Preschool & Kindergarten

List of 10 items.

• Practical Life

  The essential skills developed through the practical life activities form the basis for all further study and are a preparation for life. These activities serve as a bridge between home and school environments. Practical life exercises are performed throughout the routines of the day. They are complex because they require multiple steps for children to execute in a precise sequence helping to engage their executive function skills.
  
  Purposeful lessons in daily living prepare hands and minds for the challenging work by cultivating skills such as organization, repetition, problem-solving, and inner-discipline. A sense of pride comes when the child completes self-help tasks independently and when contributing to the classroom community. Practical Life includes exercises to refine small motor coordination through activities such as setting the table, washing cloths, sweeping the floor, arranging flowers. sewing, and art. This area develops the hand for advanced tasks – writing, woodworking, or playing a musical instrument.

• Grace & Courtesy

  Greeting a visitor, serving tea, offering something, interrupting, restoring the classroom, and care for pets and plants are some of the lessons that are given to the children. Grace and courtesy activities instill a sense of citizenship and commitment to the environment and all living things.
  
  Children’s House classrooms are peaceful and respectful. Young children learn to negotiate freedom and responsibility with guided instructions and expectations. Simple, clear lessons in grace and courtesy provide the youngest children practice of the tools for social living while benefiting from the model of older peers who have an ethic of care and cooperation in their interactions in the classroom. The culture of mutual respect and shared helpfulness sets the tone in the classroom and honors the children

• Sensorial

  Children this age are naturally curious and use their senses to explore their world. The materials in the sensorial curriculum are designed to appeal to the senses and enable the them to compare and contrast, discriminate differences, sequence and identify shape, size, form, and sounds. These essential skills prepare the child for language, math, geometry, music and science.
  
  Sensorial materials reveal mathematical relationships that exist in the real world and provide the foundation for understanding complex relationships. The language embedded within the sensorial materials is rich and descriptive (baric, symmetry, congruence, cubing, musical notation). Through repetition of lessons and the use of scientific observational skills, children learn to discriminate increasingly complex characteristics and qualities of shapes, sounds, algebraic equations, musical pitch, temperature, texture, weight, and volume.

• Math

  For the youngest children, the sensorial materials provide an indirect preparation for mathematics. The use of these materials bridge into learning arithmetic and geometry through understanding of similarities, differences, variations, patterns, sets, and logical thinking. The concrete math manipulatives are uniquely Montessori in design. They build upon the Sensorial curriculum and advance to counting, recognition of numerals, matching numerals with quantities, the decimal system (place value), and all four operations (addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division – including exchanging, squaring, and cubing).
  
  All of these advanced principles are learned through the hand and are introduced well before children are capable of holding a pencil to complete math problems on paper. It is the visual, representational, concrete understanding of mathematical concepts that allow Montessori students excel beyond their peers.

• Language

  A Montessori classroom is a language rich environment that nurtures the children’s development of reading and writing as a joyful and almost effortless experience. The Montessori teacher recognizes that for all children there is a sensitive period in their development for language and this occurs at a slightly different time for each child. When the moment is noticed, the teacher guides the child toward language in a precise sequence lessons using Montessori’s visually attractive materials. With great individualized attention and repetition of exercises, an explosion into writing emerges followed by the process of reading.
  
  Before children reach this period of development, lessons are given for the hand to be strengthened for writing, and the ear prepared for listening and discriminating sounds. These exercises are found in the Practical Life and Sensorial curricula. Oral language games include initial sound and rhyming fluency, sequencing exercises, finger plays, and storytelling. The process of writing to read in a Montessori classroom includes sounds and symbol, letter formation, word composition and structure (phonetic and non-phonetic words), grammar, and sentence structure. The Language curriculum brings children into the path of writing and reading early, which are the tools to access advanced learning in all other areas of study.

• Kindergarten Writer's Workshop

  While individualized lessons are embedded into the kindergarten daily work cycle in the Language curriculum, the group gathering for Writer’s Workshop is a special time for kindergarteners to experience and appreciate the art of composition together as a community of authors. Writer's Workshop is led by Children's House Teacher and Reading and Language Assessment Specialist, Jamie Oakley.
  
  The workshop begins with a mini lesson focusing on aspects of writing such as use of capital letters, spacing, grammar, and punctuation. Elements of story development are introduced including creating a character, setting, adding details and description into their work. Kindergarteners continue with focus areas and use these skills to create their own creative stories accompanied by illustrations. An author’s celebration at the end of each term introduces the young children to reading their work to an audience and learning strategies for giving feedback to a fellow writer.
  
  Jamie Oakley completes reading and writing assessments and closely monitors the progress of each Kindergarten student throughout the year while also sharing feedback and educational plans with the students' classroom teachers. 

• Natural World & Outdoor Classroom

  The Cultural Curriculum inspires children’s natural sense of wonder as they explore botany, zoology, physical science, and earth science through hands-on investigation and discovery. Montessori materials introduce scientific concepts, classification, and vocabulary, while real-world experiences bring those ideas to life.
  
  

  Learning extends into our Outdoor Classroom, where children garden, observe plants and animals, investigate seasonal changes, and explore the natural environment firsthand. Through experiences both on campus and beyond, children learn to observe closely, ask questions, recognize patterns, and make meaningful connections between their classroom studies and the natural world around them.

• Kindergarten Science

  Twice a week the kindergarten students gather for hands-on science class together. These lessons primarily focus on basic introduction to chemistry and physics. They begin with a mini-lesson on the topic, a review of the previous lesson and vocabulary, and a discussion to access prior knowledge. Next, they prepare the activity following the prescribed format of: question, apply or test, observe, review, record, restore the materials. At the end of each class children have a time to share what they have recorded in their Science Journal with the teacher, a partner, or the full group.

• Social World

  The study of geography is divided along conceptual lines for young children and includes: physical and political geography, cultural geography, economic geography (natural resources production, transportation of goods to market), and map skills. History in the Harborlight curriculum has two parts: activities to introduce time and the stories that introduce the relationship of the universe, its parts, and the human’s role in it.

• Physical Education

  Montessori embraces the development of the whole child. At Harborlight, our focus is on health and fitness for life. Freedom of movement and self-regulation is inherent in the philosophy and supported both in classroom practice and within the course guided by our physical education teacher. In their gym class, children are exposed to a variety of motor skills and movement drills that challenge their balance and coordination including running, jumping, climbing, throw and catch, yoga postures, and more. There are daily lessons on health, nutrition, sleep, emotional regulation and wellness.