Preschool and Kindergarten Program
Our Montessori Preschool and Kindergarten program (3 to 6 years old) caters to children ages 3-6. It is a three-year full-day program that will allow your child to achieve their maximum potential and move on successfully to Grade 1.
Each classroom is equipped with beautiful, developmentally, age appropriate materials and furniture. Areas of activity include Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, Mathematics as well as extensions to those areas like Geography, Science, Art and Music. Throughout their three years’ children will learn practical skills, refine their senses, learn to read, write and analyze sentences and develop their mathematical mind from basic counting to advanced operations such as addition, multiplication and long division.
Children learn at their own pace through self-directed activity and one on one lessons from the teacher. It is a joyful classroom environment and each child’s individual achievements and potentialities are observed and supported. The children will not only leave our school prepared for elementary school but prepared for life.
There are five key areas of learning in the Montessori environment which include: Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, Mathematics, and Culture.
Practical life
Children have an intrinsic need to discover and perfect themselves through their movements and actions. Activities in the Practical Life area are similar to things a child would see in their everyday life. The child observes these activities in the environment and gains knowledge through the real experience of how to accomplish life skills in a purposeful way. These activities will encourage the development of will and independence.
This area also prepares the child indirectly for all other areas of the curriculum with order, concentration, coordination, self-awareness and confidence.
Sensorial
Children are fascinated by the world around them. They are eager to understand it, always asking questions and using all their senses to explore everything. When children do so they acquire a wealth of information. In the Montessori preschool environment, we help them organize all this information into an orderly store of knowledge.
The Sensorial area is where this training happens. It allows the child to classify their surroundings. Sensorial materials are used in a Montessori classroom to help children in discrimination and order. They refine a child’s senses and when working with these activities it helps them become more logical, perceptive and aware.
Beyond all of this, the Sensorial materials are significant in that they indirectly prepare children for later work in language and math.
Language
Language starts the moment a child enters the classroom environment. Maria Montessori believed that the sensitive period for language begins at birth and continues to about six years of age. Daily exposure to language through conversations and the reading of good literature helps the child strengthen their vocabulary and increases independence as they become more aware of the world around them.
When children enter the Primary class, language becomes a natural extension of the patterns of communication that have already been absorbed. Through every book reading, conversation and new word that is taught the child is learning language. In the Montessori curriculum writing is taught before reading through the direct and indirect aims of the Montessori Practical Life and Sensorial works. Writing itself is seen as a direct preparation for reading.
Mathematics
Children are naturally attracted to the Mathematics area. They have an inborn ability to see differences and similarities, patterns and sequences. At a certain point in development, usually around the age of four, the child enters the sensitive period for numbers, and the child’s mathematical nature awakens.
Math is an abstract concept. The ability to count, compute and use numerical relationships can be challenging for a young child. Maria Montessori demonstrated that if a child has access to concrete mathematical materials in their early years, they can come to their own understanding concerning the concept of Math. During this sensitive period for numbers, the hands-on Montessori materials allow the child to form concrete impressions of the world of mathematics. This in turn, allows the child to experience mathematics with positive associations and experiences satisfaction of learning through self-discovery. This understanding of such an abstract concept is truly the child’s own which then cultivates a lifelong love of learning!
Culture
In Montessori classrooms, Cultural lessons remain an equally important and vital part of the student’s day. Incorporating Cultural lessons into a student’s educational experience enables them to enrich their understanding of the world and their place in it. The Cultural area includes geography, zoology, botany, physical science, music and art history.
Our Montessori Culture area is rich with content and materials where young children can build skills in observation, categorizing, questioning, comparing and contrasting.
