Maria Montessori believed that children learn through 'doing'. She drew her ideas about how to handle and educate children from her observations of them at different stages in their development and from her exposure to children of different cultures. She identified what she saw that was common in all children as 'the universal characteristics of childhood':

• From birth to six years children have ‘absorbent’ minds.
  
  
• All children want to learn, to investigate. They enjoy active learning where they are involved as much as possible.
  
  
• All children learn through play and work.
  
  
• All children pass through ‘sensitive’ periods which are periods of intense sensibility to a certain area of development or concept forming, for example, language.
  
  
• All children want to be independent