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Montessori Practical Life Skills for Modern Times

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / Leave a comment

My son is in a Montessori playgroup, so I’ve spent a decent amount of time browsing descriptions of the philosophy as well as activity suggestions on Pinterest. While I agree with its broad aims of child-led education and teaching practical skills, one thing that frustrates me is that the curriculums don’t seem to be updated to reflect modern times. And I’m not even talking about computers. While some of the skills taught are great, like gardening, others are downright archaic, grown out of date through the development of technology or culture. For example, I certainly don’t iron handkerchiefs, arrange flowers, polish silver or wash chalkboards on a regular basis. (These are some of the tasks mentioned in Montessori presentations and Montessori websites about Practical Life Skills.) Instead, I offer a suggested list of updated activities and life skills that Montessori or not, practical-minded parents and teachers may want to integrate into their children’s learning. These are skills that I do use very regularly, some learned from my parents and some through trial and error. I’ve gained as an adult through some amount of trial and error, building on my parents’ well-intentioned efforts to teach me them when I was younger, which I often ignored.

Picking out and cooking vegetables: Food preparation is a pretty big part of the Montesorri curriculum, from what I can tell. They actually teach kids to use knives properly, which is both great and something my junior high home-Ec class failed to teach me. (The main thing Home-Ec taught me about kitchen knives was to be afraid of them.) Picking out and cooking vegetables is the next step up, but definitely a skill that an elementary school student could learn under supervision. I think it’s essential for kids to learn how to cook vegetables in particular because there’s such a cultural prejudice against them. Children are already told by society that they should dislike vegetables. In contrast, part of the reason many of us love to bake cookies at Christmas or pie at Thanksgiving is because we fondly remember doing so with our parents or grandparents. If most people looked back on cooking tomato sauce, preparing sweet potatoes, or sauteeing broccoli with their families, I think we’d all eat a lot more veggies. Involving kids in the process builds that inherent fondness, staves off some of that cultural negativity and helps them feel responsible for the end product. Even if a kid is too young to even go near the stove, parents and teachers can still talk about what vegetables are in season and how you can tell if a vegetable is fresh. In terms of specific learning goals, this allows you to talk about seasons, months of the calendar, problem solving (if this isn’t in season, what can I use instead?), and characteristics of a vegetable like color, firmness and flavor. In field or shopping trips to the farmers’ markets, children can ask farmers questions, learning about agriculture as a career and different growing methods. For older kids, this can feed into conversations about environmental impacts, the transport of goods, and plant life cycles.

Taking care of animals: Everyone knows that taking care of an animal can be great for teaching responsibility, but no parent wants the poor animal to suffer through the child’s learning process. But both parents and teachers can help prepare students to be good stewards of wild and domestic animals without taking on the responsibility of a cat or dog. For wild animals, kids can help fill bird feeders, plant flowers for pollinating insects, or hang bat houses. On the most basic level, little ones can practice their pouring skills with small bags of bird seed. On a deeper level, it can lead to conversations about animals’ needs (food, shelter) and larger ecological roles. Classrooms usually can’t have cats or dogs, but many can have lizards, hamsters, butterflies, or fish. As part of the class’s daily activities, children can feed the animals, play with them, and even help clean their cages. To build awareness of the skills needed for keeping more demanding pets, students could take care of toy cats or dogs, play-acting feeding and brushing them. Kids themselves love to pretend they are pets, which also helps them build empathy for animals and think about how they may see the world differently from humans.

Recycling and composting: Recycling and composting provide tons of great opportunities to build sorting skills as well as lead into bigger thematic conversations. Depending on your community’s recycling set-up, you may be separating garbage into paper, plastic, metal and trash, or if it’s single stream like ours, just recyclable and non-recyclable. Adding composting to the mix makes it even more complicated, with produce scraps able to go into it, but no other food scraps. If you do your own composting, you can also explain how you need to balance the food scraps with dry input like newspapers. These activities can lead into conversations about how much we throw away and what happens to it, how that affects other people and how we can reduce our waste. With older kids, composting is a great opportunity to talk about decomposers, soil chemistry, and their role in ecology.

