Video The Montessori Classroom The Three-Year Cycle
For our first post in our new Montessori Theory blog, we present a video showing how children in a Montessori School learn skills over time. It's entitled "The Montessori Classroom: The Three-Year Cycle."
Here are some excerpts from the video narrative:
Just as in a family, younger children may seek out help from an older child. Independence is fostered and confidence is built for the younger child. The older child practices humility, and cements acquired skills by teaching the younger student. The benefit for the older child is the feeling of pride in being a leader. For the younger child, it's a feeling of dignity, and all doors are open and everything is possible.
The sensorial materials allow the children to explore and name all aspects of the senses. Later the exploration of these materials will allow the child to develop a better sense of spacial relationships, and establish the groundwork for the study of geometry, and even algebra.
Writing and reading are approached with hands-on materials as well. Children learn the sounds of the alphabet, then use these sounds to form words, phonetically. Sandpaper letters are traced to train the muscular memory, in preparation for writing.
The specialized manipulative materials used in the Montessori Method to teach math, have been called "materialized extraction." The child learns that numerals are representations of quantities. Using hands-on, self-correcting materials, the child acquires the operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division with ease. The older children rely less and less on the concrete materials. Upon completion of the three-year cycle, a Montessori student will have internalized the abstractions of mathematics years ahead of their peers in traditional education settings.
Montessori Ivy League Academy in Pembroke Pines can help your child develop abstract concepts from concrete materials over the three-year cycle. Our curriculum includes daycare, preschool, kindergarten and after school/enrichment programs using the Montessori method. It’s never too early to help your child get a head start. Visit our campus today or call (954) 438-8808.