The Hockessin Montessori School

A Brief Overview................................

Practical Life
*Grace and Courtesy - Children ages 3 through 6 continue integration of proper behavior and social skills by following the examples being modeled by their peers and the adults in their environment.  Grace and Courtesy lessons include, but are not limited to greeting others, opening and closing doors, offering snack and other items, establishing proper manners, respect towards others in large and small groups, and working in a community to make decisions which affect the whole group.
*Care of Self - Children at this stage of development gain a sense of self-worth through activities that promote independence by focusing on personal hygiene, caring for personal belongings, assuming individual responsibility for lunch, snack preparation, and clean up.
*Care of Environment - Children at this level continue to develop self-awareness and independence for the care of the classroom and school environment by maintaining cleanliness and order of their personal