About Montessori Education
Children’s Montessori Academy provides an authentic Montessori education based on Dr. Montessori’s principles.
In a Montessori school, your child teaches themselves through the use of the specifically designed Montessori materials. Encouraging a child’s innate desire to learn, providing a prepared child-friendly learning environment, and supporting children’s need to work at their own pace remain the foundation of the program. Our children learn in mixed-age classrooms under the guidance of trained educators. Your child learns to work alone and with others in a Montessori school. Because each child chooses their own work and preform at an individual pace, your child has many opportunities for success.
Children’s Montessori Academy is a well-established school operating in its 25th year. It is a family owned and family focused school now educating children of previous students that attended when they were preschoolers. We emphasis low student to teacher ratios and offer on-site services like speech or occupational therapy. Our campus boasts a large shaded playground with a picnic area for lunchtime, weather permitting.
We have several opportunities throughout the year for parents to volunteer and participate with their child, such as Thanksgiving Feast and Valentine’s Day.
Many of the teachers at Children’s Montessori Academy were once parents of children that attended the school and now work at Children’s Montessori Academy because of the impact the school had on their children.
What Is Montessori?
The Montessori Method refers to a child-centered philosophy of education developed by the Italian anthropologist and physician, Dr. Maria Montessori. Her basic principle was to “follow the child”.
In a Montessori school, your child teaches himself through his use of the specifically designed Montessori materials. These are attractive, generally simple, child-sized materials that are self-correcting; that is, if a child makes an error, he can see it by looking at the materials himself. In this way, no adult is needed to point out his mistakes and perhaps injure his self-esteem.
Your child learns to work alone and with others in a Montessori school. He can usually make this choice himself. He learns to follow the class “ground rules” and may often remind other children to follow them as well.
Because he can choose his work and do it at his own pace, your child has many opportunities for success; the Montessori classroom is noncompetitive. It is an attractive place in which your child can be free from adult dominance and can discover his world and build his mind and body.
Who Is Dr. Maria Montessori
When Maria Montessori graduated secondary school, she became determined to enter medical school and become a doctor. Despite her parents’ encouragement to enter teaching, Maria wanted to enter the male-dominated sphere of medicine. After initially being refused entry, Maria was eventually given entry to the University of Rome in 1890, becoming the first woman to enter medical school in Italy. Despite facing many obstacles due to her gender, Montessori qualified as a doctor in July 1896.
Dr Montessori opened Casa dei Bambini in Rome, in 1970 bringing some of the educational materials she had developed.
Dr. Montessori put many different activities and other materials into the children’s environment but kept only those that engaged them. What she came to realize was that children who were placed in an environment where activities were designed to support their natural development had the power to educate themselves? By 1909 Dr Montessori gave her first training course in her new approach to around 100 students. Her notes from this period provided the material for her first book published that same year in Italy, appearing in translation in the United States in 1912 as The Montessori Method, and later translated into 20 languages.
Why Choose Children’s Montessori Academy For My Family?
Children’s Montessori Academy provides an authentic Montessori education based on Dr. Montessori’s principles. Encouraging a child’s innate desire to learn, providing a prepared child-friendly learning environment, and supporting children’s need to work at their own pace remain the foundation of the program. In addition, our children learn in mixed-age classrooms under the guidance of trained teachers. Learning is emphasized through all five senses, not just through listening, watching, or reading.
Our program focuses on the five core areas of exploration; practical life, sensorial, math, language and culture.
The Practical Life area in a Montessori classroom is a variety of daily life activities that aid in the development of coordination, concentration, and independence.
Using sensorial materials, children develop and refine their five senses. The child is able to explore using sight, touch, taste, sound, and smell to experience new and wonderful things.
Language is a very important part of the Montessori classroom at any age. With the direction of our classroom teachers, children are taught using a phonetic approach highlighting the sounds of each letter. Having a solid knowledge of phonetics allows children to move effortlessly through reading. The human mind is by nature mathematical. Doctor Maria Montessori believed that children come to absorb mathematical concepts naturally. Doctor Maria Montessori designed concrete mathematical materials to represent all levels of quantities and mathematical concepts after she observed that children who are interested in counting, like to move items as they enumerate them. In the Montessori learning environment, the child not only sees and learns the symbol for a number, they hold the quantity in their hand.
The Montessori cultural studies make a Montessori classroom very different from other classrooms. Dr. Montessori called botany, zoology, history, art, music and geography the “cultural subjects” because she believed that the knowledge and understanding of these subjects is what makes the difference between a “literate” person and a “cultured” person.