5 Must-Try Montessori Activities for 1 Year Olds

Hi, everyone. I'm Katie, a Montessori infant toddler teacher and registered early childhood educator. In today's video, I'm going to share five Montessori activities you can do with a child approximately one to two years of age. These activities are called practical life exercises in the Montessori community. So what are practical life activities? These are the daily tasks that we do to care for ourselves and to care for the environment. I think we would typically call them like the chores that we do around the house for, you know, lack of a better word. In my experience as a toddler teacher, children truly enjoy these types of activities. There are so many benefits to practical life activities, including learning, collaboration, cooperation, developing social skills, especially with activities in the kitchen like preparing food. You can imagine, right, when we're in the kitchen baking with a child, there's so much going on. They're learning to follow recipes and follow your instructions, and you're talking to each other and working together. They're also developing their fine motor skills and their gross motor skills. It just covers every area of development. So why do children enjoy practical life activities? I think it's because they're meaningful to them. They see us, the adults, doing these types of activities every day at home, and they want to participate in them. They quickly learn the value of these types of activities and want to participate. The activities that I'm going to share with you today develop independence, confidence, and self-esteem as the child learns to contribute to their home environment. It's really powerful for a child when they learn that they can do something for themselves, when they learn that they can help to care for their home, just like they see their parents doing every day. My three favorite words to hear in the classroom are, I did it. It's really a beautiful thing when a child has that sense of accomplishment, and practical life activities are really rewarding to the child in that way. All right, so let's get to the five activities. The first one is a carryover from the previous video, Starting Montessori in Infancy, and it is exploring a basket of household items. So this is just simply an exploration basket. You're collecting things from around the house that are safe for the child to explore so that they can learn about them. They can hold them. They can explore them before they actually start using them. So you can include things from the kitchen, like a wooden spoon, a potato masher, a little measuring spoon, a funnel, a little scoop, or you can include tools that we use to clean. So something like a little drying mitt, or a sponge, or this duster. You're just giving them a chance to, as I said, like really explore these items. You can introduce the vocabulary to them. You can start to develop those language skills just by giving them a chance to explore these objects on their own before they actually start using them. So an exploration basket of real life objects is my first suggestion for an activity. The next one is opening and closing drawers and cupboards. Now you want to make sure, obviously, that if you're using something that's not, you know, like a kitchen cupboard that's attached to the wall, you want to make sure that it's safe. We obviously don't want it to topple over on the child, but you want to give them an opportunity to start opening and closing drawers. Now at home, you might be thinking, oh my goodness, there's way too many things in the cupboards and in the drawers at home. I've baby-proofed everything, but we have an alternative. Here at the Montessori Room, we sell a developmental aid that's used in Montessori environments that helps to teach this practical skill of opening and closing drawers. So here it is right here. It's called box with ball and drawer because that's quite literally what it is. So as you can see, it's got this beautiful little knob here. It's made of wood for the child to start practicing opening and closing the drawer. There's a little crocheted ball inside that they push through the hole, starting to explore object permanence, strengthening the hand, but there are materials and toys available that will replicate the same idea as opening drawers and cupboards in the house. You can do it a little bit more safely with these types of materials. So opening and closing drawers and cupboards helps to develop the hand, helps to develop independence. You can put objects of interest inside. This is actually one of the activities in our at-home program, and I suggest just putting things inside for the child to discover. So if they're opening up a drawer in the kitchen, they would open it up and find a few kitchen tools for them to explore, take in and out, open and close the drawer, repeat. It's more interesting than it sounds, I promise. So the next activity, the next practical life activity that I would suggest for this age group are transfer activities. So this can be hand transfer, this can be simple tool transfer, or this can be pouring. So I'll show you what I mean. So here on this tray I have a little bowl with some papoose balls on it, and so I would present this to the child. Let me turn it so that you're seeing the way that the child would see it, because in Montessori we work from left to right. So what the child would simply do is that they would just take the papoose balls using their hand and transfer them from one bowl to another. This helps develop the hand, develops hand-eye coordination. It's a nice orderly activity for the child to repeat as many times as they like. Now transfer them all back the same way. For a little challenge, you can add a spoon, and now the child scoops up the ball and transfers it into the other bowl. So you can see, transferring back and forth, back and forth. Really, really great for the hand. So the next one is pouring back and forth. You can either do that with liquid, or you can do that with something dry. So just because I have it close to me, I'll demonstrate with one of these papoose balls. So they've got the object in one of the pitchers, and then the child