The next Montessori exercise for Valia was a simple, rhythmic one—walking on a line to secure bodily poise and limb control.
It was just another game for a child, full of happy surprise, too, for she never knew when the sweet notes of the piano in the big rooms of the Children’s House would tinkle out their call to the march. But when the pianist played a tune that was simple and repeated its melody over and over again and was marked in its rhythm, Valia and Otello and Mario and all the other babies put away their work and fluttered like wind-blown butterflies over to the place where a big circle was outlined in white paint on the floor. To march upon this line, now fast, now slowly, sometimes with the lightness of a fairy and then with the joyously loud tramp of a work horse, oh, how delightful! Sometimes the music changed to the rhythm of running or a folk-dance step, and this gave further delight to the little ones.
At first, Valia could not find the white circle of delight. Her fat feet refused to obey the impulse of her eagerly musical soul. But with the days she found poise and grace and erectness and the crooked limbs began to straighten themselves.
She sat, for hours at a time, in a patch of sunlight on the floor, using her incompetent little fingers in some of the practical exercises of everyday living. The directress gave her a stout wooden frame, to which were fastened two soft pieces of gay woolen stuff, one of which was pierced with buttonholes and the other having large bone buttons. Valia worked all one morning before she was able to fit each button in its corresponding buttonhole, but when she did accomplish this, the triumph was a bit of wonder-working in Valia’s control of herself. It started her on the road to physical freedom.
[Illustration: An important physical exercise of Montessori.]
Happy in her new accomplishment, she mastered all the other dressing frames; the soft linen with pearl buttons that was like her underlinen, the leather through which one thrust shoe buttons with one’s own button hook, or laced from one eyelet to another, the lacing on cloth like her mother’s Sunday bodice of green velvet, the frames of linen with large and small hooks and eyes, the frame upon which were broad strands of bright-colored ribbon to be tied in a row of smart little bows.