The Pinay Homeschooler

Montessori Practical Life: Folding Clothes

Saturday, January 17, 2015

We're back from our 3 weeks vacation and it was amazing! Now I'll save details on a separate post, for now allow me to show you how Mavi has been very helpful for the past few days. I give credit to the years of training of practical life activities based on Maria Montessori philosophy.

The traditional work in the family is known as the practical life work and is the most important area of an education for life. These practical life activities provides children the groundwork for physical, mental and social development. And what’s more important is that it’ll teach them the work habits that will lead to success in academic and in all aspects of life later.

One of the chores I dread doing is folding the laundry. My husband usually do this for me, but since he's busy most of the time, the folding doesn't get done and the laundry would pile up at times. Now this is where Mavi comes in handy. I gave him the responsibility of folding his own clothes, sort and put them directly in his closet.

To start with, Mavi would sort his own clothes from the pile of laundry.

I placed masking tape on his shirt, pants and underpants and these serves as a guide for folding. There's a number on the tape to indicate which one he will fold first.

He enjoys folding as he finds the approach “scientific” due to the order of how you fold a piece.

For now, I’m giving him the task to fold his own clothes. Once he masters this, then he can fold his little brother’s clothes.

At the end, he's happy that he was able to help, felt accomplished and proud that he was able to contribute something for Mommy.

More practical life activities can viewed in my Pinterest Board:

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This post is part of the 12 Months of Montessori Learning which is hosted by Natural Beach Living and The Natural Homeschool.

Amazing blogs involved in the 12 Months of Montessori Learning

Natural Beach Living ~ The Natural Homeschool ~ Living Montessori Now ~ The Kavanaugh Report ~ Mama's Happy Hive ~ Study at Home Mama ~ Every Star Is Different ~ Child Led Life ~ Grace and Green Pastures ~ The Pinay Homeschooler

12 Practical Life Christmas Activities: On the 5th day…

Monday, December 8, 2014

Painting a Monet-inspired Christmas tree.

Remember how I raved about the books of James Mayhew (the Katie series)? We'll one of our favourite books is the Katie Meets the Impressionist [aff. link]. We talked about the style of Monet and why he is called an “impressionist” artist.

And since its Christmas, we use the Christmas tree as an inspiration.

Below, we work together all the time. His and hers.

We dabbed and smeared our drawing paper with green for the tree. He used a pencil to draw a triangle outline as guide which is not visible in the picture. Then we added details for the balls, lights, stars and presents under the tree.

Here’s my tree.

Mavi’s tree.

Now here’s a macro look of our tree…

Toddler Beginnings 02

Saturday, December 6, 2014

We’re reading Christmas stories with these books (Mavi and Vito). I didn’t have time to visit the local library so these books from last year’s purchases were of great help!

For this week, we did the transferring activities. Objects used were fruits and ribbons. I like it when he listens and observe properly whenever I demonstrate what to do. After which Vito would successfully emulate my actions. It’s funny how he would drop the fruits whenever he transfers them from one bowl to another. My guess is that he thinks these were balls. We have this ball which is as small as these fruits and he loves making that bounce.

Finally! He realized that these objects were different and started to put them nice instead of dropping.

And of course, we worked with these ribbons as well. He can transfer them easily, though at times his fingers would get stuck in between the twirls.

The week before, we had red… now we have yellow! Objects in the basket are: book, Duplo giraffe, yellow colour card, Playskool barrel, ring stacker, squeezable cube, yellow shirt and rattle.

I would just place this basket in the sitting room where he can see it all the time and explore it. Oh by the way, I realised it would be BEST to put on a yellow shirt as well!! And he picks the book first. And later on spilled his brother’s LEGOs, so I asked him to pick some up and put it in the box. He obliged! Early training for cleaning up LOL!

No cutting and gluing here, simply finger painting. I used two colours this time (Red and Yellow) to show the difference.

This was supposedly a transfer activity of utensils but he ended up using them as drums and cymbals. So yes! Making music using plates and kitchen utensils, why not?