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Primary program ( 3 to 6 years old)
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Korat Montessori Primary Program for children ages three to six years old is a “living” classroom for children. The children evaluate and choose their activities from open shelves and work in distinct work areas – on tables or on rugs on the floor. As time passes, the children develop a “normalized community” working with high concentration and minimal interruptions.
The Primary program environment consists of the following areas:
Practical Life
In this section of work, the child finds materials and exercises of his everyday life from pouring water from a jug to a glass, or learning how to tie a shoelace. These activities help the child to properly take care of him/herself so that he may feel as though he is independent and does not have to rely on an adult for his /her basic needs. The Practical Life component of the Montessori approach is the link between the child's home environment and the classroom. Practical life encompasses four main areas: Control of Movement, Care of Person, Care of Environment , and Grace and Courtesy.
Sensorial
From an early age children are developing a sense of order and they actively seek to sort, arrange and classify their many experiences. The sensorial component provides a key to the world, a means for a growth in perception, and understanding that forms the basis for abstraction in thought. The sensorial materials give the child experience initially in perceiving 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 which isolate a fundamental quality perceived through the senses such as color, 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 even more meaningful to the child.
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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. With this spoken language background the directress begins to present the alphabet symbols to the child. Not only can children hear and see sounds but they can feel them by tracing the sandpaper letters. When a number of 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. Other materials follow which present the intricacies of non-phonetic spelling and grammar. Because children know what they have written, they soon discover 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 inherent in our experience. A child is led to abstract ideas and relationships by dealing with the concrete. The child's mind has already been awakened to mathematical ideas through the sensorial experiences. The child has 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.
Culture (Science, Biology, History, Geography,Art, Music)Some of the science topics that we study include botany, living versus non-living, health and nutrition, the solar system, dinosaurs, zoology, and vertebrates vs invertebrates. Cultural geography is studied through the individual continents. They will be exposed to the music, artifacts, dress, and traditions.
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