“The Teacher should have the humility to let the child work at his own development”

….Phyllis Wallbank

Practical Life lessons give the keys that unlock how to live together as human beings in this world and this begins at the earliest stages of life.  Montessori thought that practical life activities were one of the keys to helping the child to adjust, adapt, and find the real interior peace and joy God wants for them (this she calls “normalization”). Children have an interior drive to become adults but as we all know, it takes time for this to develop and at the earliest stages, they are still being created, and we need to let them grow. They want to do what adults do. They mimic the movement of our mouths at the earliest moments.  They speak phonetic sounds that will refine themselves to the phonetics of their immediate world.  They want to walk, move, and talk like we do.  But this requires first and foremost the interior physical and psycho-somatic developments of their own souls. Practical life activities are central to this growth.

The stages of the child’s development have not always been understood. Montessori wrote extensively about how frequent we have mis-read the needs and life of the child, and so she spends extensive time revealing to the world the inner life and development of the child, along with how to properly assist the child in the authentic flowering of that inner life and development. Many of us read a natural disordered or even fallen state into the child. There is truth in this, but as Montessori revealed through her schools, much of the disturbance and chaos found in children is caused by adults who do not understand how to properly nurture a child. To understand this role shifts the adult into one who is a guide who helps a child navigate in a real world by helping the child to begin developing interiorly in such a fashion as to prepare them for adult activities that will not flower fully until later stages of life.

Stages of Practical Life Rooted in Stages of LIfe

1. These activities begin at birth and in the earliest years the child’s brain and body become alive to all the activities and culture of immediate world of the home. What is happening at this stage is not so much the creation of an efficient cleaning machine but the creation of the inner organism and being of the child. The activities that foster this inner coming-to-be includes movements, care for self, care for environment, and care for others.  Interiorly, human beings are self-transcending beings, and so these “activities” reveal the coming-to-be of that inner self-transcending life.
2. As the child heads into the second major stage of development with the onset of the age of reason, these activities expand into wider collaborate activities with friends.  This really is the foundation of economic, political, cultural, and religious community.  Thus the practical life activities grow in scope and in complexity both personally and socially. Children like to explore and discover exchange and commerce with each other in various types of games (such as the banking game) as well as visiting places of business or mints that create coins and bills.  Culture is also opening up more deeply to them.
3. As the child then heads from the age of reason into the age of adolescence, the practical life world grows into the creation of a rudimentary economic, political, cultural, and religious life.  This is when Montessori called for the young man and woman to learn and enter into adulthood by working with the earth and selling the fruits of their labors in a shop.  Care for self grows into an intense push to develop one’s personal identity and place within the world. Care for others grows into the making of goods and the delivery of services.  Care of environment grows into the ordering and layout of farm life and the shop.  Practical life on the farm and in the shop becomes the arena for finding their identities and giving their lives to the larger good of order and good of others.

The lessons included here will begin with those that can be introduced at any age but are best started with the earliest years. To start, five are included. For now, learning practical life begins with these five. Master these and these will give you the models to develop all the other types of practical life lessons.

Below is a video of Margaret Homfray that introduces one on how to give lessons to children in general.

Five Basic Practical Life Lessons. These are “basic” because they will introduce you to all the elements involved in practical life lessons.  Hence, these give you the paradigm for such lessons.  Once mastered, you will then be able to develop your own lessons through task analysis.

1. Sweeping
2. Pouring
3. Washing Hands
4. Folding Exercise
5. Silence Games

Other common Montessori practical life lessons.

1. Dressing Frames
2. Walking the line

Make your own practical life lessons

1. Observation and seeing the child’s interior life and needs.
2. Training yourself to do it right in a meditative state of presence. Dwelling with God’s creation in its concreteness.
3. Task analysis and synthesis: The sequencing of steps.
4. Practicing the presentation.
5. Giving the presentation: inviting, loving, and showing
6. Letting the flower grow

General Areas of Practical Life: Suggested lessons to put together

1. Self-Control (movement) and care of self
2. Care of environment
3. Relating to and helping others
4. Being in and acting in public places