Practical Tips for Preparing Practical Life at Home

Practical Life can be easy to implement using what you have available at home.

There are some specific characteristics of Practical Life materials to keep in mind.

The materials should be:

• Familiar and adaptable

• Promote beauty and simplicity 

• Appropriately proportioned physically and psychologically

• Arranged in an organized way

• Realistic and functional 

• Not gender specific

They also offer an isolation of difficulty, meaning that one new challenge will be introduced and mastered at one time. This is done to offer the child the greatest chance of being successful and having the desire to move forward with a more challenging task, as they are ready. 

Practical Life indirectly prepares the child for the future work they will be doing. Scrubbing, for example, prepares them for cursive as they scrub the table from left to right, top to bottom in a circular motion. 

In addition, Practical Life indirectly prepares the child’s tripod writing grip, muscular memory, precision and consciousness of left to right/top to bottom. 

There’s also a limited quantity of Practical Life materials. There are no repeated materials so there’s more interest, a stronger desire to repeat the work and build mastery. Having just one of each material also builds respect and care for the work available.

Here’s a few more things to consider when building a Practical Life material at home:

• Focus on what is essential, necessary and useful. 

• Coordination: choose a color theme for the work to help the child know what goes with that set. There’s no wrong color to choose, just make sure each Practical Life work has a different color scheme rather than all being the same color. 

  • If you’re handy with sewing you can use bias tape to add trim around a mat to match the set or even just colored electrical tape can do the trick.

Essential Practical Life materials

At home, while it can be lovely to offer a wide array of Practical Life materials, most of us do not have the space for everything. It’s workable to offer what’s appropriate for your child at this moment in time and then rotate in or out alternatives. In my opinion, the most essential Practical Life materials are the following:

• Table Washing

• Baking/cooking (can be together in the kitchen rather than a separate table/shelf)

• Accessible clothing/self-care areas in bedroom and bathrooms

• Sewing

• Experience with pouring, spooning which can easily happen in the kitchen or during mealtimes 

Things to keep in mind when implementing Practical Life at home:

Working alongside your child is often the best way to jumpstart Practical Life at home. This scaffolds the process and gives your child more opportunity for success.

Make sure to offer time for your child to figure it out once they’ve seen how to do the task. And know that we’re hoping for progress over a perfect product.

Offering child-sized tools can aid your child in being able to participate and contribute independently. 

Here are some additional practical life tasks you can consider:

• Toddlers can:

  • Brush hair

  • Brush teeth (with support from an adult)

  • Wipe their face

  • Wash hands

  • Begin to learn to dress by pulling up pants or making choices on clothes

  • Wipe small spills

  • Help feed pets 

  • Help put things away

• Primary children can continue with the self-care tasks listed above, in addition to:

  • Shower/wash themselves

  • Sweep

  • Wipe tables

  • Fill a bird feeder

  • Clean a birdbath

  • Help load the laundry or transfer it to the dryer

  • Fold napkins/small washcloths

  • Vacuum

• Elementary children can (in addition to the above):

  • Unload the dishwasher

  • Plan and prepare a meal

  • Do their own laundry (with some support for starting the load and folding as needed)

  • Put away laundry

  • Care for pets

  • Vacuum a room

  • Wash dishes

  • Mow the lawn (for Upper Elementary, with supervision)

Long Term Benefits

Practical life serves the child in ways that will aid them as they grow older and become adults.

In his book, Maria Montessori: Her Life and Work, E.M. Standing writes: 

“All the exercises of practical life and lessons of grace and courtesy are such; for each has a well-understood purpose which has to be carried out as a part of real social life in a real world (p. 222).”

The child becomes a contributor rather than just a consumer. Through these exercises, the child learns to concentrate, develop independence, adapt to environments and refine movement and coordination.