Preparing Children For Life

People often ask us why we have practical life activities in the Montessori environment. How are these related to the child's development, they wonder.

At one level, these activities are great for building fine motor skills, understanding sequential processes and developing concentration in young children. However, we must remember that practical life activities must eventually be PRACTICAL! They have to help equip children for real life.

When our 6-8 year olds stay in school overnight for sleepovers, they put all that practice in practical life activities to use. The children are responsible for planning the dinner menu (they decided on salad & sandwiches), purchasing the groceries, doing the actual cooking (with minimal adult assistance), serving dinner, and cleaning up after.

Speaking as adults, we very much enjoyed the hospitality!

Algebra In Early Years ?!

One of the amazing things about Montessori education is the subtle, indirect introduction of complex mathematical ideas (algebra!) right in the preschool years.

For instance, this 3 year old is working intently on the "Trinomial Cube” material. On the face of it, this is a fascinating puzzle that requires the child to place 27 different cubes in a manner that allows the box to close. However, there’s something much deeper going on: this cube is actually the geometrical representation of the algebraic equation (a+b+c)^3. As the child grows older, this serves as a foundation for understanding the concept of “cubing” a number or set of numbers.

By converting a dense equation into a wonderful, self-correcting puzzle, Montessori shows us that even young children can understand and subsequently master concepts far beyond what we may normally expect!

The Road to Memorisation

In conventional education, it usually transpires that rote memorisation comes first, and then conceptual understanding arrives (if at all).

In Montessori, conceptual understanding combined with sufficient practice leads to memorisation in a very natural manner. The addition strip board is a typical example of this process: the child works on single digit addition using concrete material.

After sufficient practice — along with recording the sums on slate or paper — the child is able to naturally increase her recall of individual sums & eventually memorise them.

Further, the concrete materials allow the child to make her own discoveries; for example, it is common to see children discover the commutative law of addition on their own (a + b = b + a), or in the case pictured above, that the number 10 can be split into two smaller numbers in many different ways!

The Path to Writing

Young children are often cognitively ready to express themselves through the written word, but have not yet developed their fine motor skills enough to write beautifully themselves. But how do we isolate the cognitive from the physical when it comes to written expression?

Dr Montessori’s insight was that by using printed “movable alphabets”, we can allow children to express themselves with the written word without yet engaging in the physical act of writing! Children as young as 3 can start constructing words phonetically, without worrying about the shape or form of the letters just yet.

This provides the cognitive & expressive practice the child needs, without overwhelming their hands with the physical effort they are not yet ready for. As with other materials, the movable alphabets illuminate a key Montessori principle: to isolate a single, specific concept for the child to thoroughly master — in the case, the skill of word-building.

Free play in Montessori

While some may think that Montessori environments place a premium on “work”, it is important to remember that free choice can include an option to choose free play at appropriate times — much like these children have chosen!

Research shows that free play in schools has numerous benefits linked to children having an outlet for their energies, building physical capabilities, as well as an unstructured opportunity to build social skills in group settings.

As the great child psychologist Jean Piaget once said, “It is through game playing, through the give and take of negotiating plans, settling disagreements, making and enforcing rules, and keeping and making promises that children come to understand the social rules which make cooperation possible."

Muscle Memory In Writing

Maria Montessori famously said, “What the hand does, the mind remembers”. The hand reports to the brain; the brain guides the hand; the cycle continues, resulting in the development of the intellect.

Thus, while learning to write, it is important to not jump too quickly into pen-paper work before building and refining the child’s muscle memory using their hands. The “sandpaper” letters give the child a concrete, tactile experience that helps imprint alphabet patterns in the brain.

In this case, this child is working towards mastering his understanding the letter “v” by tracing the corresponding sandpaper letter. This is critically important preparation before the child physically engages in writing the letter on paper or slates (and the coarse sandpaper is very enjoyable to run their fingers through!).

Nesting Dolls in Montessori

The first Russian nested doll ("matryoshka") set was carved in 1890 by a couple of Russian craftsmen; today they can be found across the world, including in Montessori environments. We love our Indian version of the original Russian matryoshka dolls!

What do these dolls have to do with Montessori, you ask?

Initially, young children love the surprise of opening these beautiful dolls to find another inside. Soon they begin working to undo and put together the dolls in the right order. Nesting materials like these dolls help children understand spatial relationships, develop fine-motor co-ordination, build the language of comparison (big, bigger, small, smaller), as well as prepositions (inside, outside, under). These dolls also give children the opportunity to concretely experience the concept of a whole object that contains individual parts that are nestled within.

