Practical Life with a Toddler

As an AMI trained Montessorian, I've been trying to incorporate Montessori into my parenting ever since my son was born a year and a half ago. I'll admit that a few times (or more) I have caved in to the convenient option as opposed to the one that lent my son more independence. Even so, he is now an energetic yet cautious toddler, who has a decent attention span for his age, and loves to explore things. He constantly gives me great living examples of the "cycles of activity" that Montessori always talked about, like the other day when I was unloading some small cans of paint that we'd bought earlier that day and he spent a full 10 minutes taking each can and, one by one, taking them to a table, then bringing them back to me, and so forth. At the end he just looked at me, smiled real big, and went off to do something else. It was very cool. =)

So far the "Montessori" aspects of my parenting have been limited to attitudes, and how I set up our home. I try to follow the mantra of "follow the child" as much as possible. I give him plenty of unstructured play time, and interrupt his activity as little as possible. I'm using shelves to display his toys as opposed to jumbled toy boxes, and am limiting how many toys he has out at once so they each have a chance to be used, loved, and paid attention to (while keeping the others a bit more novel).

However now that he's about 18 months old I've been thinking it's time to incorporate some Practical Life activities into our days. I've been planning out items to gather or buy, like small pitchers for pouring exercises; a box and some fun items to put inside for some opening-and-closing work; a toddler-sized broom so he can help sweep our patio with us. Then today I suddenly had the idea of letting him help me unload the dishwasher. It was full of clean dishes, all of which are inexpensive and easily replaceable at Ikea, so why not try it out? The worst that'd happen is a broken plate, right?

Well, no plates were broken! I showed him how to get the plates out and hold them with both hands, and he'd hand them one by one over to me to put them away in the cupboard. He loved it! He looked so proud of himself the whole time! So I think we'll have to make this part of the routine. He keeps surprising me this way, being much more capable than I expect him to be. I'm reminded of something we were often told in training, that if a child masters something on the first try you waited too long to show it to them. So I need to fight this idea that he's too young for many things, and just try it out and see how things go. I'd love to help him start setting the table for himself now, and perhaps I can get him to help me with laundry, as well.

If any of you (particualrly those who have completed the Assistants-to-Infancy course) have ideas for activities to do with a young toddler, I'd love to hear them!

-Marcy