Three key areas of development
In these nurturing and collaborative schools, your child will learn important skills and gain confidence in the three key areas of development identified by Maria Montessori.
Practical & Sensorial Life Hands and senses first
Everyday tasks and sensorial materials build focus, order and independence: the foundations for language and math.
Practical Life
Practical life exercises promote mind and body coordination and help develop task-driven focus and concentration. They allow children to develop a broad range of important skills to control, awareness of their environment, orderly thought patterns, responsibility, and many other characteristics, which encourage independence within their exercises for the children to develop and refine motor skills and hone muscular control.
Making use of things mostly found around the home, these activities promote learning of skills that also enable them to participate fully and independently in their home life.
Sensorial Life
Sensorial exercises allow for individual work and repetition, and allow children to classify their sensorial impressions in an organized, orderly, and scientific manner.
Sensorial materials give children the power to come into contact with their world through the use of all their available faculties. With the guidance from our trained instructors, sensorial materials can develop a child’s keen attention for details, order and sequence, the essential foundations for acquiring language and math skills.
Language & Mathematics At your child’s own pace
From letter sounds to reading and from quantity to the decimal system, each new step comes once the last is secure.
Language
The language program offers a variety of exercises that help your child to acquire foundation skills in literacy, writing and comprehension.
The program begins with the phonetic sounds of each letter of the alphabet and progresses to the next phase of development, which is the formulation of words and further vocabulary development. Our language exercises also include letter sound training and alphabet association, and word building exercises to further reading and comprehension ability.
Mathematics
The Mathematics program begins with a series of exercises, which focus on learning the concepts and numeric formations surrounding basic quantity and number identification. After your child has grasped these foundation principles she/he will progress to more in-depth subject matter and exercises surrounding the decimal system and numerical addition and subtraction.
At each key stage your child will drive the speed of his/her development, and new concepts and exercises will not be introduced until existing ones have been firmly established.
Geography & Science A sense of the whole world
Puzzle maps, card games and first experiments open a clear-thinking view of the world, its cultures, lands and oceans.
Geography
Beginning with sensorial activities including puzzle maps and geographic card games, the children begin to develop a sense of the world from a global perspective. As their knowledge gains momentum we will introduce geographic development exercises to help develop understanding of other cultures and their position within the world.
There will also be games and exercises designed to introduce children to the idea of landmasses and oceans of the world to generate a greater understanding and further their knowledge of geographic locations.
Science
Science is an integral element of the Montessori curriculum. Among other things, it represents a way of life: a clear thinking approach to gathering information and problem solving. The scope of the Montessori science curriculum includes a sound introduction to botany, zoology, chemistry, physics, geology and astronomy. The Montessori approach to science cultivates children's fascination with the universe and helps them develop a lifelong interest in observing nature and discovering more about the world in which we live.
How Montessori works in our classrooms
Critical learning periods. The Montessori Program at Edith’s acknowledges the impact of critical learning periods in early childhood to develop social, emotional, intellectual, physical and moral competencies. The influence of a Montessori education respects the uniqueness of each child and preserves and nurtures an innate capacity to reach potential as contributing world citizens.
Learning by doing. Our curriculum provides for concept development and skills acquisition in prepared classrooms with a focus on learning by doing. Our methods enable students to develop respect for individual differences as they engage in purposeful, collaborative learning.
The prepared environment
- Classrooms built on the principles of Dr. Maria Montessori
- A stimulating, specially prepared environment, where natural curiosity helps children become self-motivated learners
- Materials for all subject areas, experienced through the senses
- A multi-age, multi-ethnic classroom setting
