Workshop booklet for Hamilton Park Montessori School Parent Education Series, 2011-12. Original content copyright to Hamilton Park Montessori School.

1. Practical Life & Language
Across the Planes of Development
Hamilton Park Montessori School
Wednesday, January 25, 2011
6:00 - 8:00

2. Practical Life Activities on Display
Bridge Program
Rock Transfer
Bean Transfer with Cups
Water Transfer with Sponge
Dry Transfer with Pitchers
Water Transfer with Pitchers
Transferring with Tongs
Early Childhood Program
Water Pouring with Pitchers
Penny Polishing
Tissue Paper Art
Food Preparation: Celery Canoes
Elementary Program
In Elementary, Practical Life is focused on being a contributing,
successful member of an elementary community. Students learn to be
responsible for their work by managing their time, and work as a
community to keep the classroom beautiful. Many of the Practical Life
works are created to help students strengthen their coordination and
fine-motor development. Students are exposed to an array of Practical
Life activities such as knitting, weaving, cooking, and gardening, all of
which create opportunities that support the physical development of
the child. Elementary students are also expected to do more writing
throughout the school day, which strengthens their fine motor skills while
building their writing proficiency.
While there are fewer Practical Life lessons in Elementary, Practical Life
activities continue. Displayed are some tools of Practical Life frequently
used by Elementary students: Clean-up tools, Art tools, Cooking tools
and Gardening tools, and Time-Management tools.

3. Language Activities on Display
Bridge Program
Puzzles
Object-to-Object Match
Object-to-Picture Match
Picture-to Picture Match
Early Childhood Program
Rhyming Picture Cards Moveable Alphabet Phonetic Words
Sandpaper Letters – Introduction Sight Words
Initial Sounds Work Metal Insets
Sentence/Picture Matching Writing Samples
Elementary Program
Phonics: Phonograms
Reading Comprehension: Reading for Understanding & SRA
Mechanics: The Comma Key Experience
Grammar: The Noun Key Experience
Grammar: The Verb Key Experience
Sentence Analysis: Subject and Predicate
Word Study: Antonyms
In Elementary, the Language Curriculum overlaps with Early Childhood
in its refinement of phonemic awareness and strengthening of the
foundational basic word composition and reading. It then extends
further into using word study, advanced reading comprehension,
grammar and language mechanics, novel study, the research writing
process and the creative writing process.

4. Practical Life: The Foundation of Learning in Montessori
“The satisfaction which (the children) find in their work has given them a
grace and ease like that which comes from music.”
- Maria Montessori
Ultimately, the goal of education is to prepare a child for Life. What
kinds of skills will she need? What level of confidence? What is the best
way to develop her attention span and concentration so that she can
master challenges? How should she view the process of learning? How
should she feel about mistakes? How can she best create and maintain
positive relationships with her peers? In Montessori, the entire classroom
environment is dedicated to creating the best possible scenarios, but
the cornerstone for it all is Practical Life.
The Practial Life area it builds physical skills, it builds cognitive skills, and
it builds the Self of the child. Rooted in real activities, offers the child a
variety of opportunities to carry out everyday tasks requiring a range of
motor skills and, when completed successfully, enables the child to feel
independent, successful and valuable to his or her classroom
community.
Physical Skills
Consider all the movements, steps, and areas of attention you must employ in order to set up,
enjoy (or share) and clean up a snack. You likely used a variety of lifting, carrying, balancing,
pouring, spooning or spreading, rinsing, drying, setting down and organizing actions in order to do
this one thing: feed yourself or someone dear to you. What a series of tasks for a child to master! And
yet, the child learns to do it.
The activities in the Practical Life area are developed and sequenced to build the small- and gross-
motor skills that children need in order to become proficient at everyday tasks of living: nourishing
themselves, dressing themselves, cleaning up after themselves, and so on. Practical Life assists the
student in achieving these tasks by providing daily opportunities to strengthen small and large motor
skills, overall body coordination, eye-hand coordination, and manual dexterity (especially that
pincer grip!).
Cognitive Skills
An observer in a Montessori classroom will discover that, as she moves along a shelf, the first area
of the shelf has simple transfer activities, where a child moves dry beans from one vessel to another
by grasping, followed by an activity for practicing pouring beans, followed by an activity for
practicing spooning them. Further along in the sequence, there might be the Cereal work, where the
child pours dry cereal into a bowl, followed by pouring milk into the bowl, and then spooning the
cereal and milk into his or her own mouth, all as part of the same work. Of course, the dishes must
then be cleaned and dried and returned to the shelf for the next hungry student, and this requires a
whole other set of complex actions. The advanced activities of food preparation, for example,
require an increasingly advanced set of physical and skills, attention span, memory, sense of order
and concentration.
And of course, the nature of the mistake in Practical Life is that it can be resolved: a spill can be
wiped up; a dropped spoon can be washed; a broken vase can be swept up and replaced. The
child who learns in Practical Life about cause and effect, learns that learning is sometimes messy,
and that messes are forgivable when the mess-maker takes responsibility and cleans them up. This is
the beauty of Practical Life: through practice and repetition, the physical and cognitive
development of the child progress in harmony and happiness.

