The Montessori Focus on Learning in the 3-6 Classroom

The Primary program is designed to foster independence in the child and help him or her move toward mastery of both himself and the environment. Primary classrooms are specially prepared environments that encourage children to develop a love of learning and trust in their own ability to learn. The most important years of a child's growth are the first six years of life when unconscious learning is gradually brought to the conscious level. This period lays the foundation for all future development. As an aid to this period of the child's self-construction, individual work is encouraged in the Montessori classroom.

The following areas of the classroom cultivate the children's adaptation and ability to express and think with clarity:

Practical Life Exercises

In this area of the classroom, children develop their coordination and motor skills while becoming absorbed in everyday activities. They become confident, independent, and 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 work habits as they finish each task and put materials away before beginning another activity.

The Practical Life exercises are important elements in Montessori education. They provide the fundamental building blocks on which the entire Montessori Method is constructed. The Practical Life exercises are the ones that are presented first to the young child entering a Montessori school.

The aims of these exercises are to help develop the child’s coordination and concentration, enhance his natural sensitivity to order, and assist him in his desire to be independent. Practical Life exercises are simply various kinds of everyday domestic activities such as pouring water, scrubbing a table, polishing silver, etc. The Practical Life exercises develop and refine the child’s fine motor abilities while preparing the child’s hand for writing. The Practical Life area also includes the integration of graceful movements with courteous behavior called Grace and Courtesy. Opportunities are provided for the continuous growth of the child, thereby building a foundation upon which all of the more “academic” achievements of a Montessori program are constructed.

Sensorial Exercises

A young child meets the world around him through the constant use of all his senses. Since he quite naturally uses all his powers of observation during these early years, Dr. Montessori felt that this was an ideal time to give the child specialized equipment, which would sharpen his senses and enable him to understand the many impressions he receives through them. The sensorial materials in the classroom 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.

The Sensorial materials in the classroom are designed to heighten the child’s senses by isolating each sense and developing it to its fullest. These exercises help the child develop skills needed for later academic areas such as observation, comparison, judgment, reasoning, and decision-making. The Practical Life activities are the foundation of the Montessori experience and the Sensorial activities lie at the heart of it for the Montessori child. Working with the Sensorial materials helps the student to order his or her sensory impressions. The senses are the child’s keys to the acquisition of knowledge.

Mathematics

Dr. Montessori demonstrated that if a child has access to mathematical equipment in his early years, he can easily and naturally assimilate many facts and skills of arithmetic. She designed hands-on learning materials to represent different quantities after she observed that the child who becomes interested in counting likes to touch or move the items as he counts them out loud. Later, by combining this same equipment, separating it, combining multiple groups, and sharing or dividing it, he can demonstrate to himself the basic operations of arithmetic. This activity gives him the satisfaction of learning by discovery rather than by being told. Eventually he develops an early enthusiasm for the world of numbers, including square numbers, basic fractions, time, and money concepts.

Sensorial learning is considered to be indirect preparation for mathematics. The Montessori Math materials provide hands-on learning for the child with visual, manipulative representations of mathematical concepts. Montessori students do not consider math to be “work”. Instead they are drawn to this area by an internal drive to bring order and form to their world – to classify and to understand. A strong sense of order links the impressions of a child’s outer world with his or her inner world. As the child moves through the curriculum and matures, he or she is ready to move to abstract learning later on.

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 the sounds the children hear in words that they need to be able to read. The children first become aware of these phonetic sounds when the teacher introduces them through the use of the sandpaper letters. The construction of words with movable letters then leads to reading.

Gradually, the children learn irregular words and words with two and three syllables using activities and early readers. Proceeding at their own pace, children are then encouraged to explore books for answers to their own questions, whether they are about frogs, rockets, stars, or fire engines. In the 3-6 Montessori classroom, children are introduced to grammar through games, which show them that nouns are the names of things, adjectives describe nouns, and verbs are action words. This is built upon and expanded in the 6-9 class.

The Montessori approach to reading is phonetic. The child is introduced to the sounds of the letters in our alphabet. Once the child has developed a phonemic awareness they begin to construct CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) words. The child develops from reading on a word level to reading on a sentence level with the introduction of sight words. Opportunities for oral reading are provided for the child to further develop fluency and comprehension.

The exercises in Practical Life and Sensorial encourage the child’s natural ability to write words and phrases as early as age four. It was spontaneous writing demonstrated by four-year-olds in Dr. Montessori’s first school, Casa dei Bambini, that contributed largely to her method becoming world famous.

History

The Montessori program offers children a concrete presentation of history by encouraging them to work with Time Lines. Time Lines are long strips of paper, which can be unrolled and stretched along the floor of the classroom, illustrating the historical development of things such as music or transportation.

Science & Nature

The child’s natural curiosity is stimulated through discovery projects and experiments, which help him to draw his own conclusions. The plant and animal kingdoms are studied in an orderly fashion to foster a love and appreciation for all living things.

Physical Geography

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 the continents through songs and hands-on activities. Each year the class focuses on two continents that are studied in more depth. The children also learn the land and water formations such as lakes and islands, gulfs and peninsulas.

Cultural Awareness

Montessori 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 the children’s awareness about other people, and to gain an understanding and compassion for all peoples of the world.