Tempe Montessori School
Primary: Ages 3 - 6+
The Tempe Montessori School offers a wide range of educational opportunities for both children and their parents during the important early formative years. Beginning with practical and social skills, children learn to keep track of their belongings, to put things away, and to share materials. Academics are introduced through concrete, manipulative materials which utilize all five senses and lay the groundwork for abstract thinking.
Exercises of Daily Living
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
History, geography, science, art, and music are referred to as cultural subjects. Children learn about people, their countries, and the world through food, music, pictures, flags, maps, artifacts, the celebration of holidays, and scientific experiments and observations.
To aid the child's understanding of biology and to enhance the student's love of nature and experience with living things, the school has many animals in the barn yard, fish pond and classroom environments including fish, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and mammals. Small gardens and plants are cared for by the children.
