How to create a prepared environment: 5 advantages for children

Do you know that the environment in which your child lives and plays is a fundamental stimulus for their development? And what, to know what elements you need to keep learning at every moment, it is only necessary to observe where your spontaneous interest is centered? This is so because children spontaneously go to the stimuli they need at each moment.

Adapt a prepared environment Children are put in their place, at their height, so they have access to everything they need in an easy and comfortable way.

What is the prepared environment?

The prepared environment it is an educational approach that is based on two main principles: freedom as a requisite for development and creativity and attention as great gift of love from parents towards their children, which is the basis of the emotional intelligence of children and that they can connect with their authentic desires and lead them to their personal fulfillment.


The environment methodology prepared and adapted is quite simple: it consists of adapting the physical environment in which the child develops, especially the home, but also the school, so that he / she can independently perform his / her tasks independently.

This way he will be able to reach and use water when he is thirsty, to choose his clothes when he is going to leave, to remember where his own toys are ... The small challenges presented by practical life, like everyday tasks, are opportunities to explore and grow as Montessori manifests.

How to create an environment prepared for children

Let's think about the simple examples we have put.

1. Serve water when you are thirsty. In a conventional home, a child of five or six who is thirsty will be limited to asking for water, with more or less education. In an adapted home, a whole process of skill, planning and executive attention will follow: you must go to the kitchen, take your glass, go up the step, open the tap, feel the freshness and sound of the water, fill it, etc. He may even be the one to serve water to his parents or guests, with obvious consequences for his feeling of competence, his self-esteem and his place in his family.


2. Choose your clothes to get dressed. If at the time of dressing has a shelf at your height with several combinable garments, starting at two years of age by two pants and two shirts to choose, and since two years will make decisions.

3. Choose and collect your toys. As for the game, hardly a child under seven years old will remember all the game materials that he has when they are saved: a photograph with the content will allow him a greater choice according to his sensitive moment and will also return a classification game when picking up .

The role of parents is to accompany their children in this exploration with their attention, and also to detect their areas of interest in order to offer other stimuli. We can find for example a child who explores how to open and close a jar repeatedly, and then enrich the experience by accompanying this jar by other cans and boxes of different closure systems. Or that our son goes up and down a hundred times a step, so we will know that it is time to exercise balance and gross motor skills, and we can take you to environments where you can climb and climb.


5 advantages offered by an environment prepared for children

A home prepared and adapted for children offers the following advantages for them:

1. Physical security: to be able to trust in themselves and in the world.

2. Autonomy: putting at your fingertips and adapting the objects that cover your daily needs to your dexterity.

3. Collaboration: base of the responsibility and of the feeling of belonging, to allow him to collaborate in his measure also develops the self-esteem and the social values.

4. Free play: the home is a world of possibilities for creation and exploration, and it is easy to enrich the stimuli and activities to accompany the periods of development and the interests of your child, in all areas and for each evolutionary moment.

5. Creativity and learning: the prepared environment seeks to offer our children a safe and interesting world, which allows creativity and in which it is competent. Thus, through spontaneous play and daily activities, the child builds a base for school learning, but above all for life. And all this through simple guidelines of home organization and play materials.

The change requires some imagination to rearrange the furniture of the house, but it is fun and especially the result in the children, and the change in the attitude of the parents, who go from being servants to being companions, is amazing.

You just have to put yourself at the level of the child, to create a home of free and safe movement, where he can cover his needs autonomously and can collaborate in family tasks and activities, which offers small challenges and large fields of exploration, and thus offers him every moment opportunities for action.

Elena Furnace Educational Innovation Consultant. Founder of Crianza Con Sentido and La Escuelita by Arturo Soria.

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