Children's House Program

This area is considered the foundation for all Montessori work. The activities center around care of self and care of the environment. Children love to do this work because it gives them a sense of independence and control of their own lives. Practical Life activities include pouring, sorting, tying, scrubbing, food preparation, arranging, transferring, etc. The purpose of these works is to develop concentration, attention to detail, sequence of action, and mastery of fine motor skills.

The materials in the Sensorial area isolate one defining quality (for example: color, weight, shape, texture, size, sound, or smell) and allow children to discern variations in the isolated quality. These activities help the child to distinguish, to categorize, and to relate new information to what he/she already knows. It also helps train children to make order/sense out of his/her own life experiences.

All introductory work in the Math area is "hands on." Children move from concrete concepts to abstract ones. The students gain an understanding of quantity and symbol. They continue with discovery of operations. There are materials available at Children's House that enable a child to add, subtract, multiply, divide, compute square roots, understand fractions, and even perform basic algebraic concepts!

At Children's House great care is taken to develop both spoken and written language. The highly complex activities of reading and writing are broken down into numerous simpler works. For example, long before a child reads a page, he/she will have mastered table scrubbing. This seemingly unrelated work is actually quite fundamental to basic reading and writing. During table scrubbing the child learns to scrub in a circular motion, from left to right, and from top to bottom. These are all important skills preparing the child for later reading and writing. Through the use of various tracing activities students are encouraged to refine their fine motor skills providing better control of their pencil. Letter sounds are introduced phonetically and practiced in a variety of ways. Through the use of sandpaper children experience letter sounds by seeing them, by repeating the sound and by tracing their shape with their fingers. As a child progresses journal work is introduced. Proper speech and manners are also stressed. Children are given the opportunities to make presentations to the group and to perform.

The Cultural area covers a wide variety of disciplines including geography, science, current events, courtesy, world civilizations, art, music, foreign language, movement, drama, health, history, and special events. Due to the diversity of the topics this area provides an ever evolving classroom. Children who spend four years at Children's House are enriched with a multitude of activities and experiences.