Pre-kindergarten

“Imagination can only be built on a sensory basis. Sensory education that allows for the accurate and precise perception of all the details and characteristics of things is the cornerstone of all observation. It helps us to extract the material world from the external world to be assembled for the imagination.”

Maria Montessori

From pre-kindergarten to kindergarten...what a journey!

In a perfectly bilingual environment, the children of Ville-Marie Montessori School begin their education with a program that scrupulously meets their educational needs. Below are just some of the aspects that a child attending our school will evidently develop.

Practical life

When a child enters the casa (pre-kindergarten level) at the age of two-and-a-half or three, the Montessori “Practical Life” classroom area and appearance can be thought of as a link to the child’s home environment, and thus an adjunct to the child’s development process. The child naturally and spontaneously looks for order in self-reliance and independence through movement and defined activities with a goal and objectives. The practical life materials involve children in specific movements, enabling them to concentrate, work at their own pace without interruption, complete their task and experience inner satisfaction. (For example, at three years of age, children are more interested in the wiping motion involved in cleaning a table than in the cleaning itself.)

The practical life materials also fulfil specific real-world goals for children: they learn to button their shirt or blouse, tie their shoes and wash their hands, all without assistance from an adult. They also take care of the prepared environment by polishing wood and dusting shelves. The child-sized materials are inviting and allow them to progress in their self-reliance. They choose tasks as their needs develop.

The “Practical Life” area also immerses the child in a social setting where “Please,” “Thank you” and polite offers of assistance like “Do you need any help?” are the foundations of conversation. We treat the child with respect and the child becomes respectful as a result.

The senses: Building imagination through the real

Children live in a world of senses. To proceed with a creative task, a child has to draw upon previously received impressions. Through seeing, hearing, tasting, smelling and touching, our sensory materials are squarely focused on reality. For example, the concept of long and short is illustrated by red sticks of varied lengths. Language is clarified and vocabularies are honed. And since the sticks exist in unit lengths from 1 to 10, they also serve as the basis for mathematical gradation. Another example: children experience roughness and smoothness by touching sandpaper and smoothly polished wood. Later on, these lessons are repeated using the sandpaper globe, which helps the child distinguish between land (sandpaper) and sea (smooth). The sensory material also helps clarify the differences between big and small; light and heavy; thick and thin; loud and soft (volume); high and low; hot and cold; colours; smells; and solid and flat geometric shapes. The sensory materials thus represent a key to the world and form the basis of abstraction.

Mathematics: Making the abstract real

The Montessori approach to mathematics is special for many reasons. All operations arise naturally, from concrete manipulation of “materialized abstractions” such as sticks, balls, axes or spindles, cubes, cards and counters, etc. Children do not just learn to count; they are also able to visualize the entire structure of our number system and perform addition, subtraction, multiplication and division operations with a systematic overview in their mind. Children are also given opportunities to memorize facts at a young age, where combinations like 3 + 2 = provide real fascination for a four-year-old. If this sensitive window of time is missed, learning by heart will be required later on. Materials are ordered in a way that conditions for mathematical discovery will always result. Once initiated by the teacher’s instructions, formulas and problem-solving manifest themselves in groups of objects, leading children to independent learning. Children retain information better when they solve or manage to understand it by themselves.

Reading and writing: The access roads to culture

Reading and writing are keys that help children in update, preserve and synthesize knowledge. Children of preschool age participate fully in the dynamic of their own language development. Through the use of a mobile alphabet and sandpaper letters, young children are able to effortlessly make the link between sounds, symbols, shapes and written form.

As the children’s reading improves, they want to know the names of more things. The classroom is full of images, labels and puzzles bearing the names of geometric shapes, countries and landforms, for example. From the outset, reading and writing are intimately linked with culture. Interest in and love for the environment drive the mastery of skills.

Daily integration of art and music

Just as we acknowledge the different stages of growth in terms of practical life, sensory language and mathematics, we must also forge inextricable ties between the developmental stages and art. Artistic and musical exercises are introduced into the environment with relative ease through the use of various media such as clay, wax, oil pastels, coloured chalk, collages and pasting, paints, etc. The more opportunities a child has to experience art, the more competent he or she becomes at self-expression. The same applies to music. Art provides children with another dimension of both the program and themselves.