Practical Life (First week)

Practical Life Exercises are the foundation of the Montessori environment, provide a sane and wholesome range of activities which allow the children to develop control and coordination of movement, awareness of their environment, orderly thought patterns, independent work habits, responsibility, and many other characteristics which can only be attained through spontaneous, purposeful work. Presentations for practical life activities:

• Grace and courtesy (such as moving carefully around the classroom and welcoming others)
• Whole hand movement (such as transferring objects from one bowl into another)
• Wrist turning (such as pouring beans from one container to another)
• Care of the indoor environment (such as dusting)
• Care of the outdoor environment (such as plant care)
• Care of self (such as buttoning)
• Three-finger grasp (such as knobbed puzzles)
• Writing, cutting and pasting
• Food preparation (such as peeling carrots)
• Handwork. 

This includes all of the remaining, enjoyable activities that children do with their hands, within a prepared environment, such as knitting, felting, clay, water play, and blocks 

Survival Skills

Montessori Practical Life activities can also include specific survival skills, especially for the children in the 6-9 age group. Here are some topics to consider: 

All sorts of cooking, meal planning, grocery planning

• Organizations like Boy Scouts, Girl Scouts, or 4H
• Books like the Dangerous Book for Boys (I don’t recommend the mimic version for girls), Knots to Know, and the American Boys Handy Book
• Swimming lessons
• Bike riding
• Fishing
• How to identify poisonous plants and animals
• What do do in case of bad weather
• Building a tree fort
• Basic first aid
• How to use the phone correctly, and answer the door safely
• Knowing his or her full name, address, and phone number
• How to type and use the computer, keeping in mind that the parent is responsible for ensuring internet safety.

Pouring Exercises:

When presented to the children, they are shown how to do pouring without spilling the contents of the vessels. Mind-hand coordination is developed as the children exert their efforts to pour in the same manner presented by the teacher. Thus, all their focus and attention, their entire body concentrates to complete "pour without spilling"this procedure promotes what Montessori calls "integration of the mind and the body" which is the primary foundation for the child's "development of will". The child discovers that he can conduct his bodily movements through the direction of his will. When translated to a life skill, this gives the child confidence in facing challenging activities realizing that he can practically accomplish any task as long as he wills it. 

L Pouring lentils

L using a funnel to pour pasta shells into a small necked jar
(make sure what he pour is smaller than the funnel hole.

Sorting Exercises: 

Sorting is an open ended activity with many variations. It can be as simple as sorting a bowl of coins into smaller bowls of pennies, nickels, dimes, and quarters.” Other possibilities include: pasta shapes, beads, pom-poms, beans, paper clips, and many other common household items. Please remember to supervise children when small objects are being used, as objects can be choking hazards.

The Direct Purpose of Sorting Activities

“Learning to recognize commonalities and differences among objects in our world helps a child create more organized patterns of thought and information retrieval.” The sorting activities that children use in Montessori allow them to “experience the satisfaction of creating order out of chaos; and learn about classifying objects based on common physical properties”. Both visual discrimination and stereo gnostic perception become developed as the children work towards more challenging sorting activities. 

The Indirect Purpose of Sorting Activities

Sorting activities can prepare children for future math concepts; “sets and groups are easily visualized when sorting”. Science activities can be explored by “grouping objects or living things according to properties such as magnetism, flotation, type of substance, and biological categories”.

Bug sorting objects : on one side I mix rocks, acorns and letters from  a Scrabble game

On the other side I'm using empty apple sauce cups, to separate them by category.

 

 

Presentation on the whole hand :

The child fills the bowl with water to the red line...the red line says, "stop don't go over me!  They can baste the water back and forth as many times as they like. This lesson is especially popular with 3-year-olds. In this presentation we are using 2 mason jars, water, green food dye , a sponge for spills.

I made a little mistake giving her tall glasses....

She learn 3 new words today: squeeze, release and transfer.........

So I change containers to short mason jars, much easier and she felt more confident about what she was doing.

Lucas totally focus on his squeezing.....

He really grasp the concept quickly and there went 45 minutes.....