The Curriculum

The core of the Montessori Primary Curriculum is made up of the following: Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, Math, Science, Geography & Art.

The Practical Life includes daily living tasks, such as pouring juice, polishing shoes, sweeping and buttoning a shirt. To the child, these are meaningful activities that involve caring for himself/herself, other people and the environment. They also help the child to concentrate, expand his attention span, and improve hand-eye coordination.

The Sensorial materials isolate a defining quality, such as color, size, sound texture of shapes. They help to develop the child’s visual auditory, and tactile senses. Montessori materials, such as the bi-nomial cubes, are concrete representations of mathematical concepts that appear in later schooling.

The Language materials include objects and pictures to be named, matched, labeled and classified to aid vocabulary development. Textured letters allows the child to feel and see the alphabet, while the movable alphabet leads the child towards reading. Once the child begins to blend sounds to make words, a variety of materials are available, ranging from simple three-letter, short-vowel words to read, to materials designed to teach long-vowels sounds, phonograms, and parts of speech. A wide variety of reading materials are used to gain proficiency and a love of reading.

Mathematics is a concrete experience in the Montessori classroom. The children are constantly manipulating objects in their efforts to understand number concepts. The early materials are designed to teach the very basics such as the quantity and symbols of the numbers one to ten. Spindle boxes allow the child to see what "nothing" or zero looks like. Moving towards the more advanced materials, bead bars teach concepts ranging from units, tens, hundreds, to addition, multiplication, subtraction and division. These traditional materials are supplemented with teacher- made games and materials for learning a variety of simple concepts such as time, money and fractions.

Science activities are nature-based, and include the study of vertebrate and invertebrate animals, a variety of plant types, and environments around the world that support this wide range of flora and fauna. Love and respect for all life are emphasized.

Children are given an introduction of physical and cultural Geography through the use of wooden puzzle maps.

Painting, color mixing collage, and print making are just some of the Art activities provided to show the care and use of art materials, to encourage creativity and just to have fun.