Rationale Paper

RATIONALE OF PRACTICAL LIFE Many have questioned the true purpose and success of the Montessori method, specially the practical life area because it comes across as wasted time where the child spends spooning, pouring and playing, doing whatever he/she pleases, but many don’t know that “Dr. Maria Montessori designed the didactic apparatus as means to the achievement of the sensory, motor and intellectual development through the free exercise of the child’s interest” (Dr. Montessori’s own handbook p12) and that the success of a child in this method lies on the responsibility of the teacher who seems to be invisible since the child goes about his business without the teacher telling him what to do or correcting him when he/she is wrong. “The teacher’s role in the preparation and mediation of the environment is primarily one of observation. Montessori recognizes that the capacity of the adult for accurate observation determines much of what the child is free to do”. (Dr. Montessori’s own handbook p13) so in reality the teacher is doing much more then what is visible to the eye and it is what the teacher does with those observations that allows the child to become successful, because “the children reach the goal of self-fulfillment and self-control by different roads, indirectly prepared by the perceptive adult.” (Dr. Montessori’s own handbook p18).

Practical life in the Montessori Method is not about the water the child has learned to pour or the beans the child has learned to scoop, the tweezing or the tonging it is about the skills the child is acquiring as he completes these exercises, “the didactic material, in fact, does not offer the child content of mind, but the order for that content” (Dr. Montessori’s own handbook p22), that is where the teacher through observation will determine what the child is interested in and will prepare the environment and it’s materials according the expectations of the children, the teacher must also through her

Citations: MONTESSORI, MARIA. Dr. Montessori’s own handbook. New York, NY: Schocken Books Inc. 1965 MONTESSORI, MARIA. The Montessori Method. New York, NY: Frederick A. Stokes Co. 1912