Infant/Toddler Program
The first few years of a child's life are critical to his or her personality and intellectual development. To attain the best mental and physical capabilities, the child must have exposure to the proper experiences. Infants and toddlers not only love emotional nurturing, but also an environment which promotes their very real need to learn. The Montessori environment provides activities appropriate for even the earliest stages of a child's development.
Children in a toddler program flourish in prepared environments which respect, support, and respond to their basic needs for independence, exploration, and the building of trust and self-esteem. Any kind of group child care will not work without cooperation between the caregivers and the parents. Parental involvement is stressed. Parents know their child better than anyone else. Parents and caregivers must feel comfortable in exchanging knowledge and experience about the child.
The curriculum is based on the five developmental areas:
- Sensory and Perceptual
- Physical and Motor
- Self-Help Skills
- Language
- Social and Emotional
Sensory and Perception
The young child absorbs the world around him or her through the five senses, and a rich environment should cater to the child's senses.
Physical and Motor
Along with the mind, both fine and gross motor skills develop rapidly from three months to three years. Attention to these needs supports balanced development. Physical activity in the young child is an important part of environmental involvement, and thus education.
Self-Help Skills
The focus is on helping the child enjoy independence; each individual must depend on himself or herself for education.
Language
The construction of vocabulary is a part of every aspect of the classroom from snack time to manipulating a toy to group activities.
Social and Emotional
A well-rounded and happy child, whose balanced development and happiness have been supported by responsive individual attention, reacts positively with the environment, copes with frustration, and learns easily.
Primary Program
Dr. Maria Montessori believed that no human being is educated by another person. He or she must do it by him or herself, or it will never be done. She believed that the goal of early childhood education should not be to fill the child with facts but rather to cultivate the child's own natural desire to learn.
In the Montessori classroom, this objective is approached in two ways: first, by allowing each child to experience the excitement of learning by his or her own choice rather than by being forced; and second by helping the child perfect his or her natural tools for leaning, so that the child's abilities will be maximized for future learning situations. The Montessori materials have this dual, long-range purpose in addition to their immediate purpose of giving specific information to the child.
The primary curriculum is divided into five areas of materials:
- Practical Life
- Sensorial
- Language
- Mathematics
- Cultural Subjects.
Practical Life Exercises
These activities are said to bridge the child from the home to the classroom with exercises that the adult has demonstrated over and over again in daily life. There are four distinct groups of practical life exercises.
- Care of the person. These activities help the child become independent of the mother or someone else for dressing, undressing, taking care of his body, washing, bathing, or combing his hair; things that concern his own person.
- Care of the environment. These exercises include washing, ironing, polishing, gardening, sweeping, etc.
- The development of social relations; greetings, offerings, accepting, apologizing, thanking, etc. We refer to these as the grace and courtesies.
- Control of movement; these allow the child to develop a sense of control and balance of his entire body.
The purpose for each of these activities is for orientation and adaptation for the child to his culture in terms of daily activities of his own people.
Sensorial Exercises
The sensorial materials help children to distinguish, to categorize, and to relate new information to what they already know. Dr. Montessori believed that this process is the beginning of conscious knowledge. It is brought about by the intelligence working in a concentrated way on the impressions given by the senses of sight, touch, hearing, smelling, and taste.
Language
In the Montessori classroom children learn the phonetic sounds of the letters before they learn the alphabetical names in a sequence. The phonetic sounds are given first because they are the sounds they hear in words they need to be able to read. The children first become aware of these phonetic sounds when the adult introduces the sounds with the Sandpaper Letters.
The individual presentation of language materials in a Montessori classroom allows the adult to take advantage of each child's greatest periods of interest. Reading instruction begins on the day when the children want to know what a word says or when they show an interest in using the Sandpaper Letters. Writing or the construction of words with the movable alphabet nearly always precedes reading in a Montessori environment.
Mathematics
Dr. Montessori demonstrated that if children have access to mathematical equipment in their early years, they can easily and joyfully assimilate many facts and skills of arithmetic. On the other hand, these same facts and skills may require long hours of drudgery and drill if they are introduced to them later in the abstract form. Dr. Montessori designed concrete materials to represent all types of quantities, after she observed that children who become interested in counting like to touch or move the items as they enumerate them. By combining this equipment, separating it, sharing it, counting it, and comparing it, they can demonstrate to themselves the basic operations of mathematics.
Once the child is able to count to 10 and identify the symbols, they are introduced to the golden bead materials working with the decimal system, the foundation of the mathematic materials. They move on to concrete work with the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division. They work with appropriate materials and record their work on paper. Similar operations can be performed with a variety of materials. This variety maintains the children's interest while giving them many opportunities for the necessary repetition. In the classroom there are many materials that can be used for counting, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.
Cultural Subjects
Dr. Montessori saw teaching of the cultural subjects as a great, important part of the whole education of the young child. Her view of cosmic education was from a mountaintop, looking at the child as a whole in relation to society. Life of man on earth is interconnected with life of animals, plants, and non-living elements. Culture is the man-made part of our environment. It is a manifestation of a continuous and progressive education of psychic and spiritual life of man. Culture makes it possible for individuals in society to live together in harmony. Without it, man cannot fulfill his potential. The Cultural Subjects are a group of materials that are reflect the exercises of Geography, History, Science and Nature, Music, and Art. Each of these areas has its own exercises, some overlapping with from one area to the next.
In Geography the wooden puzzle maps are among the most popular materials in the classroom. At first the children use the maps as puzzles. Gradually they learn the names of many of the countries as well as information about climate, products, customs, food, music, language, and animals. Many of these characteristics are demonstrated through the geography pictures.
History is illustrated by working with time lines and pictures from the past and present. The children may begin by making a time line of their own lives, starting with when they were babies.
Science and Nature, the children's natural curiosity is stimulated through discovery projects and experiments. The plant and animal kingdoms are studied in an orderly fashion to foster a love and appreciation for all living things.
Music happens daily and frequently through singing songs. There are opportunities to listen to different types of music and learn about famous composers.
Art in the primary environment strives to maintain the great joy the child finds in creating something of his or her own. The children have the freedom to explore their imaginations in a variety of mediums used for expression. The activities include coloring, cutting, pasting, drawing, painting, and sewing, with exercises set up in a natural progression from start to finish as the child works with them independently.
Elementary Program
Atlanta Montessori International School is opened its Elementary Program in Fall of 2007 as we moved into our new and expanded facility. This classroom is led by an AMI-certified Elementary teacher and serves ages 6 to 12 years. In addition to the Montessori Elementary curriculum, the program features outside classroom space, a language component, and a diverse environment celebrating the richness of our multicultural community.
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