Practical Life Studies (three year cycle)

The Practical Life exercises are important elements in Montessori education. They provide the fundamental building blocks on which the entire Montessori Method is constructed. The Practical Life exercises are the ones that are presented first to the young child entering a Montessori school.

The aims of these exercises are both developmental and environmental in nature. By developing the child’s coordination and concentration, and enhancing his/her natural sensitivity to order, the child accumulates successful interactions with the classroom environment. This success grants the child ever greater self sufficiency and independence. Practical Life exercises are simply various kinds of everyday domestic activities such as pouring water, scrubbing a table, polishing silver, etc. The Practical Life exercises develop and refine the child’s fine motor abilities while preparing the child’s hand for writing.

The Practical Life area also includes the integration of graceful movements with courteous behavior called Grace and Courtesy. Opportunities are provided for the continuous growth of the child, thereby building a foundation upon which all of the more “academic” achievements of a Montessori program are constructed.

The Sensorial materials in the classroom are designed to heighten the child’s senses by isolating each sense and developing it to its fullest. These exercises help the child develop skills needed for later academic areas such as observation, comparison, judgment, reasoning, and decision-making. The Practical Life activities are the foundation of the Montessori experience and the Sensorial activities are the heart. Working with the Sensorial materials helps the child to order his/her sensory impressions; the senses are the keys to the acquisition of knowledge.

Sensorial learning is considered to be indirect preparation for mathematics. The Montessori Math materials are concrete and provide the child with visual, manipulative representations of mathematical concepts. The child does not consider math to be “work”. Instead he/she is drawn to this area by an internal drive to bring order and form to his/her world – to classify and to understand. Order links the impressions of a student’s outer world with his/her inner world.

The purpose of the math materials in the Montessori preschool curriculum is not to teach math at an early age, but rather to assist the child in developing a clear understanding of the mathematical concepts while engaging with the materials. This process is referred to as concrete learning. As the child moves through the curriculum and matures he/she is ready to move to abstract learning.

Language both spoken and written is the method of communication between people. Montessori brings the child from speech to printing and then to reading and comprehending the words that are written. In our program of studies, auditory, visual, and motor skills are refined during the first year. The exercises in Practical Life and Sensorial encourage the child’s natural ability to write words and phrases as early as age four. It was this spontaneous writing that four year olds demonstrated in Dr. Montessori’s first Children’s House that in part made her method world famous.

The Montessori approach to reading is phonetic. The child is introduced to the sounds of the letters in our alphabet. Once the child has developed a phonemic awareness they begin to construct CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. The child develops from reading on a word level to reading on a sentence level with the introduction of sight words. Opportunities for oral reading are provided for the child to further develop fluency and comprehension.