To fufill the goal of bringing out a child's full potential, the Montessori classroom is carefully prepared to provide opportunities for children to be independent and achieve "ownership" of their environment.  It is a rich, ordered stimulating space that is filled with enriching, developmentally appropriate materials that encourage the child to be creative and make their own work choices.  The teacher presents lessons to children when they are curious and ready for their next challenge in the areas of practical life, sensorial, math, language, cultural, geography, nature, art and music.

 

     Practical Life is the cornerstone of the Montessori program.  The chldren are offered real experiences in the care of one's self and the care of the environment. It is here where you will find the children spooning, pouring, squeezing, sewing, washing, buttoning, and preparing food.  These exercises encourage the child to work and think in an orderly manner, reinfine eye/hand coordination and build the child's concentration.

 

     The Sensorial materials serve to develop and perfect the child's senses.  Each material isolates a single quality, sense or impression (i.e. size, color, weight, smell, taste, shape, etc.)  After the child sufficiently experiences the materials concretely, language is added (longer, shorter, darkest. lightest) and she enjoys comparing, classifying, matching and sorting.  The skills acquired here directly translate to abilities needed for more advanced learning.  Thus the sensorial materials prepare the mind and body for reading, writing, and math.

 

     An example of something a child might work on in the Language area is tracing letters made of sandpaper while he says and hears the corresponding phonetic sound.  Later he'll "build" words with the moveable alphabet.  Here again he is using his senses as well as concrete materials to absorb and refine information.  All the Montessori language activities cultivate the child's oral, auditroy and visual discrimination, reading skills, writing mechanics, as well as an appreciation of literature and poetry.  The child has the contents of language in her mind; the materials help her organize and clarify her understanding. 

 

    The Math materials assist the child in experiencing quantity and symbol in a tangible form.  They include excercises for numeration from 0 to 10, linear counting from 1 to 1000, categories of the decimal system (units, tens, hundreds, thousands) and basic operations such as addition and subtraction.  The child learns these principals physically by tracing a sandpaper number with his fingers, carrying large heavy cubes made of 1000 beads, extending his arms wide to move the longest "ten" number rod, or stretching out a long chain of beads and counting them.  Thus the leap to abstraction is grounded in the concrete.

 

     The activities for cultural studies, geography, history, science, nature and art dovetail with the main four disciplines and are presented in the same manner (i.e first using movement and the senses concretely then moving towards abstraction, critical thinking and creativity).  A wonderful feature of the Montessori classroom is that all the areas are integrated as much as possible.  Thus this very naturally illustrates the connectedness of the world for the child.