5. Personal Development
Perhaps the most subtle and beautiful element of Practical Life is its impact on the spirit of the
child. Children naturally wish to learn, engage with their environments, and be valued
contributors to their communities. Children, like adults, are enormously social creatures: they want
to be able to do as their peers and elders do, and they want to be valued according to the
values of the society around them. Practical Life helps them in these efforts.
Confidence: A child who has the time and opportunity to
work on the activities of Practical Life is a child who learns
that she can meet her own needs. She recognizes that she
has much to learn… and that she is capable of achieving.
She can set out to accomplish a task and, after some
practice, witness her own success. What a joyful day, the
day she learns to pour her own milk without spilling or tie a
bow without help. What a momentous occasion, to realize
you have achieved something great, simply because it’s
obvious!
Independence: The goal of the education, Montessori said, is to help the children reach the point at
which they no longer need the teacher. It is a goal that will take a child into adulthood to fully
realize, but it certainly progresses by leaps in Practical Life. When a child learns that he can feed
himself, he has taken a very long stride indeed in his movement toward self-sufficiency. When a
child learns that he can learn from and solve his mistakes, he has taken a very long stride in his
relationship with learning.
A Gift Worth Sharing: Maria Montessori realized that all the skills and cognitive gains in the world
can only go so far to prepare a child for Life—we are social beings, we long to be valued by the
communities in which we live. For this reason, the area of Grace and Courtesy is also an integral
part of the Practical Life curriculum. It is through lessons in Grace and Courtesy—from waiting a
turn, to learning to interrupt, to resolving conflict peacefully—that children first learn to share their
environment with each other. As he begins to see the respect that grows up between himself and
other children who are learning Grace and Courtesy, a child learns sincere empathy,
compassion, respect and camaraderie. He learns to value the community of which he is a part—
and he learns the joy of being mutually valued by that community. It becomes a joy of the
maturing student to be a help to the younger students—when he learns to button his own jacket,
suddenly he begins to volunteer to button the jackets of those who have not yet mastered the
feat. When he sees a younger peer overwhelmed by a spill, he walks over to help, mop in hand.
When he sees two children distraught with conflict, he jumps into action and tries to resolve their
distress. It is a hope for humanity that the child who learns these lessons in his classroom will one
day take them out into the world.
Practical Life is both the pouring of beans and much more than the pouring of beans. It is a gift to
our children and to those who may one day rely upon them.
“Any child who is self-sufficient, who can tie his
shoes, dress or undress himself, reflects in his joy
and sense of achievement the image of human
dignity, which is derived
from a sense of independence.”
- Maria Montessori

