Montessori Games: Play is the child's job
Montessori games are a selection of games that you can build together with your child to help them have fun while learning. If you are looking for other creative pastimes to involve the little ones at home, watch the video and discover the funniest ones!
The didactic-educational activity: not just notions, but self-learning through experimentation.
To play these games you don't need to buy anything or almost anything, you can also do them with home objects at zero price. Montessori has innovated the world of children's education thanks to its scientific pedagogy. From kindergarten onwards, doing didactic and educational activities does not consist in pouring techniques and notions into the children's heads as in an empty sack, but helping them to build their autonomy and independence by themselves, enriching it, but respecting their learning times and making them to mature through the enhancement of the innate tendencies present in each individual. Montessori games, especially those for the little ones, are based on manual skills, so that the child knows his abilities and potential and gains in self-esteem.
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Montessori games: organizing everything is important.
According to this method, the environment in which he plays and where he develops his intelligence and skills is especially important, both in the classrooms and at home, the places where he can play and learn at the same time. The environment must be harmonious and serene, so that the child can apply and follow his natural propensity for discipline and order. The rules are fundamental to make it act avoiding waste, chaos, dirt. The materials are also part of this program and must be presented to him with the necessary instructions. First of all, the excessive quantity of each element used must be avoided; moreover, it is good not to offer him too many activities at the same time. To arrange the materials to play with, you (mum, dad, grandmother, babysitter) have to use trays, so that the child does not lose focus, looking around for what he wants to use, thus dispersing his attention. Make the space where he works as safe as possible, give him what he needs to clean up after the game. When you see him confident in his choices, stop intervening in his activity and let freedom make him thinking, reflective and autonomous. the materials to be used in the game must be easy to use, neatly arranged, beautiful to the eye, to make him enjoy touching, manipulating, grouping them, and interesting, but not too complex for his age.
House games for all ages!
These activities involve simple objects that belong to the house and are known to the child. To perfect fine motor skills you can try the game of decanting, using solid material (short pasta, beans) or liquid. In the latter case, prepare a tray with two empty ice cream cups, for example, and a dropper. In one cup put some water colored with food coloring, in the other with the dropper it will pour the liquid. solid from left to right, unlike left-handed people, it will help the child to write when he goes to school. Children from 1 to 2 years old will have a lot of fun stuffing spaghetti into a colander until it looks like a giant hedgehog, as they are attracted by penetrating large objects with thinner ones and giving life to different shapes and sizes. From three to six years old you can offer him this game for which only socks are needed. Take many pairs of colored socks and shuffle them, then together with the mating child to color; or give him the famous color wheel: put some colored clothespins in a basket, inviting him to stick them on the parts of the disc of the same color. of an apparently simple game, but useful for the coordination of the eyes with the hand and to make him quickly distinguish the various colors. Always among the Montessori games you can propose to him, after having mixed many buttons to be pigeon-holed in the shapes of a cookie pan, to fill every void with buttons of the same color. Don't help him, but don't lose sight of him, so as not to run the risk of bringing them to his mouth.
A normal daily gesture, which you often see at home, can arouse great attention and a lot of interest in the child. He has seen you many times cutting a fruit, a courgette, a little cheese and now he could try his hand at this feat as an adult, even if with a knife obviously not sharp and not serrated, but suitable for cutting soft food, not resistant to pressure. of the blade. Even hanging the washed laundry is an activity that particularly attracts him: if you get him a clothesline at his height, cloths and clothespins of various colors, you will see him very interested and happy to do exactly what adults do so often. Above all, little girls will have a lot of fun putting on raw pasta necklaces (there are also colored wholemeal ones), one piece at a time, with order and precision, perhaps of different pasta, to see how they alternate it. The string must be double and stiff enough for it to be easily inserted into the holes in the pasta (penne, rigatoni, large coral).
For this other game, take a cardboard tube from a roll of paper, attach it at child's height to the wall with scotch tape; put a tray on the ground with objects that are neither heavy nor dangerous. Even the youngest children will know how to pour the objects. into the tube one by one to slide them into the tray placed on the ground, from which they can then easily pick them up and put them back in the tube, stimulating a repetitive mechanism for self-learning typical of children.
From 3-6 years old, the child can use the hammer, the small wooden one especially for children, to nail wooden pegs on a base covered with cork so as not to make them make too much noise and to facilitate penetration. This game is a great exercise in precision and hand-eye coordination. You also learn how to hammer!
Put these small and inexpensive gifts on your online wish list, to purchase them when you think it's appropriate. Love for nature must be cultivated from an early age. Organizing a table dedicated to nature serves to be outdoors, to make collections of seeds, hazelnuts, stones and shells, collected during trips and walks, to be kept in various boxes and to be distributed according to genre. invite him to keep some legumes in a glass jar with cotton wool or wet paper to see which sprouts first. Sprouted seedlings can also be placed in a pot on the balcony and watered and cared for every day with a mini watering can. Leave him free in this activity to independently manage the care of the sprouts.
Other special games of great significance for the development of skills.
