Children's House

3, 4 AND 5 YEAR OLDS

FIVE AREAS OF LEARNING

Practical Life


This is the link between the child’s home environment and the classroom. Four main areas: Control of Movement, Care of Person, Care of Environment, and Grace and Courtesy. Includes a variety of materials and activities that support the development of fine motor skills as well as other learning skills. Involves the children in precise movements which challenge them to concentrate, to work at their own pace uninterrupted, and to complete a cycle of work that typically results in the feelings of satisfaction and confidence.

Sensorial
Children are developing a sense of order and they actively seek to sort, arrange and classify their many experiences. Sensorial materials give the child experience initially in perceiving distinctions between similar and different things. Uses sets of objects that isolate a fundamental quality perceived through the senses such as color, form, dimension, texture, temperature, volume, pitch, weight and taste. Precise language such as loud/soft, long/short, rough/smooth, circle, square, cube and so on is then attached to these sensorial experiences.

Mathematic

The child’s mind has already been awakened to mathematical ideas through the sensorial experiences. Children are introduced to the functions and operations of numbers. Through concrete material the child learns to add, subtract, multiply and divide. He/she gradually comes to understand many abstract mathematical concepts with ease and joy. Geometry, algebra and arithmetic are connected in the Montessori method as they are in life.

Language

Children are immersed in the dynamics of their own language development. The Montessori approach provides a carefully thought-out program to facilitate this process. Muscular movement and fine motor skills are developed along with the ability of the child to distinguish the sounds that make up language. With spoken language in the background, the Guide begins to present the alphabet symbols to the child. Not only can children hear and see sounds but they can feel them by tracing the sandpaper letters. When a number of letters have been learned the movable alphabet is introduced. These cardboard or wooden letters enable the child to reproduce his/her own words, then phrases, sentences and finally stories. Because children know what they have written, they soon discover they can read back their stories. Reading books both to themselves and others soon follows.

Culture

Acquisition of one’s own first culture is the child’s central developmental drive in the first plane of development. Culture includes Creative Arts, Music, Science, Geography and Cultural Studies. Globes, maps, songs, landforms, collections of pictures of life in different cultures, and much more, is offered with the goal to help the child to grow as an individual alongside an appreciation of the larger context of his/her world.

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