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Curriculum
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The Shim Academy
1305 St. George Ave.
Roselle,
NJ 07203
teamkforce@aol.com
908-620-0404
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The Curriculum
The Montessori Classroom is a heterogeneous combination of three, four, and five-year-old boys and girls. This enables the younger child to observe and learn from the older children and encourages mutual cooperation in one another. Children are free to work at their own pace with materials they have chosen either alone or with others. Montessori believed that in order for a child to develop the fullest physical, spiritual, and intellectual potential, he/she must have freedom that can only be achieved through order and self-discipline.
Our classroom is divided into five areas: Practical Life, Sensorial, Mathematical, Language, and Cultural Subjects. |
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Practical Life
Practical Life exercises are designed to teach children life skills. Children are instinctively drawn to carry out the activities they see adults performing, and Montessori saw that it would be possible for the child to do this in a specially prepared environment where the child would be free to do such things as polishing, washing-up, sweeping, pouring, and sorting as often as he/she wanted and for as long as he/she wanted. This area develops the child's sense of order, concentration, coordination, and independence. |
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Sensorial
The Sensorial exercises allow the children to classify sensorial impressions in an organized and orderly manner through individual work and repetition. The Sensorial exercises are designed to:
- Develop visual perception
- Refine the tactile (touch) senses
- Educate the child's sense of smell and bring his/her attention to smells in the environment
- Refine the sense of taste
- Train the ear to differentiate between the different sounds (train the auditory sense)
Also, these exercises introduce the child to identify geometric shapes, and enable him/her to acquire visual knowledge of geometric forms, which lay a foundation for later study in Mathematics. Because of such clarity of the concepts abstracted, The Sensorial materials lay a foundation for Geography, Botany, Art, and Music as well. |
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Mathematical
The exercises of Practical Life have given the child the opportunity to develop logical and sequential thought patterns. The logical order of the Practical Life together with the mathematical order inherent in the Sensorial Materials has well prepared the child to work with mathematical materials. The Mathematical exercises teach the child quantity, meaning of zero, odd and even numbers and the relative meaning of number by sight, feel, and weight. After much practice with the counting exercises, and working with the numbers from 1 to 10 in several dimensions, the child attains knowledge of numbers as quantities and is able to give numeric value. Also, by working with beads, the child will develop an understanding of addition, subtraction, multiplication, division, and eventually the decimal system in a concrete way. The Mathematical exercises are designed to teach the child mathematical logic from a concrete aspect and move to an abstract level. |
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Language
Language and reading is introduced in many ways in a Montessori classroom. A child is encouraged to express himself individually and in a group. As he/she experiences things sensorially, he/she also learns to identify them verbally. A child learns the phonetic sounds of letters through sentence work, books, and labeling of familiar objects in the environment. Once a child is able to read three and four letter phonetic words and sentences, he/she is introduced to the expectations. The children are exposed to grammar, in a very concrete manner, using symbols to denote nouns, verbs and other parts of speech. |
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Cultural Subjects
Cultural Subjects in Montessori terms are the areas of knowledge which enrich the child's understanding of all aspects of the world he/she lives in, and under this heading are included various branches of Science, History, Geography, Music, Arts, and Crafts. |
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