Toddler Program (Pre-Primary)

 

 

Once a child is wear­ing train­ing under­pants dur­ing the day, he should wear them at night as well. It is a good idea to use flannel/​or rub­ber sheet­ing under the mat­tress cover to pro­tect the bedding.

 Prac­ti­cal Life:

It exer­cises develop inde­pen­dence, motor coor­di­na­tion, con­cen­tra­tion, sequen­tial mem­ory and social skills. While often appear­ing decep­tively sim­ple, these tasks estab­lish how the child views and val­ues him­self. The child builds basic trust in him­self and con­firms basic trust in the environment. Exer­cises are daily activ­i­ties to care for our­selves and our sur­round­ings, such as dress­ing, wip­ing nose, prepar­ing food, set­ting the table, dust­ing plants, sweep­ing floors, wash­ing dishes, etc. Most early prac­ti­cal life exer­cises are open-​ended, allow­ing the child to extend his atten­tion span nat­u­rally. Later prac­ti­cal life exer­cises (at the Pri­mary level), such as multi-​step food prepa­ra­tion and clean­ing exer­cises, chal­lenge mem­ory and sequenc­ing skills.

 Grace and Courtesy:

Children show respect for adults by making eye contact, lis­ten­ing, and respond­ing cour­te­ously. Sim­i­larly, we adults show respect for chil­dren by low­er­ing our heads to their level, look­ing at them, and lis­ten­ing to them. We, as adults, are the best lan­guage mod­els to chil­dren, who observe and absorb every­thing we say and do. There­fore, we must model grace and cour­tesy in the proper way when­ever we inter­act with adults and chil­dren. In this way, chil­dren can inte­grate these skills into their lives.

 

 

Maria Montes­sori stated, “Lan­guage is an instru­ment of col­lec­tive thought.” Pre-​primary chil­dren absorb lan­guage from their envi­ron­ment at a phe­nom­e­nal rate. In the Montes­sori envi­ron­ment, we focus on spe­cific vocab­u­lary enrich­ment. The mate­ri­als we use for devel­op­ing and enrich­ing lan­guage are:

Every tod­dler (pre-​primary stu­dent) has an art ses­sion with an art instruc­tor once a week at the Art Stu­dio. Each ses­sion is about 30 min­utes long. Once in the art stu­dio, the child is wel­come to choose his or her work, to receive a les­son or to cre­ate an art­work prac­tic­ing her or his art skills. Dur­ing the les­son time, the art teacher pro­vides gen­tle guid­ance on a one-​on-​one basis to each stu­dent on how to orga­nize his/​her own work­ing place, how to use age appro­pri­ate art mate­ri­als and how to put the work away and independently clean up the work space.

Tod­dler art cur­ricu­lum includes but is not lim­ited to:

• Draw­ing with col­ored pencils

• Paint­ing at the easel

• Glu­ing pre-​cut pieces of col­ored papers onto a cardboard

• Work­ing with poly­mer clay

 

 

 Music is a uni­ver­sal lan­guage that should be inte­gral to the life of the child, not just a sub­ject or a les­son. Music to some means sim­ply to play an instru­ment, or to sing, or to dance. But to many, and espe­cially to chil­dren, music is a mag­i­cal language.

Chil­dren love to sing. Singing songs devel­ops both sides of the brain and research has shown singing increases a child’s abil­ity in spa­tial rea­son­ing; addi­tion­ally, singing often light­ens the mood. All tod­dlers (Pre-​primary stu­dents) par­tic­i­pate in Kodály-​inspired group singing classes twice a week, and per­form in two school-​wide con­certs in Decem­ber and June.