Exercises of Practical Life. The children set and clear the table for luncheon. They learn to put a room in order. They are now taught the most minute care of their persons in the making of the toilet. (How to brush their teeth, to clean their nails, etc.)
They have learned, through the rhythmic exercises on the line, to walk with perfect freedom and balance.
They know how to control and direct their own movements (how to make the silence,—how to move various objects without dropping or breaking them and without making a noise).
Sense Exercises. In this stage we repeat all the sense exercises. In addition we introduce the recognition of musical notes by the help of the series of duplicate bells.
Exercises Related to Writing / Design / The child passes to the plane geometric insets in metal. He has already co-ordinated the movements necessary to follow the contours. Here he no longer follows them with his finger, but with a pencil, leaving the double sign upon a sheet of paper. Then he fills in the figures with coloured pencils, holding the pencil as he will later hold the pen in writing.
Contemporaneously the child is taught to recognise and touch some of the letters of the alphabet made in sandpaper.
Exercises in Arithmetic. At this point, repeating the sense exercises, we present the Long Stair with a different aim from that with which it has been used up to the present time. We have the child count the different pieces, according to the blue and red sections, beginning with the rod consisting of one section and continuing through that composed of ten sections. We continue such exercises and give other more complicated ones.
In Design we pass from the outlines of the geometric insets to such outlined figures as the practice of four years has established and which will be published as models in design.
These have an educational importance, and represent in their content and in their gradations one of the most carefully studied details of the method.
They serve as a means for the continuation of the sense education and help the child to observe his surroundings. They thus add to his intellectual refinement, and, as regards writing, they prepare for the high and low strokes. After such practice it will be easy for the child to make high or low letters, and this will do away with the ruled note-books such as are used in Italy in the various elementary classes.