See the magic of our classrooms in action! Below are but a few reels showcasing our students as they engage in hands-on learning, exploration, and discovery. From practical life activities to sensorial experiences, each short video provides a glimpse into the rich learning environment at Pearlily Montessori. Join us on this journey of discovery and inspiration!

Practical Life activities are an essential part of Montessori education. Montessori children find joy doing challenging tasks that involve practical real-life activities such as shining a shoe, folding a small towel, pouring water into a small cup from a water bottle, and observing an older child slice a banana and then doing it.

Children find and gain confidence as they perform everyday activities that they can do all by themselves. It reinforces good habits and the attitude “I can do it!” This is why it’s so important for children to have opportunities to perform practical life activities in their daily environment.

The aim of practical life activities is to develop a child’s independence, body control, and coordination of movement, concentration, and sense of order.

As children gain mastery doing everyday tasks, they become role models to younger children by showing them how to perform a practical life activity correctly with ease. Children learn the virtue of responsibility by doing things themselves and from observing what their peers are doing.

Dive into the world of Montessori Math with the 45 Layout! The 45 Layout in Montessori Math is a key activity designed to help young children understand and internalize the decimal system, and shows them the magic of numbers, from 1 all the way to 1000.

The 45 Layout involves the use of specific Montessori materials like the golden bead material, which includes individual beads, bars of 10 beads, squares of 100 beads, and cubes of 1000 beads.

In the 45 Layout, these materials are used to build quantities from 1 to 1000, helping children have fun visualizing and building their understanding of the decimal hierarchy and place value system.

The hands-on Montessori approach makes abstract mathematical concepts tangible and easier for children to grasp, laying a solid foundation for more advanced mathematical learning.

Watch as abstract math concepts become child’s play!

The Montessori approach to “Writing Before Reading,” a method that places a strong emphasis on developing a child’s writing skills as a precursor to reading, is implemented with the use of an iconic Montessori material— the Moveable Alphabet.

This approach helps a child decompose words into its parts and associate a symbol (i.e., the alphabet) to a sound. The Small Moveable Alphabet comes in a box with smaller wooden lowercase letters either all red or all blue, removing any distinction between vowels and consonants. By placing letters together, a child forms a word such as cat, bag, fan, hat, mat.

Can you imagine the enthusiasm and joy a child feels when creating a word on their own? When a child writes for the first time, these are their own words and letters which they’ve arranged in the order they’ve chosen. Later when they start to read, they recognize these letters which they’re already familiar with.

Once children have a strong foundation in writing and phonics, the transition to reading becomes more natural. They can decode words they’ve written and sound them out, leading to the development of reading skills.

Since reading and writing are intertwined in this way, the process is organic, intuitive, and less reliant on rote memorization. By prioritizing writing before reading, Montessori education lays a strong foundation for literacy that is both enjoyable and effective.

At Pearlily Montessori, children are fascinated by the Land, Air, and Water globe! They love how smoothly the globe turns on its axis as they observe different the shapes of formed by land and sea.

In the Montessori environment, children use Land and Water Form trays to learn the names of various land and water forms. By carefully pouring water into a tray to see where land and water meet, for example, they visually see what an island, lake, peninsula, or isthmus looks like. Three part cards also help the child match the image of an island with the words used to describe the land or water form.

They learn which is “land” and which is “water” during a three-period lesson. First, the guide invites them to feel the rough land and the smooth water, and then names them. Then she asks the child, “Which is water?” If they have success with this, she then asks “Which is this?” giving the child the opportunity to say its name.

Christy Hale’s “Land and Water Forms” book is a wonderful accompaniment to these lessons. It has beautiful illustrations that show fascinating connections between many forms of land and water. A lake turns into an island. A cozy bay into a secluded cape. A gulf with sea turtles transforms into a peninsula surrounded by pirates.

Sandpaper Letters are a fundamental tool in the Montessori Early Language Curriculum, used for teaching letter recognition and phonetic sounds. Each letter is made of sandpaper on a smooth board. When children trace these letters with their fingers, they engage multiple senses, specifically touch and sight. This multi-sensory approach helps imprint the shape and sound of each letter in the child’s memory. Letters are introduced phonetically, meaning children learn the sounds that the letters make, rather than their names.

The guide typically introduces a small group of letters at a time during a 3-period lesson, ensuring they are visually and phonetically distinct (e.g., “a”, “m”, “h”). The guide first demonstrates how to trace the letter gently with two fingers while saying the letter’s sound. The child is then encouraged to trace the letter while saying its sound. This reinforces the association between the shape of the letter, the way it feels, and the sound it represents. The process is repeated with different letters over time, ensuring the child has ample opportunity to practice and reinforce learning.

Once a child is comfortable with several letters, the guide may introduce activities combining these letters to form simple phonetic words, bridging the gap between letter recognition and word formation. The Sandpaper Letters also serve as a precursor to writing, as tracing the letters helps develop the motor skills necessary for using a pencil. Through Sandpaper Letters, Montessori guides facilitate a foundational understanding of the alphabet, setting the stage for future reading and writing skills in an engaging, hands-on manner.

The Geometric Cabinet is a beautiful material in the Montessori Sensorial Curriculum. It has 6 drawers filled with yellow wooden frames with sockets that perfectly fit knobbed blue wooden insets:

Drawer 1 holds 6 circles decreasing in diameter from 10 cm to 5 cm. Drawer 2 holds 6 rectangles that begin with a 10 cm square and decrease in width by 1 cm each. Drawer 3 holds 6 triangles: equilateral, right isosceles, obtuse isosceles, acute isosceles, right scalene, and obtuse scalene. Drawer 4 holds 6 regular polygons: pentagon, heptagon, octagon, nonagon, and decagon. Drawer 5 holds 4 curvilinear figures: ellipse, oval, curvilinear triangle, and quatrefoil. Drawer 6 holds 4 quadrilaterals: rhombus, parallelogram, isosceles trapezoid, and right trapezoid.

What’s the significance of working with the Geometric Cabinet to a young child? For one, it helps builds fine motor skills and the pincer grasp. A pincer grip helps a child to hold a pencil to write. It introduces abstract ideas of geometry when working with the shapes. It helps develop logical thinking and visual discrimination skills.

The Geometric Cabinet is one of many Montessori materials that challenge and shape a child’s stereognostic sense, which is their ability to perceive and understand both the form and nature of objects through touch. By working with these materials, children become aware of how shapes form the basis for everyday objects.

Practical life activities have a purpose– they help children build their skills and grow in coordination, concentration, independence and order.

Real life activities cover these areas in the early childhood environment: physical movement that builds gross motor or fine motor skills, care of self, care of environment and lessons in grace and courtesy.

Young children in Montessori classrooms love to participate in these familiar daily activities: grating soap and bubble making, cleaning and brushing nails, pouring into a small container, grating carrots, placing snowflake toothpicks in tiny holes, carrying and putting away a tray on a shelf, using tweezers to order tiny flowers in a wooden compartment, putting away a lunch container and zipping up a lunch box, arranging flowers as a way to care for the environment, and so much more.

Schedule a visit to Pearlily and discover how children are just fascinated with daily tasks and would much rather work with real tools doing real life activities.