is just going to pour it back and forth, back and forth. And each time they're refining their movements, they're getting stronger, they're figuring out how to hold the jug, how to pour. And when there's a liquid, it also develops their equilibrium, because they have to really concentrate and focus on doing this activity without spilling the water. It's okay if they do spill, of course, that's how we learn, but they're going to develop their fine motor skills, their independence, their concentration, and most importantly, they're going to develop the hand with these types of transfer activities. All right, the next activity that I would recommend for this age group are cleaning activities. So this means providing your child with child-sized cleaning tools. So things like this duster, inviting them to dust the shelf in their bedroom, perhaps showing them how to do it, and then letting them dust, dust, dust. Drying mitts, this is very sweet, fits right in there, you know, their little hand will fit right inside, and they can use it to start cleaning up their own spills. So this isn't quite an activity, because obviously they need to have a spill in order to learn how to clean up a spill, but having something like this available to the child during meal times and during snack times so that they can start to wipe up their spot when they're finished with it. So any sort of cleaning activity. And then finally, the practical life exercise that I would recommend is assisting in food preparation. Now, you might be thinking, no way am I going to put, you know, a knife in my child's hand, and that is completely understandable. You do that once you're ready. But even as young as 12 months, you know, all the way to two years, they can certainly help you with food prep in the sense that they can start to wash some of those fruits and vegetables. They can, you know, when you're doing a baking activity, they can dump some of the ingredients in the bowl. They can help to stir. Obviously, we're taking our time. We're moving very slowly. We're trying to follow the child as much as we can, but inviting them to participate in food preparation. Food preparation is, in my opinion, just one of the most beautiful parts of the Montessori method, inviting young children to participate in these things, because I've seen it firsthand in the classroom. You know, I sit down and I start, you know, preparing snack. And before you know it, you know, I'm surrounded by children who are fascinated by what I'm doing, who want to help, who want to talk about. Some just want to sit and observe, which is totally okay. And when they get that chance to participate, when, you know, they're ready to maybe use, you know, that step one wooden knife, they feel, they look as if they feel so good about what it is that they've done. So inviting your child to participate in food prep in any way that you're comfortable, of course, and in a way that's going to be safe for them as well. So keep in mind that practical life skills need to be built upon, right? So in infancy, they start by observing, even at this age, between one and two, you want to invite the child to observe you participating in these practical life skills. So they're going to spend time observing. And then as they get older, they're going to show an interest in imitating you. So the next comes imitation. They're going to want to start doing the things that you're doing. And then they're going to practice and they're going to practice and practice and practice. And eventually they're going to be fully independent with these skills. They're going to be able to do them completely on their own, but it does take time. Even in the classroom, you know, I had children leaving the classroom at about three, three and a half, and they would go into the next classroom and they would continue to learn the same skills. So it takes time for children to master these skills. It probably takes a good portion of their childhood. So there's no rush for them to learn all of these things at once. Really take your time and know that it's being built upon. The other thing to keep in mind is that it's also really important that your child is interested in participating in these types of activities. If they're not ready for practical life activities, if they're not showing any interest, then I wouldn't force them. I think as parents of infants and toddlers, you probably have the experience of trying to get them to do something that they don't want to do and being met with quite a lot of resistance. So I wouldn't push it. In my experience, most children do eventually show an interest and it's even more meaningful to them if they're invited to participate once they are interested. So look for signs that they're interested. They start asking you questions, they start asking to help, and then you'll know that it's ready to start implementing some of these activities at home. So as I've discussed today, there are quite a few ways of bringing Montessori into your home without a lot of fancy materials. All you really need to do is invite your child to participate in these practical life exercises. Remember to demonstrate. They might not need a demonstration if they've been observing you doing these types of tasks around the home, but if you think that they could benefit from a demonstration, a really great acronym to remember is SHOW. So what SHOW is, is slow hands omit words. So that means that you are simply demonstrating how to do it rather than explaining to the child how to do it. And we demonstrate rather than explain in Montessori so that the child is able to focus on our movements, on what it is that we're doing instead of what it is that we're saying or the movement of our mouth. It's really effective. I encourage you to really try it. Try to demonstrate some of these skills without any words at all and you'll see how focused the child becomes on what it is that you're doing. All right, well I hope that you found today's video helpful. If you're interested in learning more on how to bring Montessori into our home, I encourage you to check out our at-home program. There will be a link to join in the description below. I hope to see you there. Bye!