NURSERY

This is an important area your child encounters when joining a Montessori school at an early age, an area which imitates many of the day’s routines at home. There are different elements to practical life exercise:

1. Care for the environment

• • Preliminary exercises such as carrying a chair or table, opening/closing doors, rolling up/unrolling floormats, carrying trays/baskets or a fragile object, squeezing sponges, opening and closing locks, bottles or boxes, and folding napkins.
  • Pouring rice, sand or water, sweeping, dusting, laying the table, preparing food, polishing, washing the tabletop, arranging flowers, taking care of plants.
  • Outdoor sweeping, taking care of animals, observing nature, raking leaves, preparing the vegetable garden, feeding the birds, watering the garden, tidying up after play.

2. Care of self

• • Dressing frames such as snap frame, large and small buttons, zippers, hook & eye, buckles, safety pins, bow and lacing frame.
  • Washing hands or clothes, polishing shoes, sewing.

3. Grace and courtesy

• • Walking around a mat, how to greet people, say thank you and goodbye, how to apologise, waiting for your turn.

4. Control and coordination of movements

• • Walking along a line
  • Playing the silence game

This is the area where the child carries out activities linked to the senses, helping them to organise and structure the perceptions they have received from the outside world. They develop their:

1. Visual sense through using cylinder blocks, pink towers, brown stairs, red rods, colour tablets, geometric and leaf cabinets, constructive triangles, geometric figures, decanomial squares, knobless cylinders or bi- and trinomial cubes.

2. Auditory sense through using sound boxes and bells.

3. Tactile sense such as sensitising fingers, touch boards, touch and baric tablets, fabrics, thermic bottles and tablets.

4. Olfactory sense such as smelling jars.

5. Gustatory sense such as tasting bottles.

6. Stereognostic sense such as geometric shapes, mystery bag, stereognostic bag.

The materials for exploring the sensorial aspects of the world provide keys to the child for further exploration of his world: shape, basic landforms, cultural adaptations in relation to the climates and some of the basic names of places and oceans.

1. Geography, such as sandpaper and coloured globe, puzzle maps of world and continents, land and water forms, flags.

2. Botany, such as puzzles of leaf, tree, flower, life cycles, seasons, etc.

3. Zoology, such as puzzles of animals, animal classification, parts of the body, etc.

4. Experiments, such as Roman Arch, magnets, sink and float, water and air, volcano, mixing colours, etc.

When teaching language, we pay particular attention to the phonetic sound every letter makes, followed by the tracing (writing) and recognising (reading) of each sound.

1. Spoken language:

• • Enrichment of the child’s vocabulary ny naming objects of the environment, stories, books, poems, songs, classified cards and nomenclatures, sequential stories, and the farm.
  • Language training exercises such as sharing news, conversations, question games and sound games.

2. Written language exercises such as the sandpaper letters, mechanics of writing (sand tray, chalk boards) and the metal insets.

At this early age the child learns mathematical concepts through sensorial activities. The activities call for precision and the child gets familiar with isolated concepts and through repetition arrives at a clear abstraction. These concepts help the child to order their mind. It helps the child to build up spatial awareness of quantities. The mathematics material, such as recognition of numbers, is introduced from the age of 4.