Furniture is our trade, toys are our passion
We're a small family business, and most days the bench is busy with handmade furniture. But the part we're proudest of is the hobby: making toys that give a child something to think about.
The same care goes into every toy
Every toy is made to the same standard and with the same attention: sturdy, safe, and built to last, so it keeps giving a child both delight and something worth learning. Each one is made along Montessori lines.
About Montessori
A child learns by moving
Montessori is nothing new — it's very well known, and interest in it has grown a great deal over the years. Riga alone now has dozens of places working with the method: kindergartens, child development centres, and single rooms set aside inside other schools.
the year Maria Montessori opened her first Children's House
the ages the method is written for, though a child is ready from birth
of Montessori kindergartens and development centres in Riga alone
Maria Montessori, an Italian physician and teacher, opened her first Children's House in 1907. The system she built is known the world over today as a strand of reform pedagogy, and it carries her name.
The method is written for roughly ages two to sixteen — though in truth a child is ready for it from birth, ready, that is, for a particular way of being regarded. It rests on a single conviction: a child learns by moving. The smaller the child, the more they need to develop movement, and the skill of grasping most of all.
The principle underneath it
From grasping to understanding
A child under one doesn't speak yet. But by handling things, by feel alone, they have already worked a great deal out — that a block has corners, say, and a ball doesn't. Once both shapes have settled into the child's mind, and a parent has put names to them, the child will fetch the right one every time, without fail.
How Montessori arrived at all this
Her whole way of seeing a person, and of seeing a child, came out of her earliest work — with sick children, and with children who were mentally ill — using teaching material other researchers had devised. Working with them, she came to a realisation: there were things they learned perfectly well, so long as the learning ran through the senses.
Then came the turn that decided the rest of her life. She was offered a preschool to run, and there, for the first time, she was working with healthy children too. Applying the same sense-led method to them, she found it carried a child forward faster on every front — and fastest of all intellectually.
A prepared room, and the material in it
She also found that children take in a great deal without being taught at all, provided the room around them is set up for it. The special teaching material is what really separates Montessori from every other approach, because it is designed rather than decorative: every piece is worked out around one question — handling this, how does a child develop themselves further?
Which is why any school running the method needs proper equipment to Montessori's specification, and the purpose-made material to go with it. In the preschool years the principles aim at the senses: telling colours and sizes apart first, then, gradually, letters and the sounds they stand for. The idea underneath all of it is simple — given something to do, a child builds themselves.
As Montessori put it, and not without reason:
The child is their own architect, and no adult has the right to alter that architecture.
Maria Montessori
Montessori opened up a different way of looking at a child, one filled with understanding. Too often adults fall short of recognising what a child is capable of, and in doing so hold back the growth of that small person's independence. To trust a child, and to trust what they can do, is the groundwork their self-belief is built on.
On Montessori pedagogy: RPIVA, I. Lāce