Montessori Curriculum
Practical Life
The Practical Life area of the classroom is an extension of the child’s own home environment. The practical life exercises encourage independence and promote the development of a sense of order. A child’s ability to concentrate develops with repetition of exercises, which is essential for future learning. Practical life encompasses four main areas:
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Control of Movement
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Care of Person
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Care of Environment
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Grace and Courtesy
Skills, such as fine and gross motor, learned in this area of the classroom lay an important foundation to the whole Montessori curriculum.
Sensorial
Children learn through their senses and the Montessori Sensorial curriculum promotes the development and refinement of the five senses. All materials in a Montessori environment provide learning through touch, taste, smell, sight, hearing or hands-on manipulation. The sensorial materials enable a child to learn how to discriminate, contrast and grade within each sense, developing a greater awareness, knowledge and understanding of the environment
Language and Literacy
At Kensington Montessori, young children are introduced to language in many forms, including stories, letters, poems, and songs. Our rich environment extends the children’s scope for discussion and constantly introduces new ideas and vocabulary. Games, rhyming songs, and poetry build listening skills, and as children show an interest in alphabet sounds and letters, they are guided to progress, step-by-step, through the literacy curriculum.
Our literacy curriculum is included working with Montessori insets, Pre reading materials such as matching objects to pictures , sandpaper letters,I Spy with objects or pictures, matching letters to an alphabet board or verbal games identifying initial or end sounds of words.All these strategies are reinforcing the child’s knowledge of letters and sounds in preparation for reading and writing. A child gains word-building skills by working with the large moveable alphabet and begins to analyse words in preparation for reading, writing and spelling. A child becomes aware that there is a sequence to sounds in words.
Problem solving and Mathematics
At Kensington Montessori children learn the basic concepts of mathematics with concrete materials initially which leads to a better understanding of abstract concepts. Montessori mathematical materials allow the child as a sensorial explorer, to begin their mathematical journey from the concrete to the abstract through manipulation, repetition and exploration. Through concrete material the child learns to add, subtract, multiply and divide, the decimal system and gradually comes to understand many abstract mathematical concepts.
The focus in Montessori mathematical education is not getting the right answer, but rather the process of how an answer is reached and what is discovered along the way.
Geography and Culture
The children work with globes, maps, land and water forms, and collections of pictures of life in different cultures and countries of the world gaining a knowledge and understanding of the world around them.
Science & Technology
Students’ appreciation of the nature is enhanced with regular hands on experiments and explorations.
