— Maria Montessori About our Program
These activities are exciting for the children because they allow them to imitate adults – whether it be sweeping, cooking, chopping; pouring, washing, or polishing they want to do what we do. By performing these Exercises of Practical Life activities the child adapts to the world around him. These activities not only make the child independent but also help to perfect his co-ordination and lengthen his span of concentration. The child learns to pay attention to details as he follows a regular sequence of actions. This prepares his hands indirectly for writing and his mind indirectly for mathematics and logical thinking. Sensorial activities are designed to isolate and materialize properties of physical matter – size, shape, colour, weight, taste, texture, smell, 3-dimentional, temperature, etc. Each activity appeals to a corresponding sense organ. Each material is complete and in proportion, thus helping the child to achieve these important concepts and refine his senses further. It also prepares him for all other areas of learning especially Mathematics, Language, Geometry and Physics. Maria Montessori believed that the sensitive period for language begins at birth and continues to about six years of age. Babies learn to recognize and repeat the individual sounds of their language and toddlers learn to recognize, name, and pronounce the names of objects in their environment. In the Montessori Infant/Toddler environment, daily exposure to language through conversations and the reading of good literature helps the child strengthen her vocabulary. The Montessori 3-6 classroom is a natural extension of the patterns of communication that have already been absorbed. Through every conversation, every book read aloud, every new word that is taught, the child is learning language, and thus, learning to read. In the Montessori environment, emphasis is placed on the process of acquiring language. Writing is taught before reading through the direct and indirect preparations done by Practical Life and Sensorial works. As Montessori educators, we help the child to focus her attention to the sound of her own speech, making fine distinctions between sounds. From our attention in oral language development emerges the child’s need to write. Written symbols are introduced and from there, the child bursts spontaneously into reading. The Exercises of Practical life and Sensorial activities indirectly prepare the child for Mathematics. The concepts covered in the Primary class are numeration, the decimal system, the arithmetic tables, whole numbers, fractions, and positive numbers. In a Montessori classroom the children understand all the basic concepts of the decimal system including addition, subtraction, multiplication and division by actually performing the operations with concrete materials. The concrete math materials enable the child to experience the material moving from the concrete to the abstract through manipulation and experimentation. From art, music, drama, geography, history, botany, zoology – all are introduced as part of culture. There are special apparatus and materials in all the areas for the child to experience all these aspects of culture.
PRACTICAL LIFE
SENSORIAL
LANGUAGE
MATHEMATICS
CULTURE
The child has a mind able to absorb knowledge. He has the power to teach himself.
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