The Areas of Learning /Curriculum in a Montessori Environment

The Exercises of Practical Life
One of the child’s first and fundamental tasks is to adapt to her immediate environment. That is what motivates children to imitate adults. Learning routine tasks that adults consider mundane are intriguing and fun to young children. Washing dishes, paring vegetables, polishing wood, etc. are important work in the child’s development. Perfecting those skills builds responsibility and self-esteem. Each activity is color-coded and organized on a tray, which encourages independence. Through repetition, the children perfect their coordination and increase their span of concentration. They develop organizational skills as they follow the sequence of actions in an activity. The child learns to complete the full cycle of an activity, including putting away all of the materials.

Sensorial Exercises
The sensorial materials help children to distinguish, categorize, and relate new information to what they already know. The young child identifies and organizes the impressions taken in through the senses by manipulating objects in a concentrated and ordered way. Dr. Montessori believed this process was the beginning of conscious knowledge. Children learn about their world by comparing different heights, lengths, weights, shapes, colors, sounds, smells, and textures.





Language
The Montessori environment is rich with opportunities to develop and enhance oral language, vocabulary enrichment, and language appreciation. Individual presentations of language materials allow the guide to respond to those moments of peak interest in each child. Children learn the phonetic sounds of letters before they learn the sequential alphabetical names. These are the sounds the children hear in words they need to begin to read.

Reading activities begin when the child wants to know what a word says or when s/he wants to `write’ with the Sandpaper Letters. Writing, by constructing words with the Moveable Alphabet, precedes reading because the child is able to process writing in her/his mind before s/he has sufficient fine motor coordination to manipulate a pencil. Also, the child has more success at decoding and understanding words s/he has written than those written by someone else. Many fun, hands-on reading activities invite the children to enhance their skills. A child’s interest in reading is cultivated as his/her most important key to future learning. S/he is encouraged to explore books for answers to his/her own questions, about frogs, stars, dinosaurs, or whatever piques her/his curiosity.

Mathematics
Dr. Montessori revolutionized math education when she created concrete materials representing abstract concepts that the child could manipulate. In mathematics, one idea builds on another. The child does not advance until s/he clearly grasps each sequential concept. By combining, separating, sharing, counting and comparing the materials, the child learns the basic operations of mathematics: the decimal system, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions. The child learns to discriminate, recognize similarities and differences, construct and compare a series, find relationships, and to understand mathematical terminology.




Other Areas
Children are encouraged to pursue their interests in nature, science, geography, geometry, cultural and fine art, music, other languages and history. Conversations, creative drama, group stories and songs, and quiet time to one’s self, and large motor activities are all part of a Montessori day.

 

 

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