Montessori way to implement new habits with a toddler (Part 1) Practical tips you can do at home today!

You can do many things at home without completely understanding the pedagogy or having years of study. Bellow, you’ll find basic, easy, and practical Montessori activities that you can use at home. Don’t forget that good habits begin early.

“Help me to do it myself” is one of the essential principles in Montessori. The entire world is their classroom, so you don’t need sophisticated materials. Their curiosity inspires them to explore the world around them.

The environment!

Two essential things in the Montessori home environment are child-sized furniture and low open shelves for Montessori materials. It would be best to create a specific area for the scaled furniture and the low shelves in your home. This will be the space for learning where your child has the freedom to explore and learn at his own pace, his interests and think for themselves. This environment will allow them to control, have independence over basic tasks and use them independently. If you don’t want to use child-sized furniture or open shelves, designate an area in your house where your child has the freedom to move, think and practice, as a low snack shelf, or let them dress themselves. Young children need open space where they can move freely. Adults always come to the child’s level and never the other way around. This gives them the chance to achieve milestones and encourages them to crawl or walk freely toward objects or activities that are age-appropriate. Designate age-appropriate chores for your toddler and allow them to do those chores alone with minimal help if asked.

Self-discipline, self-care, care for the environment and others!

These important and practical lessons are learned every time they use the materials one at a time, pack away the materials they were working on before moving to another activity, put them back on the shelves, clean after an activity, and take care of the Montessori materials. In this way, your child will become a proactive learner and be mindful. That’s why in the Montessori approach, we find child-sized materials for them so they can easily clean up after themselves and have many opportunities to make choices. When children work independently, they become more self-reliant and self-motivated.

Sort, group, arrange! This is how you help children understand concepts as order, structure, subject matter, and more. Placing materials from left to right is also essential in preparation for reading and writing, a natural way the brain processes information. Color sorting helps little minds prepare for mathematics, learning about order, color identification, color matching, and concentration. Sorting gives toddlers a sense of control. Children crave structure and order because they become confused when they don’t know what to expect from the environment, and then they test limits to see what works. To act independently within their environment, they need to know where things are and access them, making it easy to visualize and make choices available to them. Their little absorbent mind seeks information that they categorize to internalize it in their brain for easy access when needed. It’s like the environments that are organized, help them build an organized brain as well.

Self-correction!

While this is hard for us, our children need to DO NOT CORRECT their work but offer the time to correct their own mistakes when they return to that activity. They learn to concentrate when they are interested in what they are doing. That’s when they focus the most. Observe and focus on your toddler’s strengths and interests, so they can feel successful in something rather than focusing on their weakness and make them feel a total failure on everything,