Children's House: Ages 3 - 6
Our Children’s House is home to the 3-6 year old children. In the morning all children are present and there are two adults in the room: one guide (the Montessori teacher) and one assistant. The 3 and 4 year olds go home before lunch along with the aide so that in the afternoon just the guide and the 5 and 6 year old children remain. The room is a calm and peaceful setting with a specially prepared environment that enables the children to be responsible for their work. Staying in the same classroom all three years enables the children to develop close relationships and allows the teacher to understand each student individually and how best to guide them in their learning.
At any given moment in a Children's House classroom, you might see:
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A three year old developing self-control by using tongs. He picks up stones and places them together according to their colors. The activity teaches children to sort, sequence, and classify. These are essential for developing cognitive abilities. He next practices the phonetic sounds of the letters b, c, h, m, t, and a. When he is older, he will blend these letters together and read bat, cat, hat, and mat.
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A four year old using mathematical objects to build quantities such as 4,537. She develops an understanding of place value as she selects seven unit beads, three ten bars, five hundred squares, and four thousand cubes. She next practices handwriting by tracing different geometric shapes. She will also learn the names of each shape such as isosceles obtuse triangle, parallelogram, oval, and quatrefoil.
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A five year old carefully tracing geographical puzzle pieces that represent the nations of Asia. She then colors and correctly labels each piece; for example, India, China, Japan, Pakistan. Another five year old completes a subtraction activity 3,567 – 2,978 while several other children read independently.
A Children’s House classroom offers some 150 learning activities. Each child works and grows at his or her own pace with an individualized curriculum. The learning activities are grouped into these four curricular areas: Practical life, Sensorial, Language, and Math.
These and the many other activities found in the prepared environment promote the development of each child’s individual, unique capabilities. Children learn through discovery and exploration. Your child will learn to use the classroom materials through individual and small group lessons.
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1) Practical Life: The children engage in work that develops an ability to care for themselves and their environment. Washing dishes, paring vegetables, polishing wood, etc. are important work in the child’s development. Perfecting those skills builds responsibility and self-esteem. Each activity is color-coded and organized on a tray, which encourages independence. Through repetition, the children perfect their coordination and increase their span of concentration. They develop organizational skills as they follow the sequence of actions in an activity. The child learns to complete the full cycle of an activity, including putting away all of the materials.
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2) Sensorial: This area of the curriculum includes material that is designed to help the child understand, categorize, distinguish, and relate new information to what they already know. They learn precise information about the environment and its properties. Each piece of material is designed to isolate a single quality: color, weight, dimension, texture, shape, smell, tone, taste, etc. This sensory foundation provides the base for physical and cognitive activities in all future learning.
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3) Language: Language is found in most lessons as children learn the proper names of materials and concepts. By using sandpaper letters the children are introduced to the phonetic sounds of each letter. They begin to move from oral to visual communication at their own comfort level and begin to write words using a movable alphabet Crucial to our approach is the understanding that writing precedes reading. Soon children begin to write their own words and stories only to discover that these can then be read as such. This is one of the strongest "sensitive periods" in the Children’s House.
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4) Mathematics: The children learn concepts of math through manipulation of concrete materials that will lead them, at a later age, to thinking mathematically. Each material isolates a single concept so that the child may understand clearly as they grow in knowledge. They learn first the idea of quantity, then the idea of a symbol, and then understand the concept of numbers and problem solving skills so important in Elementary I.
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