Infant & Toddler Curriculum
THE INFANT AND TODDLER CURRICULUM
The first few years of a child's life are crucial to his or her personality and intellectual development. In his acclaimed book The First Three years of Life, Dr. Burton L. White says that a child born with the best mental and physical capabilities may not attain even average levels of competence without exposure to appropriate experiences.
Infants and toddlers need not only love and emotional nurturance and a healthy physical environment, but also an environment which promotes their very real need to learn. The Montessori Teaching Method provides a basis for individualised learning activities, appropriate for even the earliest stages of a child's development.
The purpose of the Infant and Toddler Development Programme at Green Gables Montessori School is to encourage, assist, and protect the normal development of each child. Children in the Programme will flourish in prepared environments which respect, support, and respond to their basic needs for independence, exploration, and the building of trust and self-esteem.
We believe that any kind of group child care will not work without the co-operation between care givers and the parents. Parental involvement is stressed; parents know their child better than anyone else. Parents and care givers must feel comfortable in exchanging knowledge and experience about the child.
During the early years of life , Dr. Maria Montessori felt that "the first thing the child's education demands is the provision of an environment in which he or she can develop the powers given by nature". Quite literally, the school environment is the curriculum.
The structure of the curriculum is based on five developmental areas: Sensory and Perceptual, Physical and Motor, Self-help Skills, Language, and Social and Emotional. Dr. Maria Montessori emphasised the need for a rich environment, and noted the speed at which children can develop: "If our own adult ability be compared with the child's, we should need sixty years of hard work to do what he or she does in three.
While providing a structured, and thus familiar environment, the needs of individual children are met. For example, for a 26 month old child developing large muscles of the arms and chest, a light, safe object would be made available for the child to carry.
SENSORY AND PERCEPTION
The young child absorbs the world around him or her through the five senses, and a rich environment should cater for 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.
THE PRE-SCHOOL CURRICULUM
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. A truly educated individual continues learning long after the hours or years he or she spends in the classroom because that person is motivated from within by a natural curiosity and a love of knowledge. Dr. Montessori felt, therefore, that the goal of early childhood education should not be to fill the child with facts from a preselected course of studies, 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 being forced; and second, by helping the child perfect his or her natural tools for learning, so that the child's abilities will be maximised 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.
PRACTICAL LIFE EXERCISES
For young children there is something special about a task that an adult considers ordinary - washing dishes, paring vegetables, polishing shoes, etc. They are exciting to children because they allow them to imitate adults. Imitation is one of the strongest urges during children's early years.
In this area of the classroom, children perfect their co-ordination and become absorbed in an activity. They gradually lengthen their span of concentration. They also learn to pay attention to details as they follow a regular sequence of actions. Finally, they learn good working habits as they finish each task and put away all the materials before beginning another activity.
SENSORIAL EXERCISES
The Sensorial Materials in the Montessori classroom help children to distinguish, to categorise, 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.
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 of 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.
Children in a Montessori class never sit down to memorise addition and subtraction facts; they never simply memorise multiplication tables. Rather they learn these facts by actually performing the operations with concrete materials.
When the children want to do arithmetic, they are given a sheet of paper containing simple problems. They work the problems with appropriate materials and record their results. Similar operations can be performed with a variety of materials. This variety maintains children's interest while giving them many opportunities for the necessary repetition. As they commit the addition facts and the multiplication tables to memory, they gain a real understanding of what each operation means. In a Montessori classroom there are many materials that can be used for numerization, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing.
LANGUAGE
In a 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 these are sounds they hear in words that they need to be able to read. The children first become aware of these phonetic sounds when the teacher introduces the consonants with the Sandpaper Letters.
The individual presentation of language materials allows the teacher 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 Sandpaper Letters. Writing - or the construction of words with the movable letters nearly always precedes reading in a Montessori environment.
Gradually the children learn the irregular words, and words with two or three syllables, by doing many reading exercises which offer variety rather than monotonous repetition. Also available in the Montessori classroom are many attractive books using a large number of phonetic words. Proceeding at their own pace, children are encouraged to read about things that interest them. Their skills in phonics gives them the means of attacking almost any new word, so that they are not limited to a specific number of words which they have been trained to recognise by sight.
The children's interest in reading is never stifled by monotony. Rather, it is cultivated as their most important key to future learning. They are encouraged to explore books for answers to their own questions, whether they are about frogs, rockets, stars, or fire engines. In a Montessori class, the children are introduced to grammar by games which show them that nouns are the names of things, adjectives describes nouns, and verbs are action words. The activity becomes most enjoyable.
PHYSICAL GEOGRAPHY
The large wooden puzzle maps are among the most popular activities in the classroom. At first the children use the maps simply as puzzles. Gradually they learn the names of many of the countries as well as information about climate and products. The maps illustrate many geographical facts concretely. Children also learn the common land formations such as islands and peninsulas by making them.
HISTORY
Montessori offers the children a concrete presentation of history by letting them work with Time Lines. Time Lines are very long strips of paper which can be unrolled and stretched along the floor of the classroom. The line is marked off in segments which represent consecutive periods of history. As an introduction to the idea of history, the children begin by making a time line of their own lives, starting with their baby pictures.
CULTURAL AWARENESS PROGRAMME
The children gain an awareness of the world around them by exploring other countries, their customs, food, music, climate, language and animals. This helps to raise their consciousness about other people, to gain an understanding and tolerance and, therefore, compassion for all people in the world.
COOKING AND NUTRITION
The children study the four basic food groups and learn what their bodies need in order to be healthy. They cook nutritious meals that revolve around their studies of other countries.
ARTS AND CRAFTS
Art in the pre-school 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 of mediums used for expression. The importance of the process is stressed at this time, not the end product.
MUSIC AND CREATIVE MOVEMENT
The creative music, movement, and dramatics programme is an ongoing flexible process that integrates itself into the academic year program of the Green Gables Montessori School. The musical element of primary appeal to young children's rhythm and the natural response to rhythm is physical; therefore the body is the child's first instrument through which the movement in music is reflected and interpreted.
SCIENCE AND NATURE
In science the children's natural curiosity is stimulated through discovery projects and experiments, helping the children draw their own conclusions. The plant and animal kingdoms are studied in an orderly fashion to foster a love and appreciation for all living things.
PRIMARY SCHOOL CURRICULUM
The Montessori Primaiy Program offers individualised instruction, which means that the child may work and be helped on an individual basis. Individualised learning establishes more intimate contact among the child, the teacher, and the work. The teacher can become involved with the child in other than a "talk-and-chalk" stance before an entire class.
Montessori individualised instruction deals in the concrete. The program permits a variety of approaches, using at every turn dynamic and colourful manipulatives which materialise abstract principles. These beautiful concrete materials are used through out the entire curriculum, including math, reading, grammar, writing, spelling, geography, history, natural and general science, and conversational French.