Academics

 

In a Montessori program, the curriculum includes math, language arts, biology, geology, and social studies.  Yet there are no homework assignments, no rote memorization, and no tests.  

 Instead, each lesson is presented at the child's level, in a manner designed not only to teach but to help them succeed through their own natural desires. Indeed, Dr. Montessori told us "Never let children risk failure until they have a reasonable chance of success."  Each lesson has carefully been designed to build upon those before it.  Thus, the scrubbing and polishing motions used in Toddler become tracing sandpaper letters and learning to write in Primary.  Red rods of length are followed by the number rods to introduce numerals and units, which are themselves followed by the bead materials, through which a child learns not only how to count to one thousand, but what it is to square and cube numbers. 

A Primary environment has four basic areas: Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, and Math.

Practical Life exercises are designed to foster independence, self-confidence, self-esteem, and self-control. Through these activities, children learn to care for themselves, their community, and their environment.  Through caring for the everyday necessities of life, a child becomes an active participant in life, increasingly self-reliant and empathetic.  Working through a precise set of steps develops concentration and the ability to understand and remember a sequence of steps, both of which aid in later development of reading and math skills.  Each set of motions is also carefully planned, enabling activites such as scrubbing tables and polishing shoes to develop skills and muscle memory for the motions of writing.  

Sensorial activities isolate qualities of the environment percieved through the senses, assisting children in learning how to categorize and name them. As skills increase, so does the introduction of language. These activities begin to introduce mathematical concepts including size, geometry, and algebreic relationships. They also include scientific concepts such as botanical classification and weights and measures, as well as artistic concepts including music and harmony, color discrimination, and tactile awareness.

Language activities continue throughout the day and in all areas, but there are also specific lessons designed to assist with developing vocabulary, the development of writing skills and then reading, and composition. Introducing new language, playing sound games to learn to hear the different sounds in a word, and tracing letters start the process; later excercises progress to creative writing using movable letters, exploring the functions of the parts of speech, and eventually through not only reading and writing but sentance analysis.  Our language activities also include the introduction of geography and time.  Starting with the concepts of land and water on a globe, geography lessons introduce concepts including land and water forms, continents and oceans, and climates.  They also begin to introduce political geography and world cultures, including countries on a map and flags of the nations.  Cultural materials include pictures, stories, art objects and music, both from places around the world and various cultures throughout time; there is an emphasis on seeing that while things may be done differently in different places and times, all humans are striving to meet the same goals such as eating well, having a place to live, and being part of a community, and to express similar emotions and feelings.  

The Math curriculum, which buiilds on the development of math awareness presented in Practical Life and Sensorial activities, begins with sequencing and recognizing  the language, reading, and quantity of numbers 0-10.  Additional lessons introduce the ideas of the decimal system, operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division); odd and even numbers; linear counting and number recognition through 1,000; squaring and cubing, and fractions.  These activities form the foundations enabling children to work complex math problems.  Because each concept is introduced in the most concrete, touchable way, and only gradually becomes abstract, children understand the ideas in a fundamental, easy way: adults frequently comment that if they had learned math this way when they were young, it would be less difficult or scary now.