The Children's House is designed to serve the needs of children from 3 to 6 years of age. With a ratio of ten or less children to each adult, the individual needs of each child are easily met. The children learn many different skills at their own academic and social level.

The youngest children develop social skills. These children learn what it means to be part of a group, how to separate from their parents, take turns, and become independent. The children in their second year focus on lessons and peer socialization and always move at their own pace. The third year in the Montessori classroom is the Extended Day year. This is the year when the children grow academically at a rapid rate. The afternoon is devoted to these Extended Day children. Here, the focus of small group lessons and advanced academics helps foster the love of learning we see in children.

Practical Life                  
Practical life is the area of the classroom where children learn coordination, confidence, cooperation, independence, and order. These activities include care of self, care of the environment, and physical skills.

Care-of-self activities include handwashing, snack preparation, and dressing activities. These activities help the young child gain confidence in him/herself.

Care-of-the-environment activities can include plant and animal care, as well as cleaning activities. Sweeping, scrubbing, and polishing all help children learn the importance of order. If steps are done incorrectly, the results can be less than desirable.

All children gain valuable skills in the practical life area of the classroom regardless of age and ability. Many of these skills set up the basic foundation to all the other areas of the classroom.

Sensorial                                        
The sensorial area of the Montessori classroom helps children develop three main skills that are used in the math sequence:

Teachers use several beautiful materials to help children learn to discriminate for differences. The activities isolate difficulty so only one characteristic of the materials is different in each piece of the activity. The potential differences include thickness, length, texture, and shape. Some of the activities are knobbed and knobless cylinders, prisms, cube, rods, the geometric cabinet, and geometric solids.

Matching activities develop the perception of similarities. Here, groups of objects have identical pairs, and the child searches through comparison and contrasting. These activities involve the first two color boxes, baric tablets, sound cylinders, smelling bottles, fabric matching, and the bells. These activities help the children to find characteristics that are the same within a set.

The third set of activities in the sensorial area involves working with things in a series. The gradation of a set of objects is a challenging and advanced activity. Many of the same materials used in the previous two sections are used here; however, instead of matching and sorting, the objects are graded. Things are graded from heavy to light, hot to cold, loud to soft and large to small, and thick to thin.

Geometry is introduced in a hands-on way in sensorial work. Activities include the triangle boxes and cube puzzles. The cube puzzles--monomial, binomial and trinomial--teach basic algebraic equations in a concrete way. The triangle boxes develop knowledge of two-dimensional shapes.

Language                        
Before one learns to read, one must learn to listen. Listening activities are the first language activities in the preschool classroom. The silence game, rhyming, verbal labeling, listening to books, and "I-Spy" games all stress listening. Children at this level need to be able to hear the differences in sounds, words, and phrases. Many of these activities take place during group time--or without the child being aware they are having a lesson. This is often referred to as "ear training."

Next we must prepare the eyes for reading. To do this we use visual activities, such as puzzles, matching, classification, sequencing and sorting activities. Here we pick up where sensorial left off. We find the subtle differences that are needed to distinguish the difference between "n" and "m."

After many activities with the previously mentioned materials, the child is ready to start integrating his/her skills for the continuing journey to reading. The child uses the sandpaper letters to learn the relationship with a sound and the symbol it represents. Through these activities children see that blending sounds together makes a combination of sounds--or words. The movable alphabet is used for beginning or phonetic spelling activities.

The second part of language is writing. We begin with motor preparation in order to get the hand ready to write. Children have gained coordination skills through practical life activities. Sensorial actives have introduced the pincer grip used in holding a pencil. These, with other prewriting activities, have prepared the hand for the specific skill of handwriting. Activities such as rock painting, the sand tray and the chalkboard help children learn the flow of shapes that lead to drawing letters. These activities are very forgiving and can easily be redone if the child is not satisfied with his/her own work. Tracing, hole punching, and cutting activities use different muscles in the hand to develop the muscles needed for penmanship.

