Chesapeake Montessori School

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When children enter the classroom they are immediately welcomed. It is a warm and friendly environment. The children are shown around the classroom and find familiar items in the Practical Life area. Children have an understanding of how many of these activities work, because they have seen them around home.

Maria Montessori describes the exercises of Practical Life as the foundation for all future learning. The children will develop concentration, coordination of movement, order and independence through these exercises. Practical life exercises can also be identified as daily living activities. The areas of practical life include preliminary exercises, grace and courtesy, care of self, care of the environment, control of movement and food preparation.

Through the use of the sensorial material, the children refine their senses. Children develop an understanding of dimension, size, shape, color, texture, sound, smell and taste through the use of the material. The children use a series of activities to discriminate among many objects by using their senses. The sensorial and practical life areas prepare children to enter into math, language and cultural studies.

The math program begins with the learning of one to one correspondence and the mastery of 1 through 10 and the concept of zero. The next step is learning the entire decimal system. This is the where the golden bead work is utilized. Children learn the physical reality and conceptual quantity of units, tens, hundreds, and thousands. The children are then introduced to mathematical operations using the golden beads with which they are now familiar. An important concept of exchange is taught in concrete format so that even young children can understand that once you reach ten units we must now exchange the units for tens and that ten units makes one ten. After concrete operations the children then learn the same operations in abstraction and begin paper and pencil tasks of adding and subtracting numbers to the thousands with exchanging. Memorization of math facts is also introduced and practiced. Other math concepts such as patterning, money, time, measurement and fractions are taught.

The children in the Montessori classroom learn to write and read phonetically. This means they learn to encode and decode words by learning the sounds in the English language. Children begin their language experiences with many kinds of games and activities that build phonemic awareness and pre-reading skills. Children move through the language curriculum working toward total reading and writing.

Children explore physical and cultural geography using a variety of exciting hands-on materials. The children learn about the continents and oceans. They explore land and water forms. The children use experimentation to learn concepts in life science, physical science, earth-space science. Our program also includes extensive botany and zoology studies.

Children are given the opportunity to work on craft projects daily. Our program also features art history and appreciation. The children are given presentation in the elements of art such as line, shape, texture, color, light and space.