Early Years Community
Why Montessori in the early years?
Home / Why Montessori in the early years?
Montessori education in the early childhood is known for helping children develop strong cognitive, social, and emotional skills. Children who attend Montessori programs often demonstrate higher levels of independence, problem-solving abilities, and a deep love for learning, laying a solid foundation for their future education.
Montessori education provides a holistic approach that not only prepares children academically, but also supports their emotional and social development. It’s an approach that values the whole child, empowering them to reach their full potential in a nurturing and respectful environment.
Children are grouped across a range of ages, allowing them to learn from and with each other. These mixed-age groups are central to the Montessori approach, encouraging peer learning, cooperation, and the development of leadership skills.
1. Infant Community (0-3 years)
This stage is often split into two subgroups:
– Nido (0-18 months):Designed for infants in a secure and nurturing environment where they can freely explore. Activities focus on sensory development, motor skills, and early communication.
– Toddler Program (18 months-3 years): As children become more mobile and independent, they engage in activities that build practical life skills, support language development, and encourage positive social interactions.
2. Children’s House (3-6 years)
This mixed-age classroom is a key aspect of Montessori education. Children aged 3-6 years participate in hands-on activities across areas like practical life, sensorial exploration, language, mathematics, and cultural studies. The classroom environment is thoughtfully set up to meet each child’s developmental stage, with older children often helping and guiding younger ones.
The multi-age setting allows children to progress at their own pace while also benefitting from the social and learning dynamics of being in a diverse age group.
How is Montessori different to traditional play-based programs?
A key difference is that our Educators act as Guides, supporting children as they explore, build skills, follow their interests, and develop their individual potential.
Montessori and play-based education differ significantly in their approach. Montessori education allows children to choose from carefully designed activities in a calm, organised environment, promoting self-discipline and concentration. The Educator’s role is to observe and guide when needed, allowing children to learn at their own pace.
In contrast, play-based learning is more flexible and encourages children to explore and learn through imaginative play. The environment is designed for creativity, with various play areas like dress-up corners and building stations. Educators actively engage in play, asking questions and introducing new ideas to support children’s social and emotional development.
A Montessori education prioritises not just academic readiness but also real-world skills through structured activities, while play-based learning focuses on creativity, social interactions, and problem-solving. The choice between the two depends on whether you prefer a more organised, skill-focused environment (Montessori) or a flexible, child-led approach that emphasises exploration and play.
What to the children learn in the early years community?
Practical Life
In the early years of a Montessori environment, your child will engage in hands-on experiences that support their overall development across several key curriculum areas:
Early Years Community
Sensorial
From an early age children are developing a sense of order and actively seek to sort, arrange, and classify their many experiences. The sensorial component provides a key to this world, a means for growth in perception and understanding. The sensorial materials help the child experience and perceive distinctions between similar and different things.
Later the child learns to grade a set of similar objects that differ in a regular and measurable way from most to least. Each piece of equipment is generally a set of objects that isolate a quality perceived through the senses: such as colour, form, dimension, texture, temperature, volume, pitch, weight, and taste.
Precise language such as loud/soft, long/short, rough/smooth, circle, square, cube, and so on is then attached to these sensorial experiences to make the world more meaningful to the child.
Language
Maria Montessori did not believe that reading, writing, spelling, and language should be taught as separate entities. Pre-primary children are immersed in the dynamics of their own language development and the Montessori approach provides a carefully thought-out program to facilitate this process. Oral language acquired since birth is further elaborated and refined through a variety of activities such as songs, games, poems, stories, and classified language cards.
Indirect preparation for writing begins with the Practical Life exercises and Sensorial training. Muscular movement and fine motor skills are developed along with the ability of the child to distinguish the sounds that make up language. With this spoken language foundation, the guide begins to present the symbols of the alphabet to the child.
Not only can children hear and see sounds but they can feel them by tracing the sandpaper letters. When sufficient letters have been learned the movable alphabet is introduced. These cardboard or wooden letters enable the child to reproduce his or her own words, then phrases, sentences, and finally stories.
Creativity is encouraged and the child grows in appreciation of the mystery and power of language. Other materials follow which present the intricacies of non-phonetic spelling and grammar. Because children know what they have written, they soon discover that they can read back their stories. Reading books both to themselves and others soon follows.
Mathematics
Mathematics is a way of looking at the world, a language for understanding and expressing measurable relationships. The child’s mind has already been awakened to mathematical ideas through the Sensorial experiences. They have seen the distinctions of distance, dimension, graduation, identity, similarity, and sequence and will now be introduced to the functions and operations of numbers. Geometry, algebra, and arithmetic are connected in the Montessori method as they are in life. For instance, the golden bead material highlights the numerical, geometrical, and dimensional relationships within the decimal system.
Through concrete material, the child learns to add, subtract, multiply, and divide and gradually comes to understand many abstract mathematical concepts with ease and joy.
