Pre-Primary 3-6

Exercises in practical life are those early exercises taken from everyday life that lead a child to independence through concentrated, purposeful activity. These include activities as simple as pouring and spooning to scrubbing and polishing. The young children get great joy from purposeful activity.

The Montessori approach to arithmetic lays a perfect foundation for complete comprehension that number is quantity and size. We have materials that reinforce this idea. All aspects of number are presented in concrete form first before any abstract concepts are introduced.

Maria Montessori saw the senses as the gateway to perception. She wanted to help the children come to understand the environment through the sensorial qualities of objects. The sensorial materials  are grouped together in qualities, such as, shape, size, colour, sound, texture, temperature and form. These are given to the child  so one sensorial aspect is dealt with at a time.

The 3-6 Montessori environment is rich in materials for oral and written language. Children of this age are very sensitive to the absorption of all aspects of language. Oral questioning games encourage the children to express themselves in an ordered way. Letters with their phonic sounds are given to the children. With these they can create their own words and stories before they can read. This gives the children a great sense of achievement. The progression of reading exercises in the classroom leads to early, fluent, joyful reading.

Our job as educators is to give the child the world. No child is too young for the world they live in. We introduce the children to the geography of our world made of land and water, the continents, the seas, the oceans and all the countries that make up the whole world. These same children want to know all about the plants and animals that inhabit our world. They also look to the sky and are interested in space, the planets and stars. Exploring all these areas increases the amount of language the children are exposed to.