Practical Life Work

While in this school, I was able to observe several works that are part of the practical life work.  The skills learned through practical life work help children develop a sense of reality, add to the growth of many developmental skills, help children develop social and emotional skills, motor and coordination, and prepare children to be active participants in their current and future lives.  This article does a nice job giving an overview of practical life work. 

I was able to observe children were engaging in practical life work everyday that I observed at this school. Each day the teachers would set out the laundry that had been washed the previous afternoon and one of the works that the children could do was fold the clean laundry. In the laundry, there were child sized aprons and napkins that were used for snack or for lunch time. The children received a lesson on how to correctly fold the aprons. I was amazed to watch a child demonstrate the folding of an apron for me and even more amazed that they could orally tell me the steps as they folded the apron. The first step was to lay it flat on the mat that was on the floor with the loop that goes around your neck closest to the child. The child would then pick up that loop and fold the loop down until it touched the bottom hem of the apron. Then, the child would fold in each side and tuck the ties that go around the back of the apron into the middle before folding the bottom hem up to meet the top. Each apron was placed in a pile and the entire pile was put back on a shelf near the kitchen. The napkins were folded in half and then half again, and as the teacher reminded the younger children how to fold the napkins they were using math talking about halves and fourths. The napkins were also placed either on a shelf or in a basket depending upon if they were to be used for lunch or for snack. Snack used smaller napkins and lunch used bigger napkins. The napkins were made out of fabric and were reused everyday. 

I liked the idea that the napkins looked worn and used, but knowing how Montessori valued the Earth and caring for the earth, I could immediately see how sharing with children the idea of reusing cloth napkins could be a powerful skill as they grow older. 

One of the other practical life works that I was able to observe was the loading of the dishwasher. I thought it was interesting to watch children so eloquently load and unload a dishwasher when the dishwasher was almost as tall as they were. It was then I began to wonder more about what Maria Montessori might think of the modern day works that children are doing in comparison to the initial methods she developed, but the more I thought about it, the more I realized that it was not that much different from the way that the children also hand-washed each of their cooking materials or baking materials after they used them. It was just another interpretation of this practical life skill, one that was still amazing considering I know many adults who struggle to load a dishwasher properly. 

Another practical work that I observed was the art of arranging flowers. Each Monday, the directress purchased a bouquet of cut flowers and those were placed in several areas around the classroom and outdoors. The children know that at any time they are more than welcome to select one or more of those flowers and arrange them in a vase of their choosing. All of the vases that I saw were bud vases, so no more than 2-3 flowers could fit in them. Another way that children honored the nature of the flowers was to draw them. Sometimes a child would arrange the flowers and immediately sit down to draw or sketch them, and sometimes one child would arrange the flowers and another child would sit and sketch them. I appreciated how the children were taught how to appreciate the beauty of the flowers. In addition to all of the other motor and cognitive skills they were using while drawing or sketching the flowers, they also were taught an appreciation for them and handled them very delicately.

When watching the children wash their cooking and baking materials, it was clear that many children knew how to do that work very well. There were two 8-in stainless steel buckets about 3-4 inches tall and behind the two buckets there was a ceramic rectangle shaped plate with a dish scrubber that looked natural and a small brown glass bottle with a dropper in the top of it. The dropper bottle contained dish soap. There were some children who knew to just add a few drops of the dish soap to the one of the stainless steel buckets and there were still other children who added almost half the dropper bottle of soap to one of the stainless steel buckets. Even when adding much more soap than needed, because of the small size of the dropper bottle there was never a problem with the children creating a mess. The children would use the scrubber to clean each of their baking tools or materials and then would transfer them to the second stainless steel bucket where they would fill it with clean water and rinse the items off. 

One of the tenants of practical life work is to teach the children that there will only be a limited number of works each day, once the children were finished cleaning their baking or cooking materials they placed them back on the tray, however many times the adults would come around and collect those already cleaned materials and run them through the dishwasher at the end of the day for sanitary purposes. I did wonder why children were rushing in each morning to select a baking or cooking task, and once I learned more about practical life work and the idea that there is one a day of each work, it started to make more sense to me. 

Another way that practical life work helps the children grow and develop different skills is through the use of color-coded materials. As I sat with a student while he taught me the raspberry muffin lesson, I asked him how he knew which ingredient was which. He replied and he said that he knew that the flour was always in the largest jar, and the salt was always in the jar with the gold lid. The adults had subtly color-coded each of the baking ingredients so that no matter what baking or cooking work the child chose to use, the lid on each ingredient stayed the same. The child who was working with me said that the lid on the salt jar was always gold no matter which work he chose. I began noticing other details on each of the work trays that were for baking and cooking, such as the lid on the baking soda was always silver, and sugar, if needed, was always in a ball jar that was half the size of the jar the flour was in.

I also noticed that each of the different types of work were grouped together. and this helped children flow from one level of work to another. In the case of practical life work, the flowers lived near the windows all the time or outside, and the baking or cooking work was on one of two shelves, both closely placed near the kitchen. This was also true for any of the art or sewing work as well. all of the collage and mixed media work was on a shelf by itself as well. Each of the simple works were on the left side of the shelf and the more complex work was on the right side of the shelf, as a way to help children identify which work they had a lesson on from either an adult or an older child already, and so that each work tray once it was reset, could be returned to the spot it belongs in. 

All of the cooking and baking materials were child-sized when they were able to be, and all of the jars were easy for the children to open and close, primarily because one of the works that they would have done previously was about opening and closing containers. I watched several 3-year-olds engage in the work of opening and closing different containers during the first two weeks I observed. The work for the containers was set up so that the child would retrieve a metal shopping basket and inside the shopping basket there would be a variety of containers. In this basket, there was a square Ziploc container with a pull-off lid that included a tab at one side, a small plastic cylindrical container with a twist on/off lid, a pencil pouch with a zipper that could be opened and closed, and several glass jars that had lids that opened and closed with different flaps and latches. There were also several cardboard boxes of different shapes and sizes that children could take the lids off of and put them back on. This work was introduced to the younger children or children who had not yet had any baking lessons as a way to help them learn how to open each of the containers that would contain ingredients for baking or cooking. 

Even the measuring cups and measuring spoons were realistic and had the correct measurements on them. In most cases, the measuring cups and measuring spoons were adult sized, however I do remember seeing one set of child size measuring cups, where the handles were covered with a grippy surface so that the child could hold on to them a little bit better. I did make a note that this particular set of measuring cups was placed on the tray of a simpler baking recipe, presumably so the child could learn how to hold and maneuver the measuring cups.

The practical life work was always fascinating for me to observe as they are activities that have been seemingly cut out of traditional public school classrooms. It is so interesting to me that we do not engage children in the work of baking and cooking in early childhood classrooms as there are so many skills that can be learned just in the area of practical life work alone. I do understand that much of it is probably due to safety and the storage of food materials, however, that does not mean that we should not let children learn these important life skills.