“The senses, being the explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge.”
~ Maria Montessori
Preschool Program Description
Practical Life
Children instinctively seek to care for themselves, their homes, and their natural environments. They want to feed themselves, sweep the floor, rake leaves, and pour milk into their cup. What Dr. Montessori called “practical life” is a valuable component of the IMS Preschool program. Children practice simple dressing exercises, cutting fruits, and peeling vegetables. They help prepare and serve the morning snack. They plant and tend vegetables and flowers in the school’s garden, water and care for the class plants, and arrange fresh flowers. Through these activities, children develop coordination as well as self-reliance.
Sensorial Awareness
Sensorial materials isolate a defining quality such as color, weight, shape, texture, sound, temperature, or smell, encouraging children to distinguish, organize, and describe their experiences and impressions.
Mathematics
Montessori math materials enable children to understand concepts through concrete explorations. Once the addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division operations are familiar, the child is ready to work with fractions, elements of geometry and algebra, and problem-solving on paper.
Language Arts
A phonetic approach to reading begins with sandpaper letters to identify sounds and shapes and trace letters, training the muscles needed for writing. Children construct words, phrases, sentences, and stories with the movable alphabet in preparation for written expression.
Culture
Cultural exercises expose the child to geography, history, physical, and life science basics. The children understand the world around them by exploring other countries, customs, foods, languages, and wildlife. Through multicultural studies, we lay a foundation of mutual understanding and tolerance. Music, art, foreign language, and physical education are part of the integrated cultural curriculum.