MADELEINE'S COLORING BOOK
A PREPARATION FOR WRITING
Coloring helps develop manual dexterity and prepares the hand for writing and all types of handiwork. When a young child observes parents or older siblings coloring, the stage is set for the child to begin to color.
Maria Montessori discovered that children have their own developmental time-clocks and they are obedient to inherent laws of nature that determine just when they are ready to develop a certain skill, such as coloring.
Children love work that is suitable to their level of development, and they need to be free to choose their work from an environment that is specially prepared to meet their developmental needs. Coloring sheets, colored pencils and crayons may be made available for the child to use, according to his desires, as soon as he is old enough to respect the materials.
Children 3-years old and younger will work to perform and perfect with their hands what they have absorbed with their minds. They will color the pictures again and again until they achieve the level of perfection they are striving for. Therefore, it is crucial that children have the example of excellence set before them, which can easily be provided with Madeleine's COLORED ILLUSTRATIONS.
DOWNLOAD COLORING BOOK
THE COLORED ILLUSTRATIONS
Accompanying the coloring book are hand colored illustrations colored by children's artist Madeleine Soltis. The colored illustrations set the standard for the child’s coloring work.
The colored illustrations are food for the absorbent mind of the young child. Each picture stimulates joy and conveys the feeling of peace and many other positive qualities such as orderliness, cleanliness and cheerfulness. The child age 0 to 6 years absorbs his environment, and the impressions he absorbs become the very stuff of which his mind is formed.
Showing children pictures of the grotesque, monsters, aliens and hellish creatures, inflicts harm upon the mind that is forming, as these things are frightening to the psyche, and the child will eventually out-picture, or manifest, whatever is in his mind. It is crucial that whatever is appropriate, purposeful, wholesome, harmonious, beneficial and beautiful surround the young child whose mind is in a formative state.
Montessori points out that it is the normalized child who will grow into an adult capable of correcting the ills of society. The normalized child is the child whose mind has not been formed with various patterns along the lines of ugliness and disorder. Read The Absorbent Mind by Maria Montessori.
Children may see the colored illustrations long before they are ready to begin with coloring work. We highly recommend that the colored illustrations be shown to babies because of the positive impressions contained within each picture.
Parents can set high standards for their children by providing them with examples of excellence such as the colored illustrations, which are intended for use with the coloring book for this very purpose.
LINK TO COLORED ILLUSTRATIONS
If you do not have access to a colored printer, we suggest that you take the PFD file of colored illustrations to a color-copying center.
This beautiful coloring book comes to you as a gift from the heart of children’s artist Madeleine Soltis.
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