6. Language in the Montessori Classroom
“The ability to write will be acquired as a result of the analysis of the words
each one possesses and of the activity of one’s mind which is interested
in such a magical conquest.”
-Maria Montessori.
Language is communication, a form of exchange whose mastery
requires the recognition, comprehension and retention of sounds,
words and rules if one is to make or translate the abstract relationship
between an object and a string of sounds. Language is affected by
hints of locality, mood, class-structure, and countless other factors.
Language is in fact, such a complex and layered pattern of linguistic
equations; it is a wonder that all humans embrace it. And what a
wonder it is, as Montessori pointed out more than a century ago, that
the most proficient learners of language are children!
Even before imitating the first syllable, a child is taking in language and responding by turning toward
voices, watching people speak, expressing emotion with body language, differentiated cries, cooing
sounds, etc. This is the beginning of a very long journey that begins simply by connecting sounds with
faces and will eventually grow into the ability to read and express abstract concepts in writing.
Oral Language Development
Oral language and vocabulary development are ongoing, occurring parallel to other language
activities, and are not confined to any one area of the classroom. Children are presented with named
objects, then pictures, helping them to learn that objects can be represented by symbols. These
nomenclature and vocabulary enrichment lessons expand the child’s vocabulary through precise
terminology, enhancing their ability to express thoughts. This ability to express oneself verbally is directly
related to the development of writing skills, since the child’s writing is an extension of their oral
language. Children are read to often. Books are of high literary quality and are beautifully illustrated in
order to inspire wonder and enjoyment. Frequent group discussions promote freedom of expression and
peer sharing. Children develop self-confidence in speaking by talking about their own experiences.
Oral expression begins simply, beginning with one idea at first, and gradually increasing the
complexity and layers of ideas expressed. Some opportunities for vocabulary development include:
- Names of objects in the environment; names of objects illustrated in pictures.
- Matching exercises (i.e. colors, fruits, flowers, clothing, animals, environmental objects, etc.)
- Attribute words (i.e. big, little, short, thick, thin, etc. Could be in connection with the use of
sensorial equipment.)
- Classification (i.e. things that go together, mothers and their young, opposites.)
- Geometric, geography and science terms.
- Group Discussions and opportunity for oral expression (i.e. Circle time, seasonal holidays, any
time which allows for common discussion.)
Phonemic Awareness & Word Composition
Phonemes are the individual sounds that make up the words we use in language, and are largely
represented in writing by a single letter or pair of letters. In Montessori, the Sandpaper Sounds are used
extensively to teach the visual representation of these phonemes. These lowercase letters of sandpaper
mounted on tablets are introduced to the child as soon as there is reasonable hand control to trace
the letters. This tracing movement insures maximum use of the child’s muscular memory, pronouncing
the phoneme aloud employs auditory memory, and the eye movement as they follow the hand
employs visual memory. Lower case letters are presented because they are they symbols most used in
reading and writing. The sounds of the letters are taught as opposed to the names because the sound
is what the child hears in words.

7. “…education is not something which the teacher does, but a natural process
which develops spontaneously in the human being. It is not acquired by
listening to words, but in virtue of experiences in which the child acts on this
environment. The teachers task is not to talk, but to prepare and arrange a
series of motives for cultural activity in a special environment for the child.”
– Maria Montessori, The Absorbent Mind.
The Sandpaper Sounds provide the child with a sensorial experience that is both enjoyable and useful to
the child who is beginning to recognize the important role that letters play in words that he or she
cherishes: his or her name, the names of family and friends, the words that represent favorite objects
both at home and out in the world, and so on.
Once a child has a working knowledge of about 10 phonemes expressed as letters, he or she may be
ready to begin composing words-- even if s/he is not yet able to write with pencil and paper. The
Moveable Alphabet is introduced during this special time in the child’s development: it is a writing
exercise, and although there are no manual writing skills involved, the child is able to place letters to
compose words. Montessori observed that the children often go through the process of word
composition before acquiring the skill of reading. This process of encoding involves taking a word,
analyzing it into its sounds, finding the letters to represent the sounds and placing them in proper
sequence. At first the child is not asked to read back the words, as reading requires decoding, a
separate mental process for which the child may not be ready. After much experience with the
Moveable Alphabet, the child may create words, sentences and even stories on their own.
Writing
One of the most exciting things possible in life happens in early childhood: A day comes when they
realize that they are able to write a word with a pencil. And then another, and another, and another!
Montessori calls this phenomenon the “explosion into writing,” and it opens up many doors for the child
with many thoughts to share! Many of Practical Life and Sensorial exercises assist the child in developing
the hand coordination needed for writing. These skills are further refined with the use of the Metal Insets,
which also give precision to the movement of the hand. In order to write, the child must understand
that written symbols represent spoken sounds.
Reading
There are two separate skills needed in reading:
- Decoding, or the ability to decipher words, primarily through breaking them into their
phonemes, but occasionally through use of memory (for non-phonetic words).
- Comprehension, or the ability to understand which concepts and thoughts are being
conveyed.
Decoding skills are developed through a series of exercises that teach sounds, phonograms, sight
words (sometimes called “puzzle words,” these may be non-phonetic words, such as “sight” and
“would”) and give practice in sounding out printed words. Many tools are used to build decoding skill,
from continued work with the Moveable Alphabet and Sandpaper Sounds (which include digraphs and
long vowel sounds) to word booklets and Dolch Word activities.
Comprehension, more than simply recalling the definition of a decoded word, requires more subtle
skills than those of decoding. Comprehension is what will allow children to enjoy the nuances of
language, consider meaning, and think critically about what they have read. Before the child is
able to comprehend, they must have been exposed to different
experiences, encouraged to experiment, to question and to make
judgements and draw conclusions.
Maria Montessori recognized that the process by which a chld
learns to read is more than putting letters together; it is a process of
gaining access to the world.

8. Thank you for joining us!