THE MONTESSORI PROGRAM
Our unique Bilingual Montessori Long Day Program is Child Care Subsidy eligible, and runs on Mondays to Fridays, 8:30am to 4:30pm ( Rainbow Room) and 9:00am to 5:00pm (Mural Room).
The Montessori method is a child-centered educational approach, established by Maria Montessori, which is rooted in scientific observation of children from birth to adulthood. The focus is on the learning development of children. This method encourages children towards independence, order and a freedom to explore but within boundaries. In our classroom, Montessori children learn through sensory-motor activities that develop cognitive behaviours through hands-on experience.
Practical Life
Practical Life is the term used by Maria Montessori to describe a set of exercises designed to encourage children to gain skills they need in their everyday lives to help them become independent in caring for themselves and their environment. The purposes include linking home to school (familiarity and imitation of adults), helps the child understand and adapt to his or her culture, mastering of everyday tasks through demonstration of steps. All these at the end, offers the child dignity and the sense of self control and independence.
Sensorial
The Sensorial Education supports human tendencies for exploration, movement, orientation, order, communication, repetition, exactness, self-control, independence and abstract thinking. The aim of introducing the sensorial materials is to help children order and analyse the impressions they have received to distinguish, discriminate, make judgements, reason, classify and categorise. It is education of the 5 senses where children manipulate the materials and begin to make connection of attributes of their surrounding such as dimensions, forms, colours, shapes, textures weights, temperatures, smells and sounds of things.
Mathematics
Mathematics is relationships, sciences of patterns, numbers, space that are connected to art, nature and our world. When children are introduced to the mathematics materials, they develop numeracy skills such as counting, predicting, estimating, measuring, organising, classifying, comparing, serialising, problem solving and develop some understanding of proportion and ratios.
Language
The child's absorbent mind, by age six, will have reached the 3rd point of consciousness in language where he or she understands that sounds and words have meaning and that these symbols can be used in writing. To help their language development , the Montessori classroom is designed to help the child reach the 3rd period of consciousness. Children will build on phonetic awareness and eventually learn how letters can be put together to form words.
Culture
The Cultural area of the Montessori classroom introduces Geography, Science, Botany, Zoology, History, Arts and Music. Subjects explored in Geography are things like land, air, water, maps, continents, people, food, music and through this exploration that our children will make sense of the different cultures around the world and who they are.
When we explore science, we include topics such as seasons and relate them to our senses. The children will learn about hypothesising and experimenting. Some things we include on our shelves would be an activity for children to explore things that sink and things that float.
Botany education relates to our outdoor environment and things that will be introduced are seeds, parts of plants, different kinds of trees, herbs, spices and the lifecycle of plants. Within the botany unit, children may engage in completing the botany puzzles ,drawing leaf shapes and going on a nature trail to find different shapes of leafs.
Zoology is the area where we focus on animals and their different forms. This could be extended into a practical activity where we look into having class pets and children learn their role as carers in keeping our class pet safe and happy.
Bilingual Program
Our Montessori program offers children the opportunities to learn a second language. Acknowledging Maria Montessori's findings that children between ages 0 - 6 years have " The Absorbent Mind" that relates to their amazing ability of learning language effortlessly. Our philosophy of teaching a second language is to have the adult as part of our prepared environment. The second language is taught through verbal conversations that relate to children's daily life and will involve practical conversational skills.
Our Bilingual second language is Mandarin. We are lucky to have several multilingual educators across our service that are able to communicate with your child in Spanish, German, AUSLAN (sign language) Mandarin and Chinese. We have access to interpreters to help with transitions as needed, at no extra cost to families.
