OUR CHILDREN’S HOUSE MONTESSORI PROGRAM

“The hand is the instruments of man’s intelligence.” - Maria Montessori Dr. Maria Montessori recognized that there are periods of great capacity for optimum development of specific skills. She discovered the senses are attuned to the specific aspects of the environment needed to satisfy the needs of the brain. Movement is an innate need of children. Providing children with opportunities of purposeful movement, repetition and practice will help them develop their gross and fine motor skills, competence, self-esteem, independence and concentration. Movement enhances learning and is a critically important factor in brain development. It also helps with communication, relationships, emotional well-being, development of balance, motor control, eye functioning, hand-eye coordination and perceptual skills. Through movement, children learn how their bodies work and get information from the environment. Movement connects the child with sensorial experiences – and through the senses is how children learn. “Movement, or physical activity, is thus an essential factor in intellectual growth, which depends upon the impressions received from outside. Through movement, we come in contact with external reality, and it is through these contacts that we eventually acquire even abstract ideas.” - Maria Montessori

Our goal is to support each child’s intellectual, physical, emotional and social development through active exploration, choice and independent learning. We recognize that by creating beautiful and orderly Montessori prepared environments (classrooms) we support the need of each child to have external order in order to help them create their own internal order. Order is soothing and predictability is calming for a child. Children naturally seek order. They not only find comfort in it, but they also seek it out and even create it themselves. We see this in children’s work in our classrooms — lining up cubes or prisms before they begin, gathering same-color puzzle pieces, matching pairs, and aligning their mat, their material and their tray just-so. When we create and encourage external order in our classrooms, the children can do the more important work — creating their own inner order. This leads to the development of logic, seeing patterns and problem solving. It leads to a calm, cooperative and receptive-to-learning demeanor in the child.

Within our Montessori environments, language takes an important role in aiding the development of each child’s powers of communication and self-expression. A classroom that is rich in opportunities to develop language skills not only promotes vocabulary development and English language skills. Oral language and listening skills promote the social development of each child through modelling clear and respectful language to others through Montessori’s Grace and Courtesy lessons. The Montessori Language curriculum offers robust opportunities for imaginative exploration of all aspects of literacy – listening, reading, writing and oral expression. Language in the Montessori-prepared environment leads to confident and creative learners with strong self-expression skills and refined sensory perception.

Our Montessori classroom environments are small communities. They contain opportunities for children to learn and play in several different ways: by themselves, in pairs, in small groups, in large groups, inside, outside, at tables and on mats on the floor. The three-year mixed-age grouping allows for the younger students to observe and learn from the older students. In turn, the older students become leaders in the classroom community, guiding the younger students and taking on increased responsibilities such as showing another child how to clean up a spill, or assisting in the preparation of snack. Care and concern for others, responsibility, leadership and other character traits are nurtured and encouraged. This learning approach encourages the development of independence in the child. All objects in the environment are scaled to the child’s size, including furniture, shelves, utensils, dishware, cleaning implements and the Montessori materials themselves. The Directress (teacher) is not the focus of the child’s attention, nor are they the purveyors of knowledge. They are the child’s guide by their side, observing carefully, and providing self-directed learning opportunities, for each child, based on their unique interests and developmental needs. Lessons in Grace and Courtesy are introduced to help each child develop social skills. Learning how to greet one another, how to wait for their turn, how to express their needs and wants effectively, are practiced through role-playing activities and appropriate modeling. Conflict resolution skills are taught and modelled, giving the child the ability to act confidently and pro-socially when conflict arises. The result is a courteous, respectful, self-regulating classroom, in which natural social tensions are resolved mostly by the children themselves.