New Theme: Practical Life Skills

A few posts ago I mentioned as part of our new schedule, I was going to start Themes or Unit Studies with the Professors. The first one I had in mind was going to be based around the Spring season, however, I found the need to dive into an entirely different subject matter, and one that I didn't really ever consider being a theme, Practical Life Skills. 

One of the things I LOVE about Montessori is the teaching of Practical Life Skills in an instructional form. The Professors have regular daily clean up times of both their classrooms, but they are showing the need for some more guidance and order, especially in the morning, so I modified two lessons from our Maja Pitamic book, into one, then merged in some Islamic Studies to boot, Alhumdullilah. 

In today's post I will give an overview of what we hope to accomplish with this new theme, since I don't plan to take pictures of the Professors doing this work, until they are a little more comfortable with it, and they won't be upset by the camera being present. 

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The theme for this week is Folding. ( I raided Professor #3's book basket for the work). The lesson in the book suggests starting out with an old handkerchief and marking it with hash lines where you would like the child to fold. I found that impractical for us at the moment, so I nixed that, and went for folding their pajama's. This gives them something to work on in the mornings while they wait for me to get Baby Professor ready to begin his day. 

The lesson instructs to fold however you wish, so I made it easy for them, with both shirt and pants requiring only three folds each. I forgot completely to lay out a small carpet for working, so in a pinch, we used their circle time squares, which worked out pretty well. The green line indicated where I wanted them place their knees, so they knew which direction to face to start working. They were free to move around however they chose after that.  Islamically we start most everything from the right side, so we went with that also. I showed them how I wanted the clothes to be folded, and they both folded the pajama shirt and pant three times each, then placed them in the small basket. 

The Folding lesson also suggest making pictograms to hang on the appropriate clothing drawer, but Masha' Allah,  the Professors already know where the pajama's go so we don't need to do that either.

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In addition we started to learn the Islamic supplications for getting dressed, getting undressed, and when wearing new clothes. Last year we color printed off a handful of Islamic supplications from a children's website, and laminated them for classroom use. The three supplications will now be hung on their closet wall, so we can see them every morning and practice them at the appropriate time. 

We will continue folding the pajama's, and practice putting them away for a few more days at circle time, then it will be part of their morning routine to fold and put away their own pajama's. From their we will insha' Allah, move on to other clothing items. The next lesson in the book, is sorting and matching socks, but since its warm more than its not, and all their socks are white, I'm thinking to have them do a quick version of the lesson with Baby Professors socks. 

Our Spring theme will have to wait till next week seems, and this will probably be our only post till the end of this week since, insha' Allah, Grammy is coming for a visit.

 Have a great week everyone.