Physical Development

Practical Life:
Physical Education, "Free" Play, Constructive Play

Interest:

• The child will learn independence through self-help skills
• The child will develop his concentration, coordination and sense of order and independence
• The child will refine and develop large and small motor skills
• The child will learn grace, courtesy, and manners

Practical life
The very first activities in a Montessori classroom develop the children's ability to look after themselves and their surroundings.

They can practice dressing skills on specially made frames which allow them to try zips, buttons, bows and buckles. They use little jugs filled with beans or rice and then water to practice pouring; they spoon, scoop, or use droppers, tweezers and even chopsticks to transfer from one bowl to another.

Other activities use scaled down versions of real equipment: bushes and brooms, wash-up bowls and cloths, show cleaning and polishing kits, even a tiny safe iron and ironing board. There are also varied opportunities for pairing socks, folding and sorting clothes, setting a table, painting and sewing - even packing a tiny suitcase.

One mother of a Montessori child discovered exactly what her daughter was capable of when they both went to help at a mixture sale. Her little girl set to work pairing shoes, folding clothes and attempting to impose order on the huge piles of mixed bag.

That's an example of the confidence as well as the competence which children gain through practical life activities. Their added purpose is that children who work on real tasks which involve the hand and the mind together develop a great capacity to concentrate, which is the best possible preparation for the intellectual work to come.

Sensorial
Dimensions, Thermic Tactile, Gustatory, Auditory, Olfactory, Baric, Kinesthetic, Visual Tactile, Visual Chromatic, Equilibriol

Interest:

• To enhance and refine the perception of the gradation of colors, dimensions of shapes and sizes.
• To refine the development of memory skills for temperature, texture and baric attributes.
• To develop senses of taste and smell.
• To enhance and refine the child's ability to distinguish the acuity of sounds such as silence, human voice, noise and music notes. This goal will provide a necessary foundation for a music education.

Sensorial
One of the first pieces of sensorial apparatus children use when they come into the preschool is a set of solid geometric forms called the geometric solids which they explore with their hands, matching identical ones and sorting into sets according to their geometric properties. At first they are presented in baskets, each basket having one type of solid: semi-regular solids curved surface solids and so on. As they get older, children become fascinated with words and are given the names: pyramid, dodecahedron, ellipsoid. Another piece of material uses flat geometric shapes - circle, square, triangle, rectangle, rhombus which are fitted into spaces on a tray, rather like a jigsaw puzzle.

On the Sensorial shelves there will be specially designed materials to encourage development of the senses, such as a tower of pink blocks; sets of cylinders gradiated in size; cylinders with knobs which have to be fitted into the right holes in a block; rough and smooth tablets in boxes; smelling bottles; fabrics to sort by touch; puzzle blocks called the binomial and trinomial cubes which are interesting in themselves but later turn out to be a physical illustration of mathematical formulae. Each of these is used to stimulate and refine one of the ten sensory areas and each will be presented to the child to be used in an exact way to aid his development. The sensorial materials also prepare the child for reading and writing.

Some materials, like the cylinders of the geometric insets which are held by their little knobs between finger and thumb, prepare the muscles of the hand for writing, others prepare the ear for hearing fine differences in sound (to prepare for, among other things, distinguishing between letter sounds) by listening both to silence and to sounds which are presented as 'noise' with the sound boxes and as musical notes with the bells. Sorting tablets according to subtle difference in shade and color sharpens the child's perception of slight difference, another prerequisite for recognizing letter and number shapes. If each step is taught by itself, one step at a time, the child will gradually, at her pace and in her particular learning style, integrate the different skills and will emerge, often seemingly effortlessly, as a competent reader and writer. Teachers are aware of how much has to happen to enable this and that only the child, through active manipulation of the materials, can make it happen.