About Us

Curriculum Overview

PRACTICAL LIFE

Develops a Sense of Order, Concentration & Coordination

Fosters Independence

The activities of practical life are building blocks for success with the more academic materials in the classroom. It is here that the processes of attention, perception and memory are developed, which are necessary pre-requisites of cognitive skills. These activities isolate particular skills such as pouring, stringing, hammering, zipping or folding.

SENSORIAL MATERIALS

Development of Visual, Auditory and Tactile Discrimination

Understanding of Qualities: Length, Width, Size, Color, Sound, and Shape

These materials are the most easily identifiable as Montessori materials and tend to be the focal point of the classroom. Children explore the qualities of cubes, prisms and cylinders through creative building. Color, sound and texture are also explored through matching and gradation act ivities. Maria Montessori felt it was important for children to experience these qualities in isolation to develop the discrimination skills necessary to explore their larger environment.

MATH

Pre-math activities include sorting, classifying, patterning, one-to-one correspondence, rote counting and identifying similarities and differences.

The Montessori math materials provide children with a basic foundation of number concepts. Through manipulation of tactile materials, order, sequence, quantity and geometry are concretely explored. Most of our kindergarteners leave Montessori having practiced addition and subtraction skills with both concrete and abstract activities.

LANGUAGE

Pre-reading skills include visual and auditory discrimination, concentration, purpose and motivation, exposure to books & stories, rhyming and poetry.

While most of the Montessori language materials are phonetic in nature, not all children learn to read using a phonetic approach. We utilize a whole language approach, where reading and writing are purposefully being used around the classroom. Generally, students will know the sounds and names of the letters and will be blending phonetic words by the time they leave our kindergarten.

Science & Geography


Montessori exposes children to a variety of scientific areas presented in simple, easy-to-understand, manipulative forms. We study leaves, rocks, shells, layers of the earth, volcanoes and the planets. Animals are classified and we label as many things in our natural world as possible. Classroom pets and animal visitors are part of our curriculum as well. Geography is experienced through hands-on activities using puzzle maps, flags, globes, stories, songs, music, dance, food and artifacts from other countries.