Practical Life Exercises can be categorized into four different groups:
-Preliminary Applications: the child learns the basic movements of all societies such as pouring, folding, and carrying.
-Applied Applications: the child learns about the care and maintenance that helps every day life. These activities are, for example, the care of the person (i.e the washing of the hand) and the care of the environment (i.e dusting a table or outdoor sweeping).
-Grace and Courtesy: the children work on the interactions of people to people.
-Control of Moment: the child learns about his own movements and learns how to refine his coordination through such activities as walking on the line.
Children are naturally interested
in activities they have witnessed. Therefore, Dr. Montessori began
using what she called “Practical Life Exercises” to allow the child to
do activities of daily life and therefore adapt and orientate himself in
his society.
It is therefore the Directress’s task to demonstrate the
correct way of doing these Exercises in a way that allows the child to
fully observe the movements. Montessori says, “If talking don’t move, if
moving don’t talk”.
The directress must also keep in mind that the goal is to
show the actions so that the child can go off and repeat the activity in
his own successful way. Montessori says, “Our task is to show how the
action is done and at the same time destroy the possibility of
imitation”. The child must develop his own way of doing these activities
so that the movements become real and not synthetic.
Montessori also saw the child’s need for order, repetition, and succession in movements. Practical Life Exercises also helps to aid the child to develop his coordination in movement, his balance and his gracefulness in his environment as well as his need to develop the power of being silent.
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