The kindergarten year in a Montessori preschool offers many benefits to children who complete the full 3-year cycle. Children have the opportunity to practice leadership skills, master concepts, develop social and emotional skills, and prepare for the transition to elementary school.
Children love being able to help care for their environment through real and meaningful activities. In the process of helping maintain and care for their classroom and school, children develop a sense of belonging, begin to feel at home, and develop responsibility.
Memorizing facts is essential to solid numeric understanding as well as preparation for efficiently completing more complicated problems later. As you might imagine, we start this process when children are young, and we use specialized materials to help them feel and envision what the numbers are doing.
Art is a vital form of self-expression, especially for young children. In Montessori, we’re highly sensitive to the various expressive needs of children throughout different stages of development. Explore the role that art plays in Montessori classrooms.
From the earth’s biosphere offering an array of support for life, to the fragrant and colorful flowers existing to lure pollinators, to a woman’s uterus preparing each month for the implantation of a fertilized egg – prepared environments are all around us!
In Montessori, while we care deeply about the academics we teach, we’re quite passionate about other things too. We want the children in our care to go out into the world feeling good about themselves, caring about others, and excited about what they do.
Those of us accustomed to traditional models of education may find the Montessori approach, and the role of the adult in the classroom, somewhat odd or even worrisome. How can we expect our children to learn if the teachers don’t teach?
To support a child's development, Montessori programs offer carefully designed sensorial materials that follow a formal, systematic approach. The materials isolate each sensorial quality and offer children what Dr. Maria Montessori called the “keys to the world.”
In Montessori, we love to explore how our language shapes our thinking, so we often explore the etymology of words. The word geography comes from the Greek geo, which means earth, and graphein, which means to write. So, geography can be understood as a description of the earth and all that occurs physically upon it.
Between mass media and family travel, young children are exposed to all sorts of language about our planet. They may hear phrases like “going around the world,” “as the world turns,” or “the other side of the world.” Young children absorb this information yet still need concrete experiences to help make sense of what “the world” even means!
