As you can probably guess by the title, I am not a great lover of Practical Life. Don't get me wrong I understand the importance of this area and the skills it promotes within the classroom and for life. I also understand and appreciate the need for all children within the setting to be able to access materials that are age and developmentally appropriate- THAT'S MY PROBLEM!
Within my setting, as previously mentioned I have children from 2.5 to 5 yrs- nothing unusual about that I know, however we can have new intake every single month! This means that for every month we have new starters comes the introduction to the Montessori environment and the introduction to the early PL skills. SO, here comes the main issue that while having to provide early PL activities I feel that my older students are not always being challenged.
Another difficulty I have is finding new and exciting ideas to put onto the shelves that will engage the children and also myself and other staff. That was where you all came in! Over the past 8-10 months I have been reading many of the Montessori blogs out there and have been truly inspired and have been able to implement some of your ideas, which has been fantastic. I must just mention here that my first delve into this world of blogs and inspiration was Laura at http://mymontessorijourney.typepad.com/my_montessori_journey/ so if you haven't visited this site then I would highly recommend it. This explosion of interest in PL even caused me and my colleague to declare that I was having a MF (Montessori Freak) moment whenever I would ramble on about the new activities I wanted to put out, which would happen quite a lot!!!!!
I can now honestly say that I am getting better at devising and putting together new PL activities but I do know that I still have a long way to go.
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