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Montessori Preschool/Pre-K
The year 2007 marks the 100 year anniversary of the opening
of Maria Montessori’s first Casa de Bambini (Children’s
House) in Rome. This year also marks Gethsemane’s 45th
year in existence as a school and our tenth year with a Montessori
Preschool program.
Maria Montessori asked, “what if children were allowed
to develop according to their innate nature and pace, with
only careful, conscious, well-thought out nurturance from
the adults in the community?” And she developed a system
of teaching young children that has been successful for 100
years.
Montessori classrooms are divided into various areas:
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PRACTICAL LIFE
The exercises of Practical Life provide the basis for all
other activities in the Montessori classroom, fulfilling the
child’s plea: “Help me do it myself!”
Practical Life activities are exercises in daily living.
By perfecting buttoning and tying, pouring and scrubbing,
or practicing grace and courtesy, the child gains confidence
and mastery over the environment. Specifically, these activities
contribute to the control and coordination of movement, development
of concentration skills through unlimited repetition; and
the enhancement of self-esteem by contributing to the group.
Would you like to see a child working on a PRACTICAL
LIFE skill? Just right
click on this link and choose
the save target as, to down load a short 2.31 MB movie.
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SENSORIAL
This area contains a beautiful series of materials which
allow young children to create order out of the sensory impressions
they have been experiencing since birth. By isolating the
qualities of each sense, the materials help young children
label and internalize their impressions.
Children from birth to age six are in the “sensitive
period” for exploring the world through their senses.
Sensorial experiences indirectly prepare children for future
exploration of language, mathematics, geometry, art and music.
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LANGUAGE
Absorbing and perfecting language depends on human contact,
but language is not taught. Montessori perceived the miracle
of language development as “a treasure prepared in the
unconscious, which is then handed over to consciousness, and
the child, in full possession of his new power, talks and
talks without cessation.” Words are the labels for our
experiences. A child who has varied experiences and is given
labels for those experiences will develop a well-rounded means
of expression.
Just as a rich vocabulary is dependent on the child’s
experience, reading and writing are dependent on the increase
of vocabulary. With a strong foundation the transition to
written language will be smooth.
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MATHEMATICS
The mathematics materials developed by Maria Montessori lead
the child through sequenced activities, emphasizing concepts
while preparing the child for abstractions. All the work with
the Practical Life and Sensorial materials brings order to
the children’s experiences and is essential indirect
preparation for the mathematical mind. The developing child
yearns to organize, to classify, and to abstract. And the
whole world obliges with toes to count, temperatures and amounts
of rain to check and clocks to read.
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CULTURAL
This area includes art, music, geography, and science and
broadens the child’s experiences of the world around
him.
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