Seguin demonstrated that by isolating difficulties, deficient children could learn many lessons. He had perfected a practical, efficient method which Dr. Montessori realized would enhance the teacher's effectiveness in giving presentations to any child, including normal and bright pupils. Known as the Three Period Lesson of Seguin, this method is one of the fundamental techniques of the Montessori method itself. There are three distinct steps in the Three Period Lesson…

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Dr. Montessori's anthropological studies pointed out similarities between the natural development of language in primitive people and children. Like our primitive ancestors, an infant can only make sounds. The child is born with the physical and neurological potential for speech, but a language does not spring up in vacuum. It must be acquired from the adults around, or it must be re-invented from scratch. From the moment of birth, the acquisition of language is an "unconscious" process. A child who is isolated and not exposed to speech will not learn to speak.  In an average environment, a child will acquire a vocabulary of about 1,000 words by the time he/she is three years of age. In The Absorbent Mind, Dr. Montessori describes how an infant takes in sounds from the environment and, reinforced by the adults, learns to selectively reproduce only those sounds which are meaningful. Through this process of absorption the child constructs his/her language which is typically referred to as the "mother tongue.” This essay includes the presentation of the Three-Period-Lesson of Seguin, which Dr. Montessori adopted as a standard technique in her method for introducing new vocabulary in any academic subject.

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