Montessori mobiles are elegant in its simplicity and don’t have music or brightly colored cartoon images. The purpose of each is clear and developmentally appropriate to a child’s growing visual sense. I am a big fan of Montessori’s scientific approach from birth. Below is the suggested timeline we followed to introduce Montessori mobiles.
First few weeks- child lies on floor mat to observe the environment. While this continues over the next few months, we introduce mobiles as an aid to developing their concentration. Here is the sequence we followed:
Week 3– Anika seemed comfortable in the new environment, so we introduced the Munari mobile. She spent a lot of her wake time concentrating on it.
Week 5– Octahedron mobile replaced the Munari. Octahedron introduces the primary colours in 3 dimensions.
Week 6- We set up another mobile station near the kitchen in the living room. Anika wanted to be able to see me, esp in the evenings. We introduced the Rainbow mobile, which is the introduction of secondary colours. She thoroughly loved this mobile for many a weeks.
Week 7- We introduced the Gobbi mobile at week 7, which refines the visual sense through the gradation of colors from the lightest to the darkest.
Week 9– We introduced the Dancer’s mobile at week 11. This is the last in the series of visual mobiles and introduces realistic shapes and represents movement, flexibility, bodily expression and potency and human interactions.
Important notes:
- We changed approximately every 2 weeks or she got bored.
- After week 11 when she was bored of the dancers mobile and not yet ready for grasping mobiles, we rotated and went back to Munari mobile and started the sequence all over again. She loved them all once again. I also introduced a series of my own batting mobiles.
- We didn’t want to drill and used the Fealkira Adhesive hooks as our ceiling hooks and they were perfect!
- These mobiles are followed by batting and grasping mobiles.
