Primary Curriculum
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Primary Montessori Curriculum Outline (ages 2 1/2 - 5)

Practical Life
Care of Self and Environment, Practical Tasks. Mastering buttons, zippers, bows, buckles. Carefully handling pitchers and pouring. Food preparation. Cutting, sorting, hole punching, sewing. Walking on "the line" with balance. Polishing a flower vase, ornament or mirror. Washing and scrubbing. Cultivating plants. All examples of activities that foster independence, self-control, coordination of the hand, and concentration. Each is a source of pride and joy, since every child's self esteem is built on knowing that he/she is capable.

Sensorial Material
Differentiating between sizes, colors, weights, forms, textures, musical sounds, odors, and tastes. Exercising the five senses to make finer and finer distinctions and gradations. Learning vocabulary expressing the experience, i.e., long, longer, longest; ovoid, pentagon; light blue, dark blue. Becoming a good observer through identifying, organizing, classifying and seriating. Blindfold games help form mental pictures leading the way to abstraction.

Language
Beginning vocabulary, naming an immense variety of objects.
Listening to stories, poems, and song lyrics. Playing games that highlight the sounds in spoken words. Alphabet explored through sight, sound and touch. Building words with the "Movable Alphabet". Vocabulary and phonetic exercises lead to reading and original composition. Pencil control developed through tracing and shading geometric forms. Advanced lessons highlight grammar and sentence construction.

Mathematics
Repeated sensorial impressions of geometry, various quantities, numeric symbols, the process of addition, multiplication, subtraction and division. Visual and muscular impressions are continued in a more abstract form in advanced lessons. Addition, subtraction, multiplication, and division tables are introduced through manipulating materials. Math becomes a subject approached with enthusiasm, when delivered through attractive and exciting Montessori materials.

Geography, History, Science
Exercises providing large stores of facts and impressions of different cultures, land and water forms, plant and animal life, and how the earth serves its living inhabitants. Natural sciences through indoor and outdoor nature experiments. Political geography through the puzzle maps. Historical figures introduced.

Art, Music, Drama
Cultural extensions of studies in history, geography and science (i.e., learning a song about how a flower grows, or performing a play on the parts of the tree). Developing a sense of creative expression. Experimenting with the components of art: color; shape; texture; etc. Systematic introduction of music with the "bells", an apparatus allowing one to internalize the middle C scale and to create one's own compositions.

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