Early Childhood

Overview of Program

Curriculum Overview

Grace and courtesy are encouraged and consistently reintroduced to the children. These lessons include: how to interrupt, what level their voice should be, the steps of a work cycle, how to push in a chair, how to roll a mat, how to welcome a visitor, how to solve conflicts, how to sit on line, and how to greet others. Grace and courtesy is essential to ensuring a smooth work cycle and sets the framework of a successful working Montessori classroom.

Practical life prepares the child for life. It is the foundation of the Montessori environment and nurtures the needs of the early childhood student. The four main goals in practical life activities: order, concentration, coordination, and independence.

Children learn through their senses. The sensorial materials train and sharpen the senses of the child and bring awareness to learning in other areas. Through practice with the sensorial materials, children learn to discriminate between sizes, shapes, colors, textures, smells with language woven throughout the sensorial lessons. Language activities build self-confidence by expanding the child’s vocabulary and ability to communicate thoughts more precisely.

Montessori philosophy indicates that our ability to understand math can be sourced to our innate intelligence and the quality of the environment in which we are placed. Montessori practice begins with concrete experiences that will intrinsically lead to abstraction when the child is ready.

Geography, history and science are interrelated ideas and materials. The lessons are introduced with a leading question, then the child works with the materials and draws his/her own conclusions/inferences. The purpose of this work is to provide the children the opportunity to understand their own relationship to the planet.