Practical Life in Practice

One favorite activity in our Casa is window cleaning.  We have been using the cake cleanser from www.montessoriservices.com and the children enjoy using it.  It leaves a residue that takes a bit of elbow grease to remove, so we use paper towels to polish the windows, and it works well.  We often need to direct the children back to the work, with a comment such as, "I think you missed a small area, here, let me help you," or some such thing to help them really remove all the polish the first few times they do the activity.  I have also included a photo of our cookie baking.  We are making tortillas from scratch right now for a baking activity but we also added cookie baking.  We have the children make a huge batch of gluten-free cookie dough (we have celiac disease in our Casa), and then they separate it into small amounts to be used for individual baking, wrapping them in cling wrap and storing them in the refrigerator.  The children roll out the sugar cookies and then use cookie cutters.  I love seeing them in the bakers hat, apron, and oven mitts that my assistant makes.  You can find them at www.threadcreationsbywendy.com.