The metal insets are one of the first experiences of pencil-to-paper work. Children will trace a frame or inset while they gain control of the pencil. We teach cursive and only cursive, as the flows of these letters are easier than the stop and go of printing. Cursive strokes are the first steps in forming letters. These strokes are similar to those used in making cursive letters, and they break writing into smaller steps. Once strokes have been established, letters are formed, then connecting letters, and finally the formation of words. These letters are created freely on paper, then in a more controlled box, and finally on lined paper. Advanced language activities may include parts of speech, such as compound words, plurals, nouns and verbs. Here phonograms and phonemes are introduced along with sight words and digraphs.

Mathematics                
Math is a large part of the Montessori preschool, beginning with pre-math activities that teach one to one correspondence and the relationship of symbol and quantity. Numeration activities include the numerical rods, sandpaper numerals, and spindle box, which is the first introduction to the concept of zero. The "counters game" introduces odds and evens. Sets, baskets, memory game, mystery number, and tabletop rods are other numeration activities. All these activities deal with the numbers 1-10 and demonstrate a concrete example to associate number with symbol. The child is introduced to the colored bead stair. The colored beads are a very large part of linear counting in Montessori.

Most linear counting activities use the colored bead materials. Here the children learn that things in math are linear, and follow a definite pattern. Children work with the colored bead stair, the snake game, teens and tens boards, the hundred board, and finally the squaring and cubing chains. These activities show patterns that run through different numbers, they also encourage skip counting and other mathematical relationships.

Children work with the decimal system simultaneously. The teacher introduces the child to place value through unit beads, ten bars, hundred squares, and thousand cubes. Th decimal material is used to show quantities and symbols from 1 to 9000, as well as the four operations (addition, subtraction, multiplication and division). The child works with static and dynamic problems. Children enjoy working with the bank game where they compose their own four-digit numbers. The "45 Layout" shows how the numbers grow from 1 to 9000. This portion of the curriculum introduces the concept of exchanging and equivalencies. The stamp game is a more abstract material used to move students into a higher level of work. The same four operations are used with this material as with golden bead material. The small bead frame and dot boards are introduced to older children and will be pursued further in elementary.

Other areas covered in math include fractions, which are introduced using the cones and skittle. We introduce money symbols and quantities.

The memorization of math facts begins in preschool with the strip board materials. Strips are used to help find a solution to a simple equation, which will become memorized with practice. Finger charts for the different operations help the child become less dependent on the materials. The multiplication and division dot boards are introduced as an introduction to these types of facts.

Geography                     
The geography activities at the preschool level are very enriching and exciting to children. An introduction to the parts of the earth leads to the discussion of the three parts of the world--land, air, and water. Activities in sorting objects, pictures, and vehicles encourage children to think about the world around them.

The teacher introduces the solar system and planets, as well as the specific landforms of lake and island, bay and peninsula, straight and isthmus, and gulf and cape. The teacher introduces the planisphere and all the continents. Eventually the child will have the opportunity to work with each individual continent map learning about countries through stories, food experience, and special activities. Children are introduced to history through the calendars and the concept of time. Clock activities teach us about past, present, and future.

Science                            
Early science actives include experiments with magnetic/non-magnetic and sink/float. Science experiments are used to teach the children about cause and effect, as well as about the simple responses of item such as water, electricity, matter, and machines. Other activities involve sorting things into groups such as living/nonliving, plant/animal, and organic/inorganic.

Children examine animals and plants in more depth. Plant activities include learning the parts of a tree, root, and flower as well as leaf studies with the botany cabinet. Animal work includes activities with the five classes of animals (fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds and mammals), sorting animals, learning the parts and characteristic of each individual class. Children practice sequencing using the life cycle of animals. Study of humans is also introduced.

Other Activities                
Other actives in the preschool curriculum include art activities, which are open- ended and emphasize process and not product. These actives may include crayons, colored pencils, easel activities, clay, and cutting.

The teacher brings music into the classroom each day at "line time" through songs, fingerplays and dances. She introduces musical instruments and rhythm with rhythm sticks and other simple hand instruments, which comprise a preschool "band".

Outdoor activity is a part of each day, and we take a trip to the gym at least once a week. Large motor play helps strengthen the physical body as well as increasing coordination.

Children learn Spanish, French and German when special teachers visit the classrooms daily to work with small groups on simple vocabulary and basic pronunciation.