Pre-K and Kindergarten Classrooms
3+ - 6 years
We find that the best way to describe our academic program for the Pre-K and Kindergarten classrooms, also known as Children's House, is with an overview of the various elements that make up the Montessori experience.
The core of the program is separated into the areas of: Life Skills, Sensory and Discovery Activities, Language Arts, Foundational Geometry, Mathematics, History, Geography, Botany, and Science.
The calm, bright and structured space of classrooms and school environment is architecturally designed to incorporate a traditional Montessori setting. The class environments are also intended to facilitate maximum independent learning, to meet the needs of each child's abilities and match their scale of exploration.
Self-Independent Activities
Though seemingly unsophisticated and easy, these lessons help students develop logical and sequential thought patterns which are essential towards understanding Mathematical concepts, developing independence, self-discipline, focus, positive learning habits, self-confidence, and responsibility.
All lessons are introduced to students individually at their level of capability. Whole class instructions are given as well to help with "group" mindfulness.
Language Activities
The Language materials have some essential points in common with the Sensory materials; most outstanding is their simplicity, together with its captivating features that provides a key for the Discovery of what lies beyond the surface.
Montessori Education teaches all basic language skills phonetically, by teaching letter sounds (as opposed to letter names) with the use of “Sandpaper Letters”. This material gives each child a muscular memory of the shape of each letter, accomplished through tracing. This function enables each child to acquire correctly formatted letters in their future writing skills.
Once children learn basic letter sounds, they are encouraged to compose their own words and sentences using the “Movable Alphabet”; thus, developing the means of methodical written expression. Montessori believes that the process of reading should be as painless and easy as speaking. To achieve this, students are introduced to a wide range of pre-reading exercises, sound consciousness activities, dialect, and vocabulary enrichment.
Mathematics and Geometry
Perhaps of all the Montessori materials, the Math material is the most fascinating. It gives students a concrete and tangible experience of the abstract structure in Math. Students are well prepared to work with Math through practice of Life Skills, Sensory materials, and Discovery activities; all of which enables the development of logical and sequential thought patterns required in Math computation.
The entire Math curriculum offers a clear and logical method to help children understand and develop a strong foundation in all three domains of mathematics. The core of the Math curriculum for this age group includes manipulative materials to learn numerals, quantities, sequences, computation, and comprehension of complex numbers into the thousands.
Math materials also offer a tangible understanding of each operation in addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division including an early introduction to fractions. The simultaneous use of Sensory materials in tangent with Math materials aides Montessori students not to feel the arbitrary separation of arithmetic, geometry, and algebra. They are able to correlate all three fields and comprehend it as one single discipline.
Global Cultures, Botany, History and Sciences
Global Culture Studies, History, Zoology, and Botany form the cornerstone of the Montessori curriculum.
Students are encouraged to observe, analyze, predict, and discover their surroundings. From a very young age students explore maps, learn names of continents, varying land formations, study of plants, anatomy of animals, life cycles, weather patterns etc. With this solid foundation, every student is ready to investigate the world around them!
Zoology and Botany studies are initially introduced in the classrooms. Students then get an enhanced, concrete, hands on experience at the Montessori Acres. During their rotating visits to the farm, students are exposed to the natural environments, growing seasons, and animal life.
History is gradually introduced and presented through family trees, historical figures, and timelines for clearer understanding
Discovery Activities
Children interact with their physical world through their senses. The Sensory/Discovery Curriculum is designed to help children focus their attention more carefully on the physical world, by focusing on each of their senses.
Students begin by simply sorting among a prepared series of objects that vary by only one aspect, such as height, length, or width. The children then challenge themselves by finding identical pairs or focusing on weight, color, sound, temperature, etc. These exercises are essentially “puzzles” and fascinate children as they are simple in appearance but are totally sophisticated, meaningful, challenging and satisfying to the developing child.
All Sensory materials are mathematically graded, laying a solid foundation for Mathematics and Geometry activities.
