These activities, which Dr. Montessori called "Practical Life", prepare children to care for themselves and the environment and give each child a sense of mastery and self-confidence. Performing such tasks as sweeping, polishing, washing, and preparing food, children develop coordination, concentration, and good work habits such as completing a task.

Sensorial Exercises

Montessori materials are designed to heighten the child's senses of sight, touch, sound, taste, and smell. By focusing on the senses, children are given a key to understanding and classifying the environment. Distinguishing, categorizing, and comparing the concrete lays the foundation for understanding the abstract.

Mathematics

Children's understanding of the basic mathematic operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division emerges from using manipulative materials such as rods, beads, sandpaper numerals, cards and counters which allow the student to visualize the abstraction of numbers. Using self-correcting materials, children learn not only number recognition and place value, but also to solve problems and to develop a visual image of mathematical concepts.

Reading and Writing

The pre-school child is immersed in developing language, and effortlessly links sound, symbols, and shapes. Using simple alphabet cutouts and sandpaper letters, children learn the sounds of letters and soon are linking letters to make words, then words to make sentences. Children first develop small muscle coordination necessary to master writing in their activities of daily living and in using the sensorial materials. After tracing geometric figures with a pencil, cutting shapes with scissors, and tracing letters with their fingers, they soon progress to writing letters.

Cultural Subjects

The preschool experience continues in the elementary program, where the Montessori materials are a means to an end. These scientifically designed materials are intended to stimulate the imagination, to aid abstraction and to present a universal view of the human work and purpose.

The child is led to ask philosophical questions about the origins of the universe, the nature of life, different cultures, and the fundamental needs of humankind. Interdisciplinary studies combine geology, biology, chemistry, physics and anthropology in the study of natural history and world ecology.

World history is integrated with science and language and is presented through the medium of "Great Stories" or lessons which span the history of the universe, supported by impressionistic charts and multiple time lines for each major concept presented.

The mathematics curriculum is presented with concrete materials which reveal arithmetic, geometric, and algebraic correlations. Formulae and rules are a point of arrival and discovery, not a point of departure.

There is an emphasis on creative and expository writing, interpretive reading of literature and poetry. Research using a variety of sources is basic, as is the study of grammar, sentence analysis, spelling and oral expression, including dramatic and operatic productions.

Making use of community resources through the experience known as "Going Out" is a means of allowing students to take the initiative to explore beyond the classroom walls and to follow their own interests to a satisfying conclusion.