Why Clothing Matters
Young children are developing their:
- Motor skills,
- Coordination,
- Independence
- Self-care skills.
Clothing that a child can manage for themselves helps them to improve all of these skills!
Choosing Montessori-Friendly Clothing
To aid a child’s developing independence, you can look for:
- Easily manipulated fastenings on clothes, such as large buttons instead of small fiddly ones,
- Velcro or easy fasten shoes,
- Loose, comfortable fits that a child can remove or put on independently,
- Weather-appropriate, practical fabrics so that a child can follow their instincts to explore and embrace adventure!
Supporting Self-Dressing
Once you’ve picked the right clothing options, you can scaffold a child for success by:
- Allowing extra time for dressing,
- Breaking tasks into steps,
- Demonstrating slowly and clearly,
- Repeating those demonstrations – many times! Children learn through repetition, so they’ll need to watch you a lot and then give it a go many times before they master it.
Let Them Get Messy
Children learn through doing and they are naturally drawn towards exploration through the senses. Whether it’s splashing in a puddle, crunching some autumn leaves, or getting covered in sand as they build castles, we’ve all seen children find a joyful way to get utterly messy while learning, discovering and creating. It’s important that clothes don’t create a barrier to these explorations, so it helps to choose clothing that:
- Can get dirty,
- Is easy to wash,
- Is weather-appropriate (there’s no such thing as ‘bad weather’, just the wrong clothing!),
- Doesn’t create stress for you or your child.
Independence grows when children are trusted with responsibility, even in something as simple (but powerful!) as getting dressed.
This post is repurposed from an original entry on the Montessori Child blog, with permission from the author Jessica Langford. To read the more detailed original post, we encourage you to CLICK HERE.