Primary
Primary: Ages 2 1/2 – 6.
Students must turn 3 in the current enrollment year.
Hours
We have two primary classrooms. Both classrooms offer full and half-day hours.
Our Oak room class is from 8:30 until 3:00 pm, with the half-day ending at 11:30 am. Drop off for the Oak room is 8:30 to 8:45 am, half-day pick up is 11:15 to 11:30 am, and full-day pick up is 2:45 to 3 pm.
Our second primary room, the Maple room, has class from 9 am until 3:30 pm, with the half-day ending at 12 pm. Drop off for the Maple room is 9 to 9:15 am, half-day pick up is 11:45 to 12 pm, and full-day pick up is 3:15 to 3:30 pm.
Before care is from 7:30 am to the respective class time, and aftercare is from the end of respective class time to 5:30 pm.
Overview of the Primary Curriculum
The child has a deep love and need for purposeful work. However, he works not as an adult, for completion of a job, but for the sake of an activity itself. This activity enables him to accomplish his most important goal: the development of himself — mental, physical, and psychological strength. Our curriculum includes the following areas:
- Practical Life: Young children have a natural urge to partake in daily living activities and be a participating member of family life. Practical life activities help children develop and coordinate movement, awareness of the environment, orderly thought patterns, independent work habits, and responsibility.
- Sensorial: The materials and activities in this area allow children to pursue their natural tendency to classify sensorial impressions and sort by size, shape, color, touch, sound, and weight. Sensorial activities lay a foundation for math, geometry, geography, botany, art, and music.
- Math: These activities make the abstract concepts of mathematics concrete for hands-on learning. Each activity isolates a particular concept and integrates with other activities to form a strong foundation for further exploration. Beginning preschool math activities include 1 to 10 (sequences, quantity, numeral names, combinations of ten, basic arithmetic), teens, tens, introduction to the decimal system, and the operations of addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division.
- Language: Phonemic awareness is taught through hands-on activities and games, the alphabet is learned with fun and interesting sorting and matching works, handwriting is practiced through tracing shapes, sandpaper letters, and using chalkboards, moveable alphabet letters are used for writing words, and labels are used all over the classroom for word recognition.
- Science: Sensorial exploration and experimentation are the keys as children learn about the natural world. For example, sand and water tables allow for open-ended work while other activities isolate individual concepts such as sink and float, magnets, botany, etc.
- Geography: These materials help the child learn about the facts of the material world. Hands-on activities introduce children to the names and types of landmasses, bodies of water, continents, countries, etc.
- Cultural Studies: The diversity of our world is celebrated through language, music, art, traditions, food, stories, and history. A variety of cultural themes are integrated into all curriculum areas. Peace education is an integral part of the Montessori classroom. It begins with respect for, understanding, and accepting differences and celebrating the unifying aspects that connect us all.
- Music and Art: Informal and formal music education occurs through singing, listening to music, the introduction of instruments, the introduction of musical notation, and the exploration of sound.
- Physical Development: Care of the body is equally as important as challenging the mind. Movement is built into all Montessori activities allowing the child to develop gross motor and fine motor skills. Yoga and other types of more formal exercise are built into daily group times. There are at least two periods of gross motor activity time each day with activities that include running, skipping, swinging, navigating an obstacle course, ball play, group games, sledding in the winter, and activities using other props such as parachutes and ribbons.
- Universal Values and Global Perspective: Montessori deliberately teaches children appropriate patterns of polite behavior and seeks to instill basic universal values within the core of the child’s personality. These values include self-respect, acceptance of the uniqueness and dignity of each person we meet, kindness, peacefulness, compassion, empathy, honor, individual responsibility, and the courage to speak from our hearts. The Montessori philosophy is international in its heritage and consciously seeks to promote a global perspective.
Absorbent Mind
Children of this age possess what Dr. Montessori called the Absorbent Mind. This type of mind has the unique and transitory ability to absorb all aspects of the environment’s physical, mental, and spiritual aspects. As an aid to the child’s self-construction, individual work is encouraged.
Practical Life exercises instill care for themselves and others. The activities include tasks children see as part of the daily life in their home washing and ironing, doing the dishes, arranging flowers, etc. Through these and other activities, children develop muscular coordination, enabling movement, and exploring their surroundings. They learn to work at a task from beginning to end and develop their will, self-discipline, and total concentration capacity.
Sensorial Materials are tools for development. They do this by touching, seeing, smelling, tasting, listening, and exploring their environment’s physical properties.
Language is vital to human existence. The environment provides rich and precise language.
“When the children come into the classroom at around three years of age, they are given in the simplest way possible the opportunity to enrich the language they have acquired during their small lifetime and to use it intelligently, with precision and beauty, becoming aware of its properties not by being taught, but by being allowed to discover and explore these properties themselves. If not harassed, they will learn to write, and as a natural consequence to read, never remembering the day they could not write or read in the same way that they do not remember that once upon a time they could not walk.”
Geography, History, Biology, Botany, Zoology, Art and Music are presented as extensions of the sensorial and language activities. Children learn about other cultures, which allows their innate respect and love for their environment to flourish, creating a sense of solidarity with the global human family. Experiences with nature inspire a reverence for all life. History is presented to the children through art and an intelligent music program.
Children learn and understand mathematical concepts by working with concrete materials, providing the child with traditional mathematical principles and a structured scope for abstract reasoning.