The activities in the classroom involve the use of the Montessori materials. These are all child-sized, multi-sensory, self-correcting, sequentially organized and are designed to enhance the child’s focused attention. There are materials in every area of learning and for all levels. For each activity, there is a lesson that must be precisely demonstrated by the Montessori teacher before a child can choose to do it. This ensures that the activities children choose freely will be appropriate for their individual level of ability. This also gives children the best opportunity to succeed at the activity they choose to do. At any one time in a day, all subjects can be explored at all levels.
Practical Life Activities
Activities in Practical Life teach children how to be independent. Independence is very important for the young child to learn. Small children can learn how to tie their own shoes, pour their own milk and tidy up when they make a spill. Becoming independent takes lots of practice, but in time, through concentrated work, these skills become mastered and the young child beams with pride. The success that comes from these experiences at such a young age builds up a self-image as a successful person. The development of independence develops the foundation for building confidence, self-discipline and responsibility. Practical Life activities foster a pattern for a lifetime of good work habits and an intrinsic belief in being a capable and independent human being.
In this activity, children learn to pour water from one little pitcher to another. There is a little sponge for wiping up spills. They learn to be careful not to spill a drop.
Children enjoy socializing and eating at the snack table. They are responsible for serving themselves. They learn how to pour their own cup of water and tidy up after themselves when they are finished.
Children work with dressing frames to master the skills of dressing themselves. Snaps, zippers, buckles, bows and buttons (as shown here) are a few of the dressing frames that will challenge the children to take one of their first steps toward independence.
As children’s fine motor control increases, they are able to learn to do other activities such as sewing a button.
Montessori children become responsible for the care of this child-sized environment. The children sweep the floors, clean the tables, dust the shelves and so on. Shown here, a child is watering a plant.
A CD player is always within reach of the children. Children who have had lessons with this are free to play music. Older children who have mastered a skill often help those who have not yet learned it. These children are enjoying the music an older classmate put on for them to hear.
Sensorial Activities
Sensorial activities teach children to focus their awareness, discriminate fine differences and learn how to observe. The Sensorial activities challenge children to focus in many ways. Some exercises are for matching and grading colours, textures and sounds, while others are for sorting by one aspect such as height, width or length. Children are naturally sensorial explorers who are fascinated by their physical world. By exploring with their senses the subtle variations in the different physical properties of objects, the children learn to carefully focus their attention on meaningful differences. Sensorial exercises can help children understand and appreciate their world more fully as they learn to experience their senses with a much deeper awareness and appreciation. These activities are fascinating challenges for the children that increase their attention span and provide a foundation for accuracy in other curriculum areas.
The knobbed cylinder blocks each have a set of ten cylinders that vary in a regular sequence by either diameter, length or both. The children are challenged to remove the cylinders and find the hole into which each fits perfectly.
The colour tablets help the children to learn to distinguish among primary and secondary colours and tones. The children match them or grade them from darkest to lightest while learning the words to describe each colour and shade.
The binomial and trinomial cubes are complex puzzles. The children take the cubes and rectangular prisms out of the box and are challenged to rebuild them outside of the box with the help of the pattern on the lid. The binomial cube is the concrete representation of the binomial theorem and the trinomial cube creates the concrete representation of the trinomial theorem.
Here is the binomial cube being successfully built by a girl of
3 ½.
Mathematics Activities
Montessori Mathematics includes activities in numbers 1-9999, addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and fractions. These involve hands-on learning materials that make abstract concepts clear and concrete. Traditional schools teach math by memorization only. This often leads students to a lack of understanding about what is taking place in a given mathematical process. Increasingly teachers in traditional schools are recognizing what Montessori teachers have always known. That is that learning math comes much more easily when students can see and explore what is going on. When you consider that children under the age of six are sensorial learners, it makes sense to introduce sensorial Mathematics materials at an early age because this provides a solid foundation for later learning.
The number rods are one of the many preliminary activities in the Montessori Mathematics curriculum. Segmented by colour and increasing in length, the number rods allow children to understand the concept of numbers from one to ten and quantities more fully than by counting this many separate objects by a fixed, memorized routine.
As with the Montessori materials in the other curriculum areas, the Mathematics materials are sequentially organized from preliminary to more advanced. In mathematics this involves moving from the concrete to the abstract. The purpose of this is to gradually enable the children to abstractly visualize in their minds the mathematical processes involved in their work.
In their journey toward abstraction, children's repeated use with the hands-on materials create an internalized understanding and a gradual memorization of basic math facts. The addition strip board, shown here, is one of many examples of this.
Language Activities
Language activities develop children’s skills in listening, speaking, reading, writing and grammar. Learning to speak, read and write should be simple and enjoyable. Considering that the optimal developmental timeframe for learning language is before the age of six, this is an important time for vocabulary enrichment. Unlike adults, young children can learn new words easily and quickly.
Children in a Montessori classroom are surrounded by opportunities for vocabulary enrichment. Materials in every area of the classroom can teach the names of geometric shapes and solids, continents and countries within continents, flags, types and parts of trees, flowers and animals, etc. The children develop an increasing vocabulary by listening to the teachers and to each other.
Learning to read in the Montessori environment begins by listening and by writing. Children listen to stories read by older children and the teachers. This older girl is telling a story to her classmates.
The Montessori classroom has its own children’s library. This child is looking at a book in the library. The youngest students in the class often want to learn to read. This desire to read can be naturally influenced by the older children who tend to appear absorbed in reading books.
There are many activities throughout the classroom that help children to develop the eye-hand coordination and pincer grip needed to hold a pencil. The metal insets teach children how to write with a pencil by giving them a frame in which to trace a shape and make freehand lines, attempting to stay inside the lines of the shape they’ve created. As children become more skilled with the metal insets, they begin to superimpose shapes over each other, creating complex designs. This girl has superimposed a quatrefoil on top of itself in different directions and is careful to colour it in within the lines.
Once children are able to recognize most of the phonetic sounds of the letters, they can create phonetic three-letter words using a moveable alphabet. This enables children to write words before they can write the letters successfully on paper.
Activities in Cultural Studies
Cultural Studies include the subjects of history, geography and science.
In the traditional Montessori birthday celebration, the child carries a globe around a candle that represents the sun. Each time the child takes ‘the earth’ around ‘the sun’ another year has gone by and the child is a year older. Classmates are shown photos of the birthday child as she gets older. Telling the children her life story and showing them what the earth and sun were doing is a group lesson in both history and science.
The child in this photo is blowing out the candle.
Children use many puzzles for activities in geography and science long before they do any written work. Puzzles are a very important part of the Montessori approach. Young children experience things that they can touch and manipulate with much greater interest than a two-dimensional picture on paper. By assembling a complex whole from many parts children can develop a real sense of discovery about the world they live in while building their concentration. They also tend to greatly enjoy this work. The use of these puzzles as educational tools provides the young developing mind with an advantage beyond the use of other ‘cute’ puzzle scenes typically found in other early childhood settings.
An older child is seen here with the map of Africa as she attempts to find the correct location of each country.
This child is discovering
the many parts of a tree.
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