Primary

Practical Life Exercises are designed for a child to learn how to do living activities in a purposeful way.

This curriculum’s primary aim is to help the child gain control in the coordination of his/her movement, to acquire independence, and to adapt to his/her society.

Here, we teach a child through activities that include personal and professional care practices related to most aspects of living – activities for the preservation of health (regular hygienic practices) and the protection of the environment (disposing trash properly).

Our task is simply to demonstrate the correct way of doing these exercises in a way that allows a child to fully observe the movements. The goal is to show the actions so that the child can go off and repeat the activity in his or her own successful way.

The exercises are meant to resemble everyday activities, thus, we use materials that are familiar, real, and functional. We also utilize materials that are related to the child’s time and culture.

In this curriculum, we concentrate on the refinement of a child’s sense experiences such as dimension, color, texture, sound, and sight.

The purpose and aim of sensorial work is for your child to acquire clear, conscious information and to be able to then make classifications in his or her environment.

Since sensorial experiences begin at birth (as Maria Montessori maintains that a child is inherently a sensorial explorer), we offer the first steps in organizing, and then refining those chaotic impressions that your child has so far encountered. Through work with the sensorial materials, the child is given knowledge to classifying the things around him, which leads to the child making his/her own experiences in his/her environment.

Because language is an intricate involvement in the process of thinking, a child will need to be spoken to and listened to often.

Also, he or she will need to experience different modes of language and to hear and tell stories. Most importantly, your child needs to feel free and be encouraged to communicate with others.

It is in this aspect that MSO will provide him or her with a broad exposure to language, with correct articulation, enunciation, and punctuation.

Throughout all the activities involved in this curriculum, a child will be learning at his/her own rhythm to allow him or her to concentrate on the learning of each important step in language. Thus, each progressive step is done easily.

The language development of a child lies within our trained teaching staff who will support the child in his/her learning, give order to classify what has been learned, help build self-confidence, and provide meaningful activities. 

By the time he or she leaves our classroom after the age of six, your child will have become an articulate person, being able to communicate feelings in well-formed sentences and expressing these thoughts and feelings in a skillful handwriting. He or she will have the ability to write in different styles and about a variety of subjects. Your precious child will also have a firm grasp in the effective use of language at a level where he will be the master of his or her words.

In an MSO primary classroom, a child is introduced to precise quantitative terms as it is associated with name and symbol. Counting will also be presented to a child as a means for him or her to abstract and hold arithmetic quantities in his or her mind. But first, he or she has to understand that counting requires classifying the quality of “oneness” or “twoness” from the object or objects that represent them. In this regard, the Montessori Method has a series of scientifically designed activities that enable the child to make distinctions between “one-ness,” “two-ness,” and “ten-ness”.

After a child has familiarized himself with the first ten numbers, he is given a “whole” picture of the decimal system which is characterized by the arrangement of quantities into successive hierarchies of order that allows us to comprehend vast quantities by relating them to smaller ones. TEN units are too much to handle, therefore we create ONE ten, and so on.

Through a series of scientifically designed exercises which your child can repeat, he comes to realize the simple and elegant nature of the decimal system.

Your child will likewise be introduced to the dynamic manner in which quantities are manipulated in the decimal system.

What comes next in a child’s learning process is the introduction to the most basic arithmetic combinations–addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.

These mathematical operations are introduced through a variety of means that allows the child to understand the nature of the process by which he may commit the applications to memory.

When a child discovers that he has both a conceptual understanding of the decimal system and the skill of computing, he makes the transition to doing arithmetic operations abstractly or “mentally”.

MSO also presents geography, history, botany, zoology and music to a child as a means to his or her self-development: at the right time, in the right manner, by the right means, and for the right purpose. The child begins at the perceptual (sensorial) level and then gradually works towards a greater and greater abstract understanding of the subject matter.