Bike maintenance: This is one I could use a better handle on myself. When I pulled my personal bike out for the first time this spring, Sprout was fascinated by it. I showed him how I pumped up my tires and had him help by pushing down on the handle. Every kid who has a bike should at least be able check their bike ABCs before each ride – Air in the tires, Brakes working, and Chain running well. In an ideal world, they should also know how to place a jumped chain back on and fix a flat tire, although those are both fairly challenging. These skills build both fine and gross motor skills, along with problem solving skills. While preschoolers and even most elementary school kids won’t bike alone, having these skills does make biking possible as a form of transportation for kids, far earlier than they can drive.

These are just a few of the practical skills that I think we should be teaching all kids, especially in the Montessori curriculum with its focus on “real life” learning.

What practical life skills do you want to teach your young kid or do you wish you were taught when you were a child?

Play with Your Food!

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 1 Comment

In high school, my husband was the slowest eater I had ever met. Although his future as a professional cook seems like a surprising turn of events, I often comment that they actually had something very important in common – Chris playing with his food. While that observation is half-joke, we both like to think of cooking as play instead of a chore. We want Sprout to enjoy cooking healthy, delicious, sustainable meals as he grows older rather than merely tolerating it. With this in mind, we gave him a toy kitchen and food for Christmas. What we didn’t realize is how many real-life skills we could teach him as a result.

I spent a lot of time researching and considering the options for toy kitchens before I made my final decision. I wanted one that was sturdy, gender-neutral (along with the pink drenched options, there are also ones designed to be acceptable to “manly” dads), had a lot of different play options and looked somewhat realistic.

What I like about the one I bought is that it functions in many ways like a real kitchen. There’s a “cutting board” and sufficient counter space (with “granite” countertops!) for preparation, which a surprising number of toy kitchens lack. It has a knife block with tiny chefs’ knives so we can discuss the proper storage of kitchen cutlery with him. It has a little sink that you can pretend to fill up a pasta pot or (ugh) wash dishes. It came with different types of pots and pans, allowing you to match the right kind of dishware with cooking techniques, whether that’s boiling water in a pot or searing a burger in a pan. To help Sprout learn good safety techniques, I cut apart an old dish-rag so he can use little towels to take items out of the oven. The kitchen even comes with little baskets that you to collect and empty “food waste” into the invisible compost bucket.

Our son's toy kitchen!

Unlike most toy kitchens, this one even has “food waste,” even though it’s non-compostable plastic. In addition to the hamburger and hot dog that came with the kitchen, I bought my little (sometimes) veggie-lover a basket of toy produce that requires preparation. You can peel and section the orange, cut the tomato, peel the banana, cut the cauliflower, and shuck the corn. All of the pieces are held together with Velcro, so they’re easy to put back together. What’s really neat about it is that you can introduce actual knife techniques with them. Pushing down on most play food with a play knife usually causes it to slip and cause what would be a nasty gouge in real life. In contrast, this set rewards good knife skills – cutting with the curved “sharp” side is much easier than the straight, “blunt” side. The toy food also allows us to teach him safety skills, like choking up on the knife to improve control and curling under the fingers on his holding hand so you don’t slice them. While he’s far from that level of comprehension, it’s absurdly cute for now to watch him “cut” through fake vegetables with his little plastic chef’s knife.

To further practice his skills, we recently allowed him to help us prepare a snack. A few months ago, we found a recipe for Chocolate Almond Date Energy Balls, which we found were both delicious and semi-healthy. We originally found the recipe on Sweet Happy Life, but because she’s taken down her blog archives to protect her kid’s privacy, I’m going to share our version (slightly modified from hers) here.
 
