The Montessori Environment

While it pales in comparison to the spirit of the teacher, the physical environment is very important. The Montessori classroom is child-centered, designed in proportion to the children’s physical and developmental stages. Children learn to respect and care for the environment. It is a home atmosphere with a wide variety of beautiful equipment that is both purposeful and fun to use. Reflective of the environment in general, the equipment promotes a sense of natural order both in its design and in its placement on specific locations on shelves. Most of it has built-in control of error so the children can gauge their own efforts rather than always needing to rely on input from a teacher. For further information, please call us for details!

There are three categories - Practical Life, Sensorial, and Academic:

This equipment is designed to heighten awareness of the many subtle distinctions each of our five senses utilize, greatly enhancing the child’s ability to categorize and describe the world accurately.

Maria Montessori said, “The more you do for a child, the less he can do for himself.” Learning to manipulate implements of everyday living is inherent in Montessori education. From tables, chairs, and sinks, to dishes, brooms, and dustpans, everything is child-sized. In addition to the actual tools the children use, there is a host of equipment designed to isolate and hone gross and fine-motor skills. Practical Life activities foster pride in the environment, helping children to practice moving gracefully and allowing them to do things for themselves. The children learn how to take care of their environment and help clean up after themselves whenever possible.

Language, math, the sciences, and geography all have equipment that helps build a solid, concrete foundation for later, more abstract intellectual endeavors. For example, the children have traced individual “Sandpaper Letters” and learned their sounds long before they put the sounds together to form words to read. When they are old enough to use pencils and paper to work with math, the abstract numerals have concrete meaning for the children. They have been adding and subtracting with beads in the form of units, ten bars, hundred squares, and thousand cubes for quite some time. They see that the hundred-square has ten “bars” in it, each of which has ten units. When they learn carrying, they don’t just “...put down the three and carry the one.” They see that with thirteen beads they may exchange ten of them for a ten-bar, and the result is an extra ten with three units left.