Areas of Focus

AREAS OF FOCUS

In general, Montessori general areas of focus are practical life, sensory, language, mathematics, art, music, botany, zoology, and geography.  The children will learn differences and similarities; will take chaos and make order; will have activities that help them to control their body; learn to separate the real from fantasy, and learn social graces and courtesy.

Primary:  Young children love to be with other people, but they also love to work alone.  Children feel joy when something is a little difficult and they are able to gradually find the answer or solve the mystery by his or her self.  What a tremendous growth experience it is if a child is allowed to search out answers for his or her self.  The mind has to reason--to question.  If you tell a child all the answers, he has no reason to figure things out for himself.  Perfection comes with much practice.  Do NOT judge or criticize a practicing hand.  Make available more opportunities for rehearsing and the hand will perfect itself.  The body and spirit are one--meant to work together in order to build the inner-self--"I hear and I forget, I see and I remember, I do and I understand" (Confucius). 

I will be focusing on reading and math, in addition to what the regular Montessori classroom teacher will do, in 2014 - 2015.  I hope you will be able to incorporate the information you find here to help support your child at home.

Reading:

1.  Read with your child every night if they are still learning to read. 
2.  Let them see you reading...
3.  Have a "read-a-book" contest this summer in your family; make the prize worth the time spent in reading. (Find out what motivates your child!)


Math: 

1.  Play math games in the car.  If there are three of you, to learn the multiplication facts for 3, have one person start by saying the number 3, the second person would say 6, and the third person would say 9.  Continue to rotate from person to person until you get 12 math facts out for the multiple of 3.  So the numbers everyone would say: 3, 6, 9, 12, 15, 18, 21, 24, 27, 30, 33, 36.  Do this with all the numbers 1 - 12.  You'll love the result, and we all ride a lot of places in the car.  You might as well be playing math games that will help your children with their multiplication math facts!
2.  Play Yatzee!
3.  Play the "10 Family" game.  (you can do this when you're driving too!)  The idea is to learn which numbers go together to make the number "10."  Start by saying, "What plus 1 = 10?"  Someone should answer, "9."  Go through all the numbers.  When everyone is good enough, you could just say, we're playing the "10 Family Game," and just say the number and the others would try to say the correct number to equal 10.  So someone says, "8," the others would say "2" as fast as they could.  You could keep score; that would keep it competitive!  Kids love to play games they can win at!