7What We Offer At Montessori 

The Montessori Preschool classroom invites children of different ages and developmental stages to work at their own pace and according to their own interests.  It encourages them to develop their strengths while providing the opportunity to work on other areas requiring a little more attention.
The flexibility of the Montessori environment allows it to accommodate children of varied abilities regardless of their age.   The mixed-age range allows our younger students to benefit from the older ones while they learn from helping their younger peers. The classroom offers a wide variety of activities including Practical Life, Sensorial, Math, Art and Creativity, Language, Geography and Culture, and Science. Group activities such as Art, music and movement and nature walks are also part of the curriculum. 

Montessori education is based upon a three to four year cycle of child development.  For this reason, we prefer that our students attend our school for a minimum of three years with four years being optimal.

In the 1st year ages 2 – 3.5 the children are introduced to skills like spooning, pouring, opening & shutting, walking on a line, threading, folding, washing, dressing, dusting, sweeping, polishing, greeting, sharing. They will work on the following equipment: knobbed cylinders, Pink Tower, Broad Stair, Colour Boxes 1 & 2, Red Rods, Sound Boxes, Touch Boards, Early measurement experiences of length, weight & time, exploration of paint, crayons & paper construction, movement to music and percussion instruments. Skills being developed will include growth in self knowledge, good self image, independence, motor perception and perfection of movement, sense of responsibility, order, concentration, visual and muscular perception of dimensions leading to observations, preparation for maths and language materials.

The second year ages 3.5 – 4.5 the children will be introduced to the Knobless cylinders, Touch Fabrics, Smelling Jars, Baric Tablets, Geometric Cabinet(Basic shapes 2 dimensional), Geometric Solids( 3 dimensional shapes), Number Rods, Sandpaper numbers, Rods and Cards, Spindle Box, Cards and Counters, insets for design, Analysis of sounds through Games, Sandpaper letters, Moveable Alphabet, Pink and Blue Reading Material and all cultural work done in themes. Skills being developed will continue from abovementioned skills now including pencil control, learning and recognizing the sounds of the alphabet phonetically, building words with sounds learnt, learning the concept of numbers 1 – 10, recognizing the numbers and associating them with the relevant quantities and will be visually introduced to the odd and even numbers.

The third year 4.5 – 5.5 the children will work on the Binomial and Trinomial Cube, Constructive Triangles, Golden Beads, Addition, Subtraction, Multiplication and Division, Seguin Boards A & B, Green Reading Material, Spontaneous Writing. The children will explore the construction of other shapes using various geometrical shapes, develop a perception in differences in proportion in 3 dimensions, a perception in mathematical patterns, Writing and Reading phonetic and phonic words, introduced to the Decimal System, what a unit, a ten, a hundred & a thousand is, learn new names for the combinations of tens and units and to recognize them as separate numbers i.e. 11, 12, 13,,,,, experience a concrete way of doing additions subtractions etc.

The fourth year 5.5 – 6.5 is our Grade 0 year where all of the above material is now explored more deeply and independently. We also run a visual perception programme where Visual- Motor Coordination, Figure-Ground Perception, Perceptual Constancy, Perception of Position in Space, Perception of Spatial Relationships are developed and an Auditory Skills program helping the children to receive and process auditory information effectively is used. Emotional readiness is encouraged and the child’s confidence is boosted so that they can cope in the more challenging environment of the Grade 1 classroom. The individual attention given to each child aids us to assess the child’s needs and adjust their progress accordingly.

We maintain a quota of 7:1 children to teachers which is very rare in other environments.

Did You Know….
Jean Piaget was a Swiss philosopher, natural scientist and developmental psychologist, well known for his work studying children and his theory of cognitive development. According to Ernst von Glasersfeld, Jean Piaget is also “the great pioneer of the constructivist theory of knowing”. Piaget made his first observations of children in a Montessori school.
Alexander Graham Bell noted inventor, provided financial support directly to Dr. Montessori. He helped establish the first Montessori class in Canada and one of the first in the United States.