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CAPE FARM MONTESSORI
PRESCHOOL PROGRAM FOR AGES 3-6 YEARS

"The goal of early childhood education should be to activate each child’s own natural desire to learn". ~ Maria Montessori

THE MONTESSORI APPROACH

Montessori education is a child-centered approach to learning that fundamentally believes children are instinctively keen learners who, when immersed in engaging and interesting environments, have the ability to learn and discover seemingly entirely on their own! In Montessori classrooms, teachers observe children, and based on these observations, make adjustments to the environment in order to meet each child’s individual interests and learning styles. Montessori children learn through play, are free to discover their own interests and passions, and are given the tools to pursue these interests independently - laying the foundations for becoming happy and fulfilled adults with a lifelong love of learning.

Montessori moves the focus from "what" children learn (content based learning) to "how" they learn (process based learning), and it is because of this that children from Montessori schools are not only academic high performers but they are also collaborative, empathetic, and self-driven.

PRESCHOOL PROGRAM
  • Our preschool classroom will have a maximum of 25 children whose ages range from 3 to 6 years.
  • The Preschool class will have 1 lead teacher and 2 assistants.
  • Enrollment is for five days a week from 07:30 to 13:00/13:20.
  • Regular attendance is strongly encouraged at this age and parents are required to adhere strictly to the relevant school times.
  • The Preschool child will enjoy full access to the outdoor environments, including the outdoor classroom, playground and vegetable garden with supervised access to the animal enclosure and pond area.

Curriculum overview
Profound respect for each child characterizes our programmes for Toddlers and Pre-schoolers. These programs foster growth in independence and problem solving; the development of order, concentration, and coordination; the nurturing of oral communication skills; and the stimulation of the child’s joy in discovery learning.

Practical Life is the area of development in which the child creates, controls, changes, or cares for his physical environment and his physical well-being. Practical life is the most basic and essential area of Montessori development. There are three goals of practical life that make it a foundation of the child’s future life as a whole:

  1. Through these activities the child grows to respect and love the physical work around him/her, both natural and manmade.
  2. The child develops techniques and skills that are basic to other areas of development.
  3. The child unites his/her growing body, developing intelligence and will.

The success of our work depends upon this foundation. The child chooses what he/she will do. The child acts upon his/her decision with intelligence. The child’s use of his/her body within the environment is an act of work. The work process, freely chosen, done with self-discipline, using physical skills in an intelligent way, is the child’s daily product. The result is a free child, creating through his/her work a free adult.

Sensorial exercises are done with an extensive set of materials, each of which isolate one sensorial property and expand upon it: e.g., shape, weight, texture, or pitch is matched, graded, or contrasted. The sensorial work allows the child to develop his/her sensory awareness and organize his/her perceptions to form concepts and abstractions. The purpose of this work is threefold:

  1. The satisfaction of the work with the materials
  2. The ability to perceive one’s environment with sensitivity and intelligence
  3. The appreciation of the natural order that intelligent awareness cultivates in one’s life.

Cognitive work in math and language develops from concrete sensorial materials that the child manipulates, forming the foundation for the use of symbols. The child will first have the experience before he or she uses the symbols that represent it. With the symbols, the child begins to communicate what he or she knows and does. Thus, a child’s school life is not divorced from reality and does not become something apart from life, but rather is a natural development of his personal being.

Geography, reading and writing, grammar and syntax, music, art, science, algebra, and geometry are developed in gradual stages from the concrete sensorial to the abstract conceptual through sequential materials and exercises and repetition of these exercises. Each child works from his own choice at his own pace, successfully completing self-correcting materials.