Chocolate date almond energy balls

Based on an original recipe from Sweet Happy Life (Ariela Pelaia)

Ingredients
1 cup whole, raw almonds
3 tablespoons chocolate chips
1 cup dates (can often get from the bulk section in natural foods stores)
¼ teaspoon vanilla extract
¼ cup almond butter
1 to 3 tablespoons water
4-5 tbs shredded coconut

Instructions
Using a food processor, grind the almonds, chocolate chips, dates, vanilla and almond butter, until it the combination creates large chunks that separate out from each other. If needed, add water slowly until it reaches that consistency. Pinch off a good-size chunk and roll into a ball with your hands. Roll each of the balls in the shredded coconut. Eat immediately (although they’ll be a little sticky) or refrigerate.

The first time we made the Energy Balls with Sprout, he was very engaged and enjoyed sprinkling coconut over the balls. This time, he was a little more distracted. He didn’t really want to form the balls and seemed more interested in pushing the coconut off of the plate than anything else. Oh well. We’ll keep trying to teach him to play with his food.

Giving Thanks for New Foods

/ Shannon Brescher Shea / 3 Comments

Thanksgiving week was a week of milestones – besides the holiday, Sprout ate “real” food for the first time.

The pediatrician recommended that we start him on solid foods at the fifth month, beginning with rice cereal to get him used to eating from a spoon. We’d been doing that for the past week, but it was providing more entertainment value for us than nutrition for him.

But the day before Thanksgiving was Sprout’s introduction to the wide world of vegetables. While I was never super-keen on a wide array of veggies as a kid, I’ve grown to love them as an adult. I eat very little meat and am an avid gardener, with an almost exclusive focus on edible plants. So I was particularly excited that the first real food we fed him was one that we grew ourselves.

Of our crop of root vegetables, we chose sweet potatoes. They are sweet for veggies, so he would have a relatively pleasant experience. In addition, they’re packed full of nutrients, so even though he wouldn’t be getting many calories, they’d provide a lot more value than the rice cereal. The night before, Chris chopped them up, steamed them, and blended in ice cubes to create a puree. (In his “past life,” he was a professional cook, so his experience making purees for fine dining translated well to baby food – just leave out all of the ingredients like salt and oil that make it tasty for adults.)

The momentous time arrived – just as we were trying to get out the door to drive home for Thanksgiving. So much for taking time to savor the wonders of childhood. Nonetheless, we tried to make it meaningful, including the requisite videotaping.

Despite our enthusiasm, Sprout was more confused than anything else. He’d open his mouth, take the spoon in, close his lips, and then roll the food around until it either ended up on his face or down his throat. He was making a face like he wasn’t enjoying it, but kept opening his mouth back up. Chris thinks that every mouthful, he thought, “Maybe it’s milk this time?” and then, “Oh, I guess not. How disappointing.” Fortunately, babies don’t have strong deduction skills.

It’s probably the best reception we could expect. While the rice cereal was half-milk, the sweet potatoes were far different from anything Sprout had ever eaten. While I know there are zero guarantees, I’m hoping that by starting him on fresh vegetables from the beginning and progressing to tastier ways of cooking them that he’ll grow to love them. I’m a big believer in having kids trying foods multiple times, especially when combined with a “no thank you” taste policy. My mom always had me take at least one taste and I’m a pretty adventurous eater now.

The best part of introducing Sprout to sweet potatoes was that he could actually eat with us at Thanksgiving dinner. Before he was able to sit with minimal support, we either had to put him in his pack-and-play or trade him off between us as the other person ate. Meals were inevitably rushed. Now that he’s able to sit in his high chair at dinner, he feels much more like a member of the family. The fact that he was actually eating something similar to what we were – albeit without seasoning – just reinforced that feeling.

Having Sprout with us was even more significant because it was the first time that Chris and I were able to make it home for Thanksgiving in years. Chris always had to work on Thanksgiving, so he couldn’t even have a “real” Thanksgiving dinner, much less be able to go home. Being able to all eat together – my parents, his parents, and us with Sprout – filled me with so much thankfulness for our family. Sprout’s constant smile and joy at being with his grandparents was just the whipped cream on the Thanksgiving pie.