Curriculum
The Bilingual Montessori School of Sharon offers a flexible curriculum designed to allow the children to grow individually. “The young child is attracted to activities that give independence and control over their own life”. (Maria Montessori) The curriculum structure is set to foster a full range of skills and interests, and to encourage curiosity, creativity, and security within the children. The followings are the main areas that embody the focus. The Bilingual Montessori School of Sharon classrooms comprise of:
Practical Life
Uniquely designed for young children, the curriculum emphasizes functionality and space designed for practical life activities. The children chose these activities (small garden, pouring water) because they are easy to understand from start to finish. These activities are a simple, clear, and concrete purpose. They give direction to the child’s movement who can intelligently understand and perform these activities. They are also attractive to the will of the child who may repeat them as often as they like. And because these movements are “willed” by the children, they help them toward greater skills and perfection. These activities will lead to self-accepted discipline, and at the same time create a unit between the child’s thought, his/her willingness, and action.
Sensorial
The purpose of sensorial in our school is to help the child concentrate on the refinement of all the senses. The Bilingual Montessori School of Sharon supports the verity that sensorial experience begins at birth. The children begin to explore sensorial materials such as texture, shape, taste, color, dimension and is given the opportunity to classify the things around them. The children are able to make their own experiences in their environment. By accomplishing this task alone with these self-correcting materials, the children are gearing toward the first step in organizing their own intelligence, which leads them to adapt to their environment.
Language
At The Bilingual Montessori School of Sharon, the materials are specifically designed for the children to develop at their own pace. When the children arrive in our classroom, they have already fully absorbed the culture of language, and have already constructed the spoken language. They will have the opportunity, at their own pace to start consolidating their spoken language and begin to explore the written form of language. The classroom exercises include letters, matching objects to pictures, rhyming, and language cards. We believe that language is an intricate involvement in the process of thinking. We encourage our directresses to speak to the children and listen to them, as they need to experience different modes of language and to hear and tell stories. Most importantly, the directresses help the children to build self-confidence to be able to read with ease and express themselves in writing.
Math
The Bilingual Montessori School of Sharon also believes that children are attracted by the science of numbers. The young children observe and experience the world sensorial which they can use to acquire the abstracts concepts and qualities of the things in the environment. Their growing knowledge of the environment makes it possible for the children to have a sense of positioning in space. Our directress starts with group activities, that leads toward individual activities where each child can acquire his or her own mathematical experience and arrive at his or her individual work.
The Bilingual Montessori School of Sharon values the activities that guide the children to a new level of learning or concept. Our students acquire the basis for later concepts when they are actively learning. In all of our activities, the directress in each classroom uses repetition of such activities that is integral for their learning process. As the children are allowed to repeat activities as they wish, they are ready to move on to the next level of learning when they show some level of boredom on account of the repetition of one of the activities. The directress is trained to observe each particular child and should correspondingly assign them the next lesson when ready. The directresses exhibit the proper use of the new activity to the children. While proceeding to their own pace from concrete objects, tactile experience, to abstract thinking, writing, reading, science, and mathematics, the children may use the new activities as desired.
Each age group uses the following developmental daily activities for Language that helps enhance their skills at The Bilingual Montessori School of Sharon.
- Emotional development
- Daily French
- Music
- Health and Education
- Gymnastics
- Creative art
- Physical activities
- Communication
- Field Trips