Montessori is a highly hands-on approach to learning. It is natural for children to wiggle, touch things, and to explore the world around them! Our spacious classrooms are specially designed to provide a special learning environment where everything, furnishings and prepared materials, are set for the size, pace, and interest of children.
The Montessori environment encourages children to move around freely, within reasonable limits and to generally work individually or in small groups. There are two key components to the classroom: the specially prepared materials and the teacher whose role it is to provide the link between the environment and the child.
In the Montessori Environment there are five main areas of focus that are intended to enrich and develop each child’s learning experience:
1. Practical Life Exercises
The practical life activities, which are related to daily living skills, include pouring, sweeping, washing, etc… These types of exercises help the children to become independent and to care for their own needs while also developing coordination and concentration.
2. Sensorial
Sensorial activities aid in refining a child’s senses. The child learns to discriminate differences and similarities in size and dimension as well as learning how to grade colors and identify geometric shapes. Activities for all senses begin with simple tasks and move toward materials that require more skill.
3. Language
The language materials provide modes of activity by which a child acquires the basic skills for reading and writing. The program begins with learning the phonetic sounds of the alphabet. It then progresses to word blending, then on to reading phonetically before learning more complex language materials.
4. Mathematics
The math materials allow the children to discover for themselves the concept of quantity and number identification, moving onto the hierarchy of numbers, the decimal system, and the four operations – addition, multiplication, subtraction and division.
5. Cultural Studies
This introduces the child to the fundamentals of nature study, geography, history, science, art and music. The cultural materials help the children develop an awareness of the world in which they live.
