Over the past few posts, we’ve been looking at the foundational lessons of practical life skills that are offered in a Montessori classroom for three-to-six-year-olds, but in reality these lessons should be offered in all classrooms and homes.
The practical life skills of caring for oneself, caring for one’s environment, caring for others and caring for your community form the strong underpinnings for building our lives.
For lifelong personal growth, these foundations of practical life skills should grow and offer us independence, empathy, along with an understanding of the responsibilities of citizenship.
Caring for one’s community develops a respect for shared resources, civic awareness, a sense of belonging, cooperation and a sense of responsibility.
As we see personal growth in a child, we also observe their eagerness to keep their shared spaces clean and organized. Again, this is where the importance of a prepared environment becomes evident. When we, as the adults in charge, have created a space where there is a place for everything and show children how to return everything to its place, we can watch the children taking charge of that space and be able to return it to order.
The lessons in caring for the environment come to the forefront, as children independently notice that a job needs to be done, and simply do it with no adult intervention.
Sense of responsibility for shared spaces
At clean up time, or as a child sees the need, we will notice children doing the following activities and more:
- Sweeping, mopping or dusting shared areas
- Cleaning tables, chairs and shelves
- Washing windows and mirrors
- Dusting and watering plants
- Organizing shelves to original order
- Restocking supply shelves and activities
- Returning activities to the shelves, ready for the next person
Preparing food for all
When children having many years of living a classroom routine, we should also see a quiet coordination of food preparation for snacks and community meals.
These activities, again developed with lessons for care of the self and care of the environment, now extend into taking care of community.
- Setting tables
- Serving food to others
- Baking bread or cooking soup to share for lunch
- Preparing snack or lunch for the group
- Cutting fruit and vegetables for everyone
- Cleaning dishes and space after snacks and lunch times
Taking care of the outdoors
In the outdoor areas we will see independent activity in the following activities:
- Gardening
- Composting
- Recycling
- Cleaning classroom pet habitats
- Racking leaves
- Picking up fallen twigs and branches
Volunteering for jobs
Many classrooms also use rotating job assignments where children volunteer. Some of these jobs might include the following:
- Snack helper
- Librarian
- Peace table keeper
- Materials checker for math, language and other materials
- Weather chart handler
- Greeter for visitors
Personal awareness
Also, as a sense of caring for the community grows, children become more aware of their movements and the impact of their bodies and voices. Some of the activities we see carefully performed:
- Walking around others’ work
- Speaking softly (using their inside voices)
- Waiting patiently for others to finish
- Resolving conflict with problem solving techniques
- Participating in group meetings and activities
- Inviting others to join an activity
Group awareness
As a child prepared to enter an elementary environment, we observe their skills to know they can navigate this new group setting. We should see a child that is eagerly involved in the following:
- Planning events with others
- Participating in group/classroom meetings
- Voting on projects and rules
- Solving problems
- Group decision making
Inherent structure allows growth
The growth we see in children’s care for the community relates also to the fundamental structure of a Montessori classroom, that allows for the following:
- The prepared environment of people, tools and objects, ideas, and nature
- Mixed age classrooms that lead to “big sibling/little sibling” mentoring and relationships
- Respect for others’ work and activities
- Learning activities that lend themselves to cooperative games and student-led lessons
- The three-to-four-year cycle of a child’s work in a classroom
- The addition of new students each year, while retaining older students
- Grace and courtesy skills allowing children to navigate group situations.
SUMMARY
A parent once asked me, “When will my son stop sweeping the classroom floor and start doing “real” work?”
The children working on practical life skills do the real work of learning to care for themselves, their classrooms and homes, others, as well as their larger community.
They will take these basic skills and build on them, for all of their lives.
Out of these basic practical life skills, our interest and desire for building academic skills bloom.
Wanting to learn to read, write and do arithmetic evolves naturally out of our desire to care for ourselves and others. How many apples do we need to cut to serve 25 people? How do we follow a recipe? How do we grow tomatoes and cucumbers for snack?
With strong practical life skills, we step confidently forward with our lives, no matter our age.
The obstacles we all face in life can many times be removed when we focus on these four questions of practical life:
- Do we need to take better of ourselves—physically, mentally, emotionally, and spiritually/socially?
- Do we need to better care for our homes, our neighborhoods, our local places and organizations?
- Do we need to better care for the people and relationships in our lives?
- Do we need to act in community to solve the problems around us, as well as to make life better for ourselves and others?
Our practical life skills develop and hone our sense of responsibility and our abilities to respond to challenges. The development of cooperation is also part of this process.
We learn to respect shared resources, as well as become more aware of the issues facing our larger community.
With grace and courtesy skills we have a way to work peaceably with others.
Perhaps, most importantly, our practical life skills help us feel we belong to our place and time, living a life worth living.
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