subtraction, and multiplication), the checkerboard (multiplication), and the “racks and tubes” (division) all use the same identifying colors. The colors of the short and long chains, the colors that correspond to each part of speech, all serve as a conceptual grounding for the child, a link to the concrete experiences that preceded it, and a guide to further exploration. The material is new, the concept is more complex, but the familiarity of color (or shape, or timeline, etc..), isolates the difficulty, and frees the mind.