Over the weekend, Annabelle helped her dad build a shelf for our living room. Her job? She hammered the nails with one of her wooden hammers (that I found at a rummage sale for a quarter). Hammering a nail is a Montessori practical living activity that allows children to develop their eye-hand coordination and motor skills, and is fun to boot (for both boys and girls!). Another Montessori mom who we meet up with each week introduced hammering to her 4 year old by giving him golf tees, a hammer, and a piece of styrofoam. She then modified the introductory hammering activity by giving her son small nails and allowing him to hammer them into his Halloween pumpkin. This activity does require close supervision and perhaps gentle reminding that a hammer is to be used only as a tool and not to hurt or damage people and things.
For Annabelle’s building session with her dad, my husband hammered the nails far enough into the wood that they would not fall out; we then asked Annabelle to finish hammering the nails.
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Abbie, my husband also says that he had no idea he was implementing a Montessori activity either; I think what I like about Montessori’s practical living approach as well as the approach that your parents and my husband seem to intuitively take is that we must include our children in the goings on of our day. That is, we serve our children best when we equip them to understand and participate in the world that they have been born into.
I guess what I’m saying is that hammering a nail and washing dishes with children need not be labeled “montessori” per say but that much of Montessori’s educational approach involves activities like these ones.
My dad used to start nails on a board for us then let us hammer them in. As we got older, it got to be more competitive, seeing how many swings it took to get the nail all the way into the wood. That’s why I know how to hold a hammer (at the end, not in the middle!) and believe it or not, it was a lot of fun.
My dad was Montessori and didn’t even know it!