Primary

Children work at their own pace

The teacher guides the children’s work, and allows them to move forward at their own pace. The students become self-confident, enthusiastic and joyful learners with remarkable focus and concentration. Our classrooms offer plenty of opportunities for social interaction and children learn to cooperate and respect each other.

The classroom environment

The Montessori classroom environment and activities are carefully arranged in the following areas:

PRACTICAL LIFE

Practical life exercises include many tasks of daily life, such as washing dishes, flower arranging, and learning to button and snap. Other exercises are specifically intended to foster “grace and courtesy, ” through which children develop poise, coordination and self-confidence. They experience the joy of “I can do it myself.”

SENSORIAL

Sensorial materials involve training and developing children’s sense of touch, sight, hearing, smell and taste. By practicing, children sharpen their ability to differentiate between various shapes, sounds, smells, colors, textures and tastes. The result is accentuated awareness of the physical environment and heightened powers of observation that are highly useful for future academic explorations.

LANGUAGE

Montessori builds on children’s remarkable natural capacity for language development. Students are exposed to rich language in all areas of the classroom. A phonetic approach leads to reading words, phrases and sentences, and ultimately to reading books. Children are also exposed to the mechanics of cursive writing, parts of speech and grammatical concepts.

CULTURAL SUBJECTS

Cultural subjects, such as geography, history, biology, botany, zoology, art and music are an important part of the Montessori classroom. Children use the Montessori materials to gain understanding and appreciation of the world around them.

MATHEMATICS

Work with the Montessori math materials ranges from simply learning to count and recognize numerals to hands-on work with the decimal system and hierarchies of numbers (units, tens, hundreds, thousands, etc.). By working with these lessons, children also learn the process of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. Concrete materials help the children develop a deep level of understanding of mathematical concepts.

Kindergarten included

Montessori is a continuum of education that allows your child to build upon experiences each year. Your child will stay in the Primary classroom for several years, including the traditional “kindergarten year” - when the seeds of learning come to fruition. The benefits for the children over the course of the Primary Program is that they cycle through a rhythm of growth and development in a structured environment tailored to their developmental needs. Reading and writing come to life from sounds and symbols. They are introduced to numbers and the decimal system. They learn about geometric figures and the political countries of our world. They leave the program with a strong set of academic skills; but, far more importantly, with the attitude that learning is fun, exciting and boundless. At this point, your child is ready to move up to the Elementary program for children ages 6 to 12.

Learn more about how students solidify their learning during the Primary cycle.