Normalization
Normalization is Montessori's later word for the calm, settled state she saw in children after long stretches of concentration on work they chose themselves.
The observation that started it involved the knobbed cylinders. In Spontaneous Activity in Education (1917) she describes a girl of about three in Rome taking the cylinders out of their block and putting them back. Montessori counted forty-four repetitions. She lifted the child, chair and all, onto a table, and had the other children sing. The girl kept working. When she stopped, she looked round "as if awaking from a refreshing nap."
What she saw afterwards
Montessori called this event a polarisation of attention. Each time it happened, she wrote, the child began to change: calmer, more intelligent, more expansive.
She gives other cases from teachers. A three-year-old who copied everything her older sister did became absorbed in building the pink tower, forgot her sister, and from that day developed on her own.
The reverse case is in the same chapter. Children interrupted partway through their cycle of work stay restless, and the book says they remain "in an abnormal state."
The later definition
Association Montessori Internationale's glossary today ties normalisation to repeated, spontaneous concentration on freely chosen work, and lists what shows it: love of work, attachment to reality, and a liking for silence and for working alone.
What it asks of a parent
Mostly it asks you to leave repetition alone. A child on the twentieth round of the cylinders is doing the thing Montessori counted. Don't call them to the table, and don't offer the next lesson until they stop by themselves. The work cycle page covers the morning that makes room for it.
Sources
Passage numbers point into the public-domain texts this site checks every citation against.
- Spontaneous Activity in Education, Maria Montessori (1917), ch. IX, passages 24727:96, 24727:97, 24727:126, 24727:134: The girl of about three and the forty-four repetitions with the cylinders; polarisation of attention leaves the child calmer, more intelligent and more expansive; the younger sister and the pink cubes; children interrupted in their cycle remain in an abnormal state.
- Glossary of Montessori Terms, Association Montessori Internationale (read ): Normalisation as the result of repeated spontaneous concentration on freely chosen work: love of work, attachment to reality, love of silence and working alone.
To see this at work across a whole area, the sensorial lessons list every lesson in order, with its age and materials.
Related terms: work cycle, prepared environment, control of error. All eight are in the glossary.