Children in Montessori classrooms often spontaneously help one another, just as the late Montessori biographer E.M. Standing affectionately describes witnessing here:
“Only last week, as I was observing in a Montessori class of forty (where the average age was under five), I watched a little boy of three and a half pouring rice from a jug into a cup. As he did so he spilt some of the grains on to the floor. Suddenly, as from nowhere, prompt as the fire brigade, a little girl of four and a half arrived on the scene with a miniature broom and began sweeping the fallen grains together. She had scarcely finished doing this when another child, even younger, appeared and gathered them into a tiny dustpan. Everything happened quite spontaneously. The teacher, who was at the other end of the room with her back turned, did not even know what was taking place.”
E.M. Standing, Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work