Sensorial Development in Nature

“To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand

And Eternity in an hour.” - William Blake

Isn't it sad that children today often have the majority of their interactions with nature through a tablet, phone or TV? This is a feeble replacement for the real experiences our children deserve: feeling the softness of a petal in the fingers, listening to the songs of the birds in the forest, smelling the earth after the first rain.

It is critically important to maintain the link between child and nature. A direct relationship with nature is fundamental to the sensorial development of the young child. Further, as the child grows, it allows her to experience the wonder of belonging in this beautiful world of ours. On some occasions, nature can be brought into the prepared Montessori environment; on others, as in the case pictured, the children go out to see and experience the world as it is.

The Toddler's Sense of Dignity

We often forget that children don't automatically understand how to do some self-care tasks (blow their nose, comb their hair, wash their hands) that adults assume are easy. Remember: children really WANT to be able to do these things well & take care of themselves.

This wonderful extract from Dr. Montessori's book The Secret of Childhood, details the deep sense of personal dignity in young children:

“One day I decided to give the children a slightly humorous lesson on how to blow their noses. Since after I had shown them different ways to use a handkerchief, I ended by indicating how it could be done as unobtrusively as possible. I took out my handkerchief in such a way that they could hardly see it and blew my nose as softly as I could. The children watched me in rapt attention, but failed to laugh. I wondered why, but I had hardly finished my demonstration when they broke out into applause that resembled a long repressed ovation in a theatre. I had never heard such tiny hands make so much noise, and I had no idea that such small children would applaud so enthusiastically. It then occurred to me that I had perhaps touched a sensitive spot in their little social world.

No one really teaches them how they should blow their noses. When I tried to do so, they felt compensated for past humiliations, and their applause indicated that I had not only treated them with justice but had enabled them to get a new standing in society. Long experience has taught me that this is a proper interpretation of the incident. I have come to appreciate the fact that children have a deep sense of personal dignity.”

The Spirit of Self-Reliance

People often wonder why we make a big deal about children taking off their shoes on their own & placing them in the appropriate slots.

Wouldn't it be faster and easier if the adults just help them do it? Of course it would, but that is not the point. In Montessori, the goal is not to just get the act done, but to help the child recognise that they can take care of themselves.

Self-reliance and improved problem solving are important products of allowing children to become independent. Further, indirectly, children build their concentration, fine motor skills and co-ordination by relentlessly using their hands for a variety of self-care tasks.

Most of all, remember that we can help children remove their shoes. But what we cannot do is build self-confidence & independence FOR them. There are no shortcuts to this.

Practical Life: Matching Keys with Locks

Some Montessori activities are genuinely complex, and can be very confusing for adults unaccustomed to our approach. However, some other Montessori activities are very simple to understand, but can breed endless complexity with little tweaks.

One of our favourite introductory practical life exercises is the lock-and-key set: this is a simple set of locks and keys, with children trying to match the correct pairs. Based on the child's level, the set can contain a variety of differently sized locks, or a larger number of pairs.

It is not unusual for us to see children younger than 3 working on solving this puzzle for an extended duration of time without asking for any help. It is indeed a wonderful activity for developing fine motor skills and problem-solving abilities, and very easy to replicate at home!

Command Cards In Early Reading

Montessori offers several mechanisms to help early readers; one of our favorites is the "command cards". Children who have recently begun reading small words love the mystery of opening folded command cards. Command cards usually contain action words ("Jog", "Sit") that the child reads, processes and then proceeds to act out. Once the child becomes a more fluent reader, the command cards contain short sentences, and later, even simple recipes for the child to read and execute.

If your child has begun reading, this is also a great activity to try out at home, and a wonderful way to practice reading in short 5-10 minute sprints.

The Arts in Montessori

The arts represent the primal human need for communication beyond just words. Our earliest human societies valued music, dance, painting and theatre for this very reason: sometimes non-verbal modes of communication provide a more nuanced, enriched route to representing and sharing our thoughts and feelings.

For early learners, the arts can provide a deeply meaningful medium for expressing themselves on paper (as they literally don’t yet have the words!). The powerful feeling experienced by a young child on using artwork to communicate meaning provides deep motivation for the more abstract art that soon follows: that of writing.

To provide an opportunity for this to happen, Montessori educators integrate the arts throughout the classroom, both formally (through materials such as the Metal Insets) and in a more unstructured manner (an attractive set of crayons and paper, with no expectations on end product).

Sometimes, the latter is especially powerful, as in the case pictured here -- a 3 year old excitedly talks us through her drawing, telling us that this is a picture of “the sun and the sea”. For a child who cannot yet write, what a wonderful way to express meaning!