Preschool Community

Practical Life

The exercises in practical life provide everyday activities that are experienced commonly at home. The young child seeks out ways to become independent and often gives a message to adults, “Help me do it myself!” These exercises fall in the following categories: Care for oneself, care for the environment, food preparation, and lessons on grace and courtesy. A child who is learning motor-coordination by scrubbing a table or transferring items using a tong, translates to the similar motor skills needed in writing. Within this small community of learners, social manners are also established— helping each other, developing empathy, and problem-solving.

Sensorial Exercises

Young children perceive the world and collect information through their senses. The sensorial equipment helps to categorize and isolate defining qualities such as color, size, shape, texture, weight, sound, and smell. All the materials are exact, precise, and self-correcting—it allows feedback on a child’s learning, its error or correctness, rather than to ask for an adult’s help constantly. The education of senses provides a solid foundation for cognitive development and intelligence—through categorizing, comparing, reasoning, and forming conclusions.

Pre-language works start early, in our young preschool Community. The child’s exploration of practical life and art activities foster muscular control, vocabulary, focus, and concentration: skills that are essential when the child progresses naturally to reading and writing. By reading aloud selected children’s books, open-ended conversations, I-Spy games, rhymes and poems, the child develops the comprehension and sensitivity to acquiring the native language and even a second language. A series of writing exercises such as tracing sandpaper letters aid in developing muscular memory of each letter shape. All these skills are merged for total literacy—reading, writing and speaking.

Mathematics

Dr. Montessori has observed that children delight themselves in the numerical work. With the preparations and impressions made through the work in practical life, sensorial, and language, the child is ready to progress into the language of mathematics. The concrete materials engage the child to gain concepts of quantity and symbol association, the decimal system, perform arithmetic operations, linear and skip counting, and fractions.

Science and Cultural Studies

The study on botany, zoology, physical and cultural geography introduces the larger world to the children. With the understanding of the whole, the broad range of knowledge down to an in-depth study of the parts, children expand their understanding of the complex world.