3-6 Year Olds
The Children’s House program, for children ages 2 years 9 months through kindergarten offers a diverse curriculum to fascinate and challenge every child. We have half day programs (morning or afternoon), and full day programs. While we do follow the academic school-year calendar, we also have care on most of the holidays, school vacation weeks, and summer. Our aim is to provide the services our parent community needs.
Children are developing fine motor skills (precursors to writing), and gross motor skills. The curriculum integrates math and language with important sensorial and practical life activities. Geography, science, and cultural studies are incorporated throughout the curriculum. All students have music, art, and Spanish language studies as well. In the mixed-age classroom, every child is able to progress at his/her own pace, building mastery at progressively more challenging tasks.
- The Practical Life curriculum supports the development of concentration, coordination, independence, and order. Children enjoy tweezing, scooping, pouring, and twisting, and other fine motor tasks. These activities develop the hand, as well as the mind, preparing the child for more complex activities in language.
- The Sensorial curriculum provides the opportunity to refine each of the child’s senses: sight, touch, taste, smell, and hearing. Carefully designed activities cultivate refined observation and comparison of textures and sounds. Hands-on activities present geometric shapes which prepare the young mind for math: square, pentagon, hexagon, octabon, and sphere, cube, cone, triangle-based pyramid, etc.
- The Language curriculum utilizes Dr. Montessori’s materials to teach letter sounds, and encoding and decoding. Children learn to read, and write, at their own pace and readiness. Children begin by learning letter sounds, and progress to combine a few sounds to create words! Small, engaging objects inspire children to work with the moveable alphabet to create words. Older children will write stories, and initiate research into topics that interest them.
- The Math begins with symbols and quantities from one to ten. After mastering those concepts, students work with teens, and then hundreds. With carefully designed materials that represent units, tens, hundreds, thousands, the children can create numbers up to 9,999! They learn basic operations such addition and subtraction. It is not unusual to see a 5 year old adding four digit numbers.
- In Geography, children use puzzle maps of every continent to learn the continents and names of the countries. Many five-year-olds will create push-pin maps of each continent, with countries labeled.
- Science lessons include basic classification activities (e.g. living and non-living), as well as experiments (e.g. sink and float). Children study the five classes of vertebrates and enjoy learning about the animals of various continents.
- Spanish language provides every child a basic vocabulary about family, school, common objects, colors, animals, seasons, and holidays.
- Cultural studies integrate geography, language, and science to bring an awareness of the variety of life on our planet, and the many ways that humans have invented to fill the needs for food, clothing, and shelter.
- Our Music curriculum gives children experience with rhythm, beat, pitch, and exposure to many different musical instruments. The music program often relates to the seasonal studies, and/or cultural studies in the classroom.
