Curriculum
Philosophy in practice
At The Village Montessori we offer a carefully prepared environment designed to stimulate your child’s natural interests and allow him or her to set an individual developmental pace.
The Montessori curriculum can be divided into several areas:
Practical Life
This is often the first area of learning to which a new child is drawn as it offers links with the home environment through familiar activities, such as cutting, pouring, threading, and opening and closing containers. These help to develop a child’s motor skills and also support other, later, areas of the curriculum. For example, the finger grip required to turn nuts onto bolts is later used when learning to hold a pencil.
Practical Life also develops a child’s independence through teaching key skills for care of self and the environment, such as putting on and removing clothes, mopping up spills, offering help to others and caring for plants and pets. The social aspects of these activities are significant, allowing children to feel confident and competent within their environment, and able to interact with others constructively
Sensorial
Montessori believed that all our learning and knowledge starts with sense perception. She saw all children as having ‘absorbent minds’, able to soak up stimuli effortlessly as they seek to understand their world. For very young children this is a subconscious process, but from the ages of 3 to 6 she believed children enter a ‘sensitive period’ for consciously refining their sense perceptions.
To aid this process she developed the Sensorial materials – all characterised by their simplicity and beauty. These carefully designed resources aim to isolate particular senses – visual, tactile, auditory and others – and allow them to be gradually refined. All the activities are characterised by a sense of order, which often stimulates a child to repeat them again and again until they are satisfied. As with the Practical Life materials, the Sensorial activities also offer support for other areas of the curriculum. For instance, the sequencing of the ten Red Rods provides an unconscious understanding of the idea of number as quantity that will later be built on in Numeracy.
Literacy
The Montessori classroom is alive with language-rich, pre-literacy activities, songs, rhymes, stories, poems, conversation and games (such as I-Spy). When a child shows an interest, carefully sequenced materials prepare them for writing and reading. Montessori believed that our hands are our principal tools for learning when young, so activities always have a physical aspect. Phonics are introduced and, later, grammar, but always individually and when a child is ready.
Numeracy
Montessori believed that all children are born with a ‘mathematical mind’. In attempting to understand and thrive within our environment, we seek order. We classify, sort, match and sequence our experiences. The simplicity, consistency and clear organisation of the Montessori environment is designed to assist this process. Every activity helps to prepare children for later mathematics.
When a child is ready, he or she will be introduced to the specific mathematical materials, which always begin with hands-on experience before abstract ideas are introduced. The activities are structured to build confidence and scaffold learning, with many having a social component to make them fun and unthreatening. Most importantly, a child is never pushed forward at a pace at which they are not comfortable or held back if they show interest and aptitude.
Creativity and play
Free, unstructured play is now widely recognised as of vital importance to children’s learning and development. Children are active learners and play is the vehicle of this learning. In play, children try out ideas, experiment, express themselves, forge social bonds, develop emotional confidence and resilience. Maria Montessori said ‘Imagination is the real substance of our intelligence’. Our job is to remove barriers to children’s self-expression and creativity. We do this by providing a stimulating environment and resources and then leave the children to use them as they want for as long as they wish. Art and construction materials are always available, music and dance are encouraged, stories and role play are celebrated.
