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What Makes Montessori Unique?

A boy on the floor in the class.

The Whole Child Approach

The primary goal of a Montessori program is to help each child reach his/her full potential in all areas of life. Activities promote the development of social skills, emotional growth, and physical coordination as well as cognitive preparation. 

The holistic curriculum, under the direction of a credentialed teacher, allows the child to experience the joy of learning, affords time to enjoy the process, insures the development of self-esteem, and provides the experiences from which children create their knowledge.

Two young students working with fabric.

 

The Prepared Environment

The Montessori classroom is geared to the size, pace, interests, and developmental stage of the three-to-six year-old and offers many opportunities for self-directed learning in a comfortable environment that allows risk-taking as well as collaborative learning.

A teacher helping a young student.

 

The Teacher

Originally called a "Directress," or "guide," the Montessori teacher functions as a designer of the environment, resource person, role model, demonstrator, record-keeper, and meticulous observer of each child's behavior and growth.

A girl focused.

 

The Montessori Materials

Dr. Montessori's observations of the kinds of things which children enjoy and go back to repeatedly led her to design a number of multisensory, sequential, and self-correcting materials which facilitate the learning of skills, and lead to learning of abstract concepts. 

Each material in a Montessori classroom isolates one quality. In this way, the concept that the child is to discover is isolated. For example, the material known as the pink tower is made up of ten pink cubes varying sizes. The preschool-aged child constructs a tower with the largest cube on the bottom and the smallest on top. The material isolates the concept of size. The cubes are all the same color and texture; the only difference is their size. Other materials isolate different concepts: color tablets for color, geometry materials for form, and so on.

Why Three Years?

Multi-age classrooms are one important aspect of the Montessori experience. Younger children learn from the older children while the older children solidify their skills by teaching the lessons they have already mastered. The Montessori classroom is like the real world where people work and socialize with people of various ages. For this reason, The Woods stresses the value and importance of students spending all three years in our Montessori Preschool.

Learn more about spending the Kindergarten Year in the Montessori classroom by viewing the video below from American Montessori Society.

Want to know even more about Montessori Kindergarten?

Read Please Stay...Here's Why from American Montessori Society.

A Montessori Beginning

The Soul of The Woods