| Overview | Curriculum | Phase-In | Little Children's House | Kindergarten |

Overview

The Children’s House program is for children aged 2 years 9 months to 6 years. Available schedules include 8:30-11:30 (Morning Program), 8:30-12:30 (Lunch Club), and 8:30-3:00 (Full Day). The Children’s House program is a three-year cycle encompassing two years of preschool and a year of kindergarten.

The school also offers a Little Children’s House porgram which meets three days per week from 8:45-11:45. This program is for children aged two years nine months through three years six months at the time of admission, for whom a part-time program meets their or their family’s needs. The Little Children’s House program lasts one year, and is generally followed by admission into one of the Children’s House classrooms for a full three-year cycle.

Montessori believed that the child at this age strives to be independent and own his/her world. In a Children’s House classroom, that translates into not only owning their own space (pushing in chairs, rolling up rugs, cleaning up) but also mastering it.

A children’s internal system at this age is still developing. Montessori felt that if activities were presented in a sequence that would enable the child’s internal system to become more organized.

Children at this age refine motor skills, eye-hand coordination, balance, crossing the midline and more through pouring, spooning, and from practicing the simplest task of carrying a tray to and from a table to the complex task of washing a chair (which requires the understanding of order and sequence). In a Children’s House classroom, things are set up from left to right, top to bottom, in order of difficulty starting with the easiest. (These sequences form the patterns for the eventual skills of reading and mathematical calculations.) The child returns the materials to the same place knowing that they will always be there. For a child of this age, that sense of order is critical. In a Children’s House classroom, the room is rich with language. Materials cover such topics as different animals, cultures, countries, and geometric forms, and at the age where children love complicated words rolling off their tongues, there are many opportunities to put a word to an object.

A Montessori classroom is set up in a deliberate fashion, also known as a planned environment. In a Montessori classroom, every material has a purpose in developing a particular skill. Montessori had a grand design. At the Children’s House level, her goal was to purposefully create and make available materials that would help the child master his/her world. This mastery included beginning language and math exploration. She believed that children were innately curious, loving to manipulate and touch things that would set the groundwork for later abstract thinking. Skills are developed for the present as well as for the future.

Within the prepared environment, children receive group lessons as well as individual ones. A lesson involves the teacher demonstrating an activity to the child, so that the child will have the knowledge necessary to do that activity independently, either alone or with another child.

Each material has a purpose, whether it’s the tweezers and tongs that are preparing fingers for a pencil grip, or a knobbed cylinder where a child must reach across their midline going from left to right to return the cylinders to their block, preparing them for both writing and reading.

The explosion into reading and writing begins at the Children’s House level. It is integrated into all parts of the curriculum as well as isolated through learning sounds, touching sandpaper letters, and sounding out words. Children in a Montessori classroom are taught both phonetic and sight approaches, with the understanding that children at some point show a preference for one or the other.

As an infant/toddler, the child rolled hundreds of times before they made it to their stomach, fell down many times until they walked. A child loves the process and the repetition of the work until they feel mastery: I can do it! Children have enormous capacity for concentration and when the material and the child are both at the “sensitive period,” the child will repeat the activity until they feel accomplishment. A “sensitive period” is a time much like that which preceded their first words and steps, when they are ready to acquire a new skill and all their effort goes into preparation for mastery.