At home you can play incredibly fun games, even when the weather is bad and you can't go for nice walks. A good game takes away all the whims and whining of the little ones and the spite of the grumpy and frowning older ones. You don't need too complicated games to entertain children at Christmas or birthday parties or on rainy Sundays and specialized entertainers are not needed either. A little creativity, a pinch of imagination and a good organization are enough and the children have a great time, with laughter and cries of joy. There are so many games to play at home. During the Christmas holidays there are also jobs to hang on the tree, to give to grandparents, the place cards at the table with the names of the guests, those of Easter and those of Mother's Day. An imaginative infinite world. The games must however be chosen according to the age of the child. to bore him and not to put him in difficulty Children between 1 and 2 years old want to learn to jump, to handle objects, to manipulate materials.Have him make a beautiful dough with water and flour on the kitchen table with a suitable fall arrest chair and you will see him in seventh heaven, or take an old box or a wicker basket and fill it with clothes and objects to play roles in little skits. The disguise with hats, glasses, wigs and fake beards will make him have a lot of fun. Organize skits for two children or even just with the two of you, alternate roles, taking from the basket the necessary to dress up for each different situation. Get ideas from the life of each. day: the visit to the doctor, the arrival at the grandmother's house, the babysitter who gives the baby a bottle. The child thus lives a life similar to his and learns the rules of coexistence with others, having a lot of fun with funny disguises. At 3-5 years they develop fine motor skills better, the idea of above, below and after of the right and left; with simple games they will be able to learn how to button their jacket, tie their shoes and zip up their shorts.
Often play hide and seek together while sitting. If you have hidden the object, the child will ask you questions to understand where it is, then you will switch roles, he will hide the object and you will ask the questions. To make an easy target practice, draw large colored rings with the child, then place a chair with your feet in the air and throw the rings to center them. The score increases if more feet of the chair are hit or one color may be worth more points than another. Try this too. Place four and more objects on a table gradually, show them to him for a few seconds, then remove one and the little one has to say which one is missing: a memory game, which sharpens concentration, apparently elementary. Games for learning to count are good for 5-year-olds, so as to bring them closer to mathematics from a very young age. For 6 and 7 year olds they are perfect games with pen and paper, with words, numbers or shapes to develop useful skills at school, and then also jobs suitable for this age, in which they are already older. creativity, they know how to draw, color, cut out. Get the material for this game, possibly recycled and well washed, ice cream sticks, wooden pegs, fabric, cardboard, plasticine and bicarbonate paste to model figurines, acrylic colors and the boy will be able to indulge himself in making houses, farms, gardens, to color and paint always with harmless products: a meaningful and very expressive work of the child's personality and thoughts. Tangram is a very ancient game, also for sale online, which helps the child in understanding the figures and space. And with its shapes to be composed it unleashes the imagination: it is really much more than a job for children. First of all, the game can start from its construction: you can even not buy it and make it yourself. B auction search for “tangram tutorial” on youtube to learn. Then, use it with your child to reproduce animals, numbers, objects and all that the imagination suggests.
Also organize a gymkana at home, using chairs, signals on the floor, objects to climb over, making the child move on lines marked with scotch paper on the floor, carrying a tray with light objects in his hand. The little boy strengthens his attention span, his balance and can do it perhaps even holding the tray with one hand. Be careful not to make him cause trouble and to eliminate all sorts of dangers. While playing, the child exercises attention span, concentration and hand-eye coordination. Quiet games, before the goodnight kiss are: things, cities, flowers and animals, tic-tac-toe, naval battle and simple quizzes.
From eight to ten years old: they want more.
With children aged eight to ten, finding a game that really amuses and fascinates them is much more difficult. They refuse games as children, they want to feel grown up, they don't like improvised games too much like children for three years and often criticize them. This is the age of the monopoly, the taboo beetle, the checkers and why not. even some first chess game. He will learn to resist sitting, to think, to reflect on what he does, to play new more complex games, to win, but also to know how to lose. A game suitable for 8-10 year olds is origami, that is building with colored sheets folded with a certain object technique. This is a Japanese art. At this age the child already has a good ability to use his hands; guide him in his first creations, then letting him try his hand at other more complicated ones. What he learns with this art will also serve him at school: development of attention, precision and flexibility in the use of hands, thanks to the creation of these small artifacts. From the age of 8 onwards it is possible to play games at home such as coding, so that the passion for video games becomes an educational way to bring him closer to the basics of programming.
Another game that a child who is already a kid might be interested in is the creation of DIY candles; it's really a lot of fun. Buy some blocks of wax, white or colored, maybe you can color it with him with non-toxic material. You can use colored glasses to pour melted wax of various colors or cookie molds with characteristic star or heart shapes. The moment of play for the Montessori method is an important moment, made up of rules to be respected and commitment, a crucial moment in mental development and learning. Outdoor games also have their own specific validity, they serve to make them move casually in large spaces, to focus their attention on the position, on the obstacles to avoid and on the observation of the surrounding environment. Montessori games are very useful because they offer children manual, creative and imaginative activities, promoting autonomy, coordination, self-esteem and motor skills. Knowledge takes place thanks to experimentation, therefore with self-learning. knowing, knowing how to do, knowing how to be, with manual activities, then creative, then linked to words and numbers to promote skills and personality development, developing innate skills in each, of a cognitive, motor, social and emotional type.
