Practical Life
The practical life section is a very important area in a Montessori classroom. It is through these Materials that the child develops the self-confidence, control and concentration essential for mastery of the other more advanced areas of a Montessori class.
Children will be naturally drawn to this area because these materials are most familiar to them. This familiarity also serves to provide the children with a feeling of security and well-being. The activities will contain objects and materials that are normally encountered in the every day living experiences of the child’s environment. Many of them are fundamental activities that children need to master to be able to live comfortably in the real adult world. Most of the activities of practical life will fall into four main categories: grace and courtesy, care of self, control of movement, and care of the environment.
- Purposes of Practical Life Activities:
- To develop and perfect muscle control and coordination through organization of movement.
- To develop a sense of physical and mental order through exactness in use of objects and working in a definite sequence.
- To develop understanding through control of the environment resulting in a sense of dignity and self-confidence, joy in completing tasks, and generation of social feeling among children.
- To develop concentration and persistence through focusing of attention on the work, thus allowing independence and self-reliance to be achieved.
- To establish the procedure for choosing work after a lesson has been placed on the shelf and returning materials to their proper place on the shelves.
- To establish respect for other’s work by learning that materials are not taken from another child but only from the shelves.
Sensorial
The sensorial materials help the child to become aware of detail. Each of the activities isolates one defining quality, such as color, weight, shape, texture, size, sound and smell. It is in this area that math concepts are first introduced and internalized.
The primary purpose of the sensorial of the sensorial activities is to help the child in his/her effort to sort out the many and varied impressions given by the senses. They help to do this in four ways:
- They are specifically designed to develop order, broaden and refine sense perception.
- The activities identify a single quality.
- They reveal a range of small differences.
- They explore patterns in those differences.
The child’s understanding of the world broadens when the sensorial activities awaken certain sense experiences that were previously unexplored, such as the feel of shapes or the smell of spices. They allow the child to experience and concentrate on particular qualities in perfect clarity and isolation.
The sensorial activities also provide the child with basic skills needed for mathematics work, including calculation of amount or degree, exactness in perception and dexterity, discrimination among similarities, repetition, set recognition, algebraic analysis, and recognition of progression in a series. Most of the sensorial materials provide the child with experiences in more than one of these skills.
Language
The language area contains many learning opportunities such as:
- Learning the shapes and sounds of the letters
- Perfecting the fine motor skills for writing
- Vocabulary development
- Matching of words and pictures
- Reading silently
- Reading development, reading word lists, sentences and stories
- Parts of speech, word games with nouns, verbs and adjectives.
The development of language in the early-childhood classrooms is an umbrella for the entire Montessori curriculum. Language learning occurs most profoundly in the moment to moment life of interactions within the classroom. Children learn to listen, speak and later to read and write. A balanced environment, one that is open yet not chaotic or inappropriate, is the most conducive to language learning. Activities related to the development of early-literacy skills greet young children when they visit the language area of a Montessori classroom. These activities include opportunities for young children to expand vocabulary, listen carefully to common sounds, and look carefully to find likenesses and differences among objects and pictures. Matching sets of objects, learning the names of objects and geometric shapes are other activities which build language and early literacy skills and will be found in a Montessori classroom. Specifically the metal insets, the sandpaper letters, and the moveable alphabet are very effective Montessori tools.
In the Montessori classroom teachers incorporate both phonetic and whole-word strategies to meet the needs of children.
Key strategies:
- Provision of an array of print activities
- Recognition that there is more than one way that children learn to read, so a variety of approaches will be used
- Demonstration of literacy
- Writing meaningfully in front of the children and reading back what is written
- Providing opportunities for auditory and visual discrimination activities
- Demonstration of an appreciation of words by playing games and commenting on the way new words sound.
- Reading books to the children on a variety of subjects
- Read aloud to children and encouraging the same at home.
Mathematics
By using concreate materials during the early years, the child can learn the basic concepts of mathematics. Montessori education provides many materials to develop mathematical skills.
Mathematics activities are organized into five groups:
- Introduction to numbers
- Introduction to the decimal system
- Introduction to tens, teens and counting
- Arithmetic tables
- Abstractions
The mathematics work proceeds as in all Montessori learning, from the most concrete to abstract, as the child is ready. Montessori students use hands-on learning materials that make abstract concepts clear and concrete. The approach to learning offers a clear and logical strategy for helping students understand and develop a sound foundation in mathematics and geometry.
Science
Science is an integral element of the Montessori curriculum. The program is designed to cultivate the child’s curiosity and determination to discover the truth for themselves. They learn to observe patiently, analyze, and work at each problem. Students engage in hands-on experiments and typically respond with enthusiasm to the process of carefully measuring, gathering data, classifying and predicting the outcome. One goal of Montessori science is to cultivate a lifelong interest in observing nature and discovering more about the world in which we live.
Some science activities you could see in a Montessori classroom are activities with magnets, weights, growing plants and classification of plants and animals.
Social Studies
Montessori preschools offer many opportunities for the child to expand knowledge of the world during the early years when they are motivated by spontaneous interest. Some of the materials in this are: Land and Water Globe, Continent Globe, World Map Puzzle, Picture of animals and people in other countries and career exploration.
The classroom offers a concrete representation of history by letting them work through timelines. Examples of study through the use of timelines are: prehistoric life, presidents, the student’s own timeline. Other cultures as well as our own are explored.