With the beginning of school upon us, I want to share a couple of simple practical life activities that we’re using with our Lower Elementary students (although I’ve also used these with Upper El kids, too!). These are pretty easy to implement and can be used on an ongoing basis.

Here are three practical life ideas to start and continue through the year:

• Make and use placemats for lunch. We had the children create simple placemats during the first few days of school. These were good cutting practice for our first grade friends. I pre-drew the lines on the black paper to make the process simpler, although the second and third years probably could have handled it using the ruler to draw the lines. The children cut the lines, then wove 9 paper strips to create their individualized placemats. We laminated them so they would last for more than 1 lunch. 🙂 We were constrained by the size of the laminate sheets we had available at school, so they were relatively small. If we had a bigger roll-type laminator, I would have preferred to use a full 12×9″ piece of construction paper.

Close up of the folded paper with pre-drawn lines for cutting – note the lines don’t go all the way to the edge

Once the cutting has been done, the paper is opened and the weaving begins!

A sample of a finished placemat, pre-cut strips for weaving, and folded black paper with lines

The placemats are now put out by our food preparer each day, thus mixing up the places where children eat. It adds variety to table mates that the children are sitting next to for lunch and eliminates the saving seats issues that often come up.

When children are done with lunch, they wipe their placemats off with a sponge, dry them, and put them back on the tray for the next day.

I have used this process for Upper El students, too. When they made their placemats, they were able to decorate them however they liked with markers or pencils, rather than weaving strips.

• Friday is “cleaning your cubby” day. One of the goals for each child on Friday is to clean out their cubbies. This allows children to take home any papers or projects they have completed over the course of the week and make space for next week’s work, as needed. It also sets the expectations that each friend’s personal storage space should be kept relatively tidy and be regularly cleaned.

• Classroom jobs. As discussed in a previous post about classroom job charts, each child has a classroom job for the week. These range from floor sweepers and table cleaners to mathematican (straightening and dusting the math shelves), librarian (straightening and putting away books into their appropriate bins), and botanists (watering plants), to name a few. Make sure to have enough cleaning supplies on hand (we purchased dusters at the local dollar store since five jobs required dusting) and spend time describing what each job entails as a group. We also gave the children time to practice their jobs after introducing them. Now, there is a dedicated time at the end of each day for friends to complete their jobs.

These are a few of our simple practical life activities happening in our Lower Elementary room. I hope you find them helpful!