Curriculum at Mandala
Children learn by doing
The classroom environment is full of beautiful materials in a space designed for children: just their size. The concrete materials let children explore the world through their senses, motion and stillness, and by observing and engaging with others.
Teachers guide students through the curriculum as they develop, letting children practice what they have learned and introducing new lessons as they reach new milestones. As children grow, the classroom materials grow with them in the sense that older children use the materials to explore the curriculum in new and deeper ways.
The Early Childhood curriculum of a Montessori school has four basic components: practical life, sensorial learning, language, and math. In addition, there are cultural extensions consisting of geography, history, botany, zoology, and the arts. Music and movement are also included in the curriculum.
The Classical Education approach that we combine with the Montessori Method is based on the trivium (grammar, logic, rhetoric) and quadrivium (astronomy, arithmetic, music and geometry).
Practical Life
An integral component of the Montessori curriculum is practical life. This continues throughout the child’s school years but begins at a basic level during the primary years. Children learn skills such as cleaning tables, arranging flowers, and, most importantly, how to care for themselves.
They are taught how to make their snacks when they get hungry, how to dress and clean themselves, and how to care for their environment.
Many aspects of practical life help with the development of eye-hand coordination. For example, children learn, through trial and error, how to pour liquid from one object into another without spilling.
One important thing to remember about Montessori is that all levels of learning begin with the concrete and move to the abstract. Children learn better when they can feel and see something, literally grasping it to obtain an understanding of how it works. This is applied from practical life to sensorial learning to mathematics and everything else.
Language
While many children do not begin to learn the fundamentals of reading until they enter grade school, Montessori children begin to learn to read as soon as they show an interest - no matter their age.
The Montessori environment is saturated with opportunities for children to enhance this interest. Sandpaper letters, the movable alphabet, metal insets, verbal command cards, student-made labels, and exceptional children’s literature all have most Montessori children reading very well by the time they enter first grade.
A love of reading is a major component of the Montessori educational system, and children are not only encouraged to do so, even if they don’t know the words, but are surrounded by students and teachers alike who thoroughly enjoy a good book.
Inclusive in their reading education is writing education. It is much easier to learn how to read if one is also encouraged to write or draw their thoughts, ideas, and feelings at the same time.
Sensorial Learning
Children learn to pay more attention to their world through their senses.
“The sensorial curriculum is designed to help the child focus their attention more carefully on the physical world, exploring with each of their senses the subtle variations in the properties of objects.”
The specific jobs that help children accomplish this include the pink tower, the brown stairs, the red rods, the cylinder blocks, knobless cylinders, sandpaper tablets, thermic (temperature) tablets and jars, baric (weight) tablets, smelling bottles, and sound boxes, to name just a few.
All these jobs start simply and move towards more complex understanding in a way that encourages the child and enhances his/her natural creativity and curiosity.
In addition to this, “all the sensorial materials lead into vocabulary lessons and language. For example, the child working with the tower of cubes masters the terms smaller, smallest, larger and largest, heavier, heaviest, lighter, and lightest.”
The Changing Child
The 3-6-year-old goes through an intense period of change, including the transition to cooperative play and more complex social interactions, a language explosion leading to beginning skills in writing and reading, the emergence of number sense and the foundations of math, and great changes in physical development. The Montessori teacher responds to these changes in social emotional, cognitive, and physical development with appropriate lessons to support each child’s growth and emerging capabilities.
Preschool Skills Taught
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• Work and cooperate as a group
• Understand social concepts such as “please” and “thank you”
• Help with classroom chores such as cleaning tables, organizing shelves, watering plants, or setting up snacks
• Cooperate, negotiate, and problem-solve with peers
• Recognize their own and peers’ emotions
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• Take comfort in using familiar objects
• Expand the mind by trying new things
• Gain confidence from success
• Make personal choices
• Share ideas, thoughts, and feelings with the group
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• Strengthen balance, motor skills, and coordination
• Running, jumping, and throwing
• Gain large muscle development through obstacle courses, riding bikes, and throwing balls
• Dress independently by using zippers and buttons
• Gain spatial awareness by moving to music
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• Recognize and write letters and words
• Participate in read-aloud exercises
• Identify numbers, count, and estimate items
• Explore the physical properties of water, sand, and paper
• Asking and answering open-ended questions
• Understand sequences of events
• Grasp spatial relationships and the concept of time
