Dr. Montessori was the first to introduce the child size classrooms. The room is orderly and filled with enriching materials for the child to explore. A multi-sensory environment invites the child to a world of discovery! Activities in practical life, sensorial, mathematics, language and culture are explored daily. Children work independently in a carefully prepared environment in areas of their interest. Each area in the classroom strives to meet the child’s innate desire for order, concentration, coordination and independence.

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Stepping Stones Program

Our Stepping Stones program is for children aged 2.5 to 3.5 years. The classes meet 3 days per week. Classes begin from 9:15 AM and end at 11:15 AM.

Children in this age group are interested in learning about the world around them. They explore through their senses, and learn well by experimentation, exploration and observation. The classroom environment is full of materials to meet such needs. The directress demonstrates how to manipulate the materials, and the children are then free to experience the materials fully.

Routines and consistency are important to young children. The class follows a predictable routine each day, and the children often establish a pattern of exploration for themselves.

Beginning academic concepts are introduced to the children when they exhibit readiness. Matching activities, vocabulary development, as well as beginning number concepts and phonetic awareness are among skills the child will have the opportunity to encounter. Community activities such as songs, fingerplays, stories and outside play round out a very full day.

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Pre-Primary

Children aged 3-6 years are enrolled in our Pre-Primary programs. We offer a 5-day morning, or a 5-day afternoon session, as well as a separate Full Day program.

The classroom consists of several main curricular areas.

PRACTICAL LIFE:
The Practical Life area in the Montessori environment defines the education for the skills required in everyday life. The reason Maria Montessori introduced this curriculum in education of young children was that her method aimed at preparing a child for life rather  than for school. Thus, she considered it essential to assist development in young children according to their respective stage (physiological and mental) as they come through what she referred to as sensitive periods.

According to the Montessori Method, the activities in Practical Life should be real activities, which meet the needs of the child in their respective stage of growth, and leads the child to independence from adults.

The Practical Life area offers many opportunities for the child to engage in activities that will help refine their eye-hand and fine motor coordination, increase their concentration and ability to stay on task, further develop a sense of order and increase their ability to be independent at self-help skills and tasks.

SENSORIAL MATERIALS:
The Sensorial area of the Montessori classroom has been refer to as the “Heart of the Curriculum” because of its effectiveness in assisting the development of the child as a whole person.

The five senses we as human beings posses are:

• Muscular tactile sense/Touch
• Visual sense/Sight
• Auditory sense/Hearing
• Olfactory sense/Smell
• Gustatory sense/Taste

The Montessori environment provides the necessary components within these materials to develop lifelong abilities to make judgments, and to compare and discriminate based on size, shape, weight, texture, color and temperature. In addition, muscular memory, which is often referred to as the sixth sense, is able to collect impressions and to develop the use of certain muscles and certain motions in preparation for a lifetime of further study.

MATH MATERIALS:
These materials are designed to arouse a feeling of wonder about and a joy in the mastery of numbers.
Children discover their world through observation, introductions, and experimentation with signs and symbols. Together with the child’s natural interest, they also pass through sensitive periods of learning which are met in the math curriculum. Language, movement, order and beauty are some of the periods that are satisfied in this area of the classroom. Through the use of new and interesting language, the child’s aggregation grows with great enthusiasm. The large and small muscle control necessary to complete the math activities satisfies the child’s need for movement. The sensitive period for beauty and small objects is reached when he/she handles the golden beads that are attractively displayed in wooded cabinets and other visually pleasing ways. As found in Practical Life and Sensorial, order is also displayed in the presentation of the materials as well as the placement of the work on the shelves.

The Math materials begin with numeration (giving or naming of numbers) from one to ten. Manipulation of these concrete materials enables the child to start to build a basic understanding of concepts from one to ten. These concepts are not simply committed to memory, which is the usual, but illustrate the relationship between quantity and symbols. Upon mastery of basic concepts, the child will be ready to understand place value in the decimal system.

LANGUAGE:
Language is the essence of development of the child, because it enables him to communicate with others and to understand when others communicate with him. In the Montessori classroom, the language is not only a distinct area in the environment but runs parallel with other activities throughout. The environment is designed that all activities feed naturally towards the development of the skills required for learning language.

This area of the Montessori environment builds on children’s remarkable natural capacity for language development. They are exposed to rich language every day and explore the seemingly endless opportunities for naming objects. Through learning the parts of a flower, the countries of the world, and the various species of trees, children gain much more than factual knowledge. They gain an appreciation of the power and descriptive ability of language. Various activities in the classroom prepare the child for the progression from the spoken to the written language. Exercise in the classroom move logically from left to right and various activities develop the hand coordination necessary for writing. As recognition of sounds leads to reading words, phases and sentences, children are eager to continue to gain power with reading.

Dr. Montessori personally developed three language materials for the classroom. These three materials alone  – the Metal Insets, the Moveable Alphabet and the Sandpaper Letters have proven to be astoundingly effective. Over the course of many years, Montessorians that have followed in her footsteps, have further developed the Language area of the classroom with and array of equally effective activities.

The design of the Metal Insets provides an opportunity for young children to practice the component strokes of each letter in the alphabet. As they trace the frame of the shape and later the more challenging free shape, the are gaining fine motor control. Montessori reasoned that by stroking a Sandpaper Letter, hearing the sound of the letter, and simultaneously seeing its form provided children with a multi-sensory approach to internalize the letters, Montessori designed a way for them to compose words, before they were physically prepared to navigate a writing instrument on paper, by creating the Movable Alphabet.

The world is presented to the children through work with the globes and the puzzle maps. Learning the sequence of time gives the children the beginning concepts for understanding history, explored in the Elementary years. Biology is introduced as first hand experiences in caring for classroom pets and observation of nature.

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