Primary Overview
Primary classrooms at Montessori Kids Academy are joyful, peaceful, and carefully designed for children ages 3 to 6 years. Along with academic achievement, activities focus on developing children’s confidence, self-motivation, and independence while fostering respectful engagement in the classroom and larger community.
Unlike in traditional daycare settings, children in our classrooms work with teachers who are all Montessori certified, and teaching assistants, many of whom are Montessori trained. Teachers and assistants guide children through the curriculum by modeling the same skills and qualities that these young students are attempting to master. They understand that each child is a unique individual and support students in progressing through the curriculum at their own pace.
Some of the social skills and personal qualities the curriculum fosters are:
- Kindness
- Confidence and leadership
- Creativity and curiosity
- Responsibility and self-direction
The five main academic areas in the Primary Curriculum are Practical Life, Sensorial, Language Arts, Mathematics, and Culture Studies.
Please click here for an overview of the Primary Curriculum.
Please click here for a list of FAQs
Practical Life
Practicing and mastering activities of daily life promotes self-esteem, positive social interactions, teamwork, and problem-solving and helps children develop concentration, physical coordination, and fine motor control. Practical Life activities in the classroom are simple, concrete, and familiar, including such things as sweeping the floor, serving food and drinks, buttoning a jacket, and threading beads.
Sensorial
Young children learn about the world around them primarily through direct sensory experience. Montessori Sensorial activities are designed to engage and develop all five senses and to help children develop awareness of concepts like pattern recognition, size and quantity, same/different, and categorization using hands-on materials that isolate key features, such as color, shape, size, and sound. Sensorial learning lays the foundation for grasping future mathematics lessons.
Language Arts
Speaking, reading, and writing skills are developed in this area. Using multi-sensory materials, children progress from learning the association between letters and sounds to recognizing and sounding out words, and on to basic grammar, reading comprehension, and creative writing. Along with teaching the mechanics of spoken and written language, an important goal of Language Arts is to cultivate a love of reading and writing.
Mathematics
Montessori math is a concrete, multi-sensory approach to teaching mathematical concepts that does not rely on rote learning. Instead, tangible Montessori materials promote students’ understanding of basic arithmetic, and lessons build on each child’s mastery, moving on to fractions, patterning, and other more complex concepts. Children gradually progress to doing mental calculations and problem sums, which prepares them for math in their later elementary years.
Culture Studies
Culture Studies encompasses Science, Geography, Botany, Zoology, and History. The materials children manipulate and the topics they discuss in the classroom widen their awareness and understanding of the larger world while introducing them to an exciting, new vocabulary.
Daily Enrichments and More
- Reading – The Montessori Primary classroom includes group-time for stories, and starting at age 3, children work with specially trained Independent Reading Coordinators.
- Art, Spanish, and French – These daily enrichments are available to children starting at age 5.
- Field Trips – Class trips away from the school start in kindergarten. A child must be 5 years old by October 1st to be in kindergarten.
- Daily Group Time for Kindergarteners – After lunch, when the younger children are napping, kindergarteners spend time working on their lessons, providing them with an additional work period for a successful transition to the elementary classroom.
- Weekly Art, Music, and PE Time for Kindergarteners – Children spend these times with kindergarteners from other classes.
Daily Playtime – All children have time each day for independent play.