Montessori daycare students learn with hands-on activities that they can touch, taste, smell, hear, and see. The Montessori Method combines tactile stimulation with academic, physical, and mental activities to help children develop appropriately in all ways. These hands-on activities should give you a better idea of how and why hands-on learning works.
Sorting Blocks
Learning to sort objects is an excellent hands-on activity for Montessori daycare students. Sorting is a basic function of early math and opens the door to learning to add, subtract, multiply, and divide, as well as creating a larger vocabulary and developing fine motor skills necessary for manipulating small objects.
The Pink Tower
The Pink Tower is an authentic Montessori activity that involves critical thinking, fine motor skills, and the ability to sort objects by size. Additionally, the Pink Tower is a self-correcting activity that allows children to identify mistakes without having them pointed out, and that aspect of the activity helps develop self-esteem and confidence.
Practical Life
Performing chores is one way to provide children with practical life experience they can use throughout their lives. Picking up their toys, setting the table, and learning to stick to regular routines are all practical experiences that foster independence, build vocabulary and math skills, and encourage teamwork to accomplish certain tasks.
Sensorial Activities
Honing the 5 senses is encouraged through a variety of sensorial activities in the daycare classroom. Discovery bottles can be used to engage any or all of the senses at once and help children learn to correlate data presented by the individual senses. But sensorial activities include many other activities, including things as basic as a walk around the yard or playground, exploring plants, insects, birds, and more. In Many respects, Montessori activities rely on sensory input as the primary method of problem solving and self-correction.
It is important to note that Montessori is dedicated to the development of the whole child rather than only physical or academic aspects. Authentic Montessori activities engage children in tactile ways that teach multiple subjects. For more than a hundred years, Montessori has been proving itself as an effective teaching method, and hands-on activities are at the root of that success.