Waterdown Montessori School 2.87

CCMA Accredited School

The Montessori Approach

Montessori offers a broad vision of education as an aid to life. Education involves more than acquiring skills in math, language, science and the arts. Education must also provide our children with deeper skills that will enrich their lives, explore the meaning of life, the caring of self and others, the emotions of love, forgiveness and understanding, the ability to adapt to unanticipated developments, the fostering of curiosity and the love of learning.

A Montessori education aims to develop the individual child’s potential in an environment specifically designed with hands-on materials that stimulate the child’s interest.

The Three Year Cycle

Montessori classes are grouped across a three-year age span: ages 3-6, ages 6-9, and ages 9-12. This accommodates each individual child’s educational needs at each unique stage of development.

Within each classroom, the younger children start off in the role of apprentice, listening carefully and learning from their older peers. Then as they get older and develop more skills, they are encouraged to act as helpers, demonstrators and eventually mentors to the younger students.

This mentoring approach not only develops leadership skills and confidence, it teaches children the importance of supporting and cooperating with others. This is in contrast to an attitude of competition where in order to be a winner others must be losers.

The benefits of the three-year cycle are perhaps most obvious in the Montessori preschool, or Casa program. Starting a full year or more before traditional kindergarten, in Montessori a child is given the opportunity to move from the physical world – where she can develop his motor skills, and all his senses with self-teaching, self-correcting materials – into the abstract world of ideas and concepts, all at his own pace. She must have the proper concrete preparation before she is ready to develop academically.

During that critical third year of the Casa program, this transition usually happens and the Montessori Directress is trained to help the child take great advantage of these rich educational opportunities. This is the period when all the learning absorbed by the child during the previous two years of Montessori training suddenly fits together and makes sense; the child begins reading, writing, doing math and showing other spouts of intellectual growth. Some may not start reading and writing during the third year, but usually do so the following year in their elementary class, seemingly without effort because they have gained the strong learning foundation they need.
The Montessori Classroom

The Montessori classroom is a child-centred learning environment where children can learn from one another, in small groups, or one on one with their teacher.