Practice for everyday life
The main goal of practice for every day life is to create hands and bodies that move according to one’s will. Specific activities such as “pouring,” “cutting with scissors,” “gluing with glue,” “folding paper,” “opening and moving something,” “sewing,” and “washing dishes,” which children naturally become interested in as they spend their days. In the course of these activities, they use their hands and bodies a lot, acquire coordinated, smooth movements.
Sensory education
Sensory organs develop most during infancy and early childhood. Children learn to adapt their behaviour to the environment as they become more sensitive to the five senses; smells, sounds, sights, tastes and touch.
By using teaching tools that allow each of the five senses to work individually, children are able to organize, categorize, and refine their chaotic internal senses one by one. The rich sensory experience cultivated here leads to the ability to observe and notice things and to think, which is the foundation for intellectual activities such as language and numbers.
Mathematics education
Children already have many experiences related to quantity in their daily lives before they engage in number education. In the Montessori Method, the experiences and knowledge gained are organized and learned in a systematic manner. The abstract concept of “number”is represented by concrete objects such as sticks and beads, which are familiar to children, to help them understand the three-way relationship between “quantity, numeration, and number,” the concept of the decimal system, and the four mathematic operations. By acquiring the concept of numbers while handling physical objects, children acquire not only knowledge and operations understanding, but also the ability to think abstractly and logically.
Language education
Language education includes the elements of speaking, writing, reading, and grammar. Children are born with the ability to acquire language, but they need the right environment around them. Starting with activities to expand vocabulary, systematic teaching tools, materials, and activities are provided to enable children to use their fingertips and wrists to hold a pencil and write letters, which they develop through “practice for everyday life” and “sensory education”.
Cultural education
Children who have acquired and refined their motor functions and senses, and have developed logical and abstract thinking skills through practice for everyday life and sensory, number, and language education activities, will expand their interest in the phenomena around them. They will ask themselves, “Why?” “Why?” I want to know more! We develop activities that will help them satisfy their intellectual curiosity.
As they learn to classify the shapes of leaves, investigate and summarize the body parts of animals, plus understand more abstract matters, they become interested in the world’s landforms, continents, countries etc.. As they become interested in and accumulate knowledge about various aspects of the world, they will develop an ability to perceive and think about things from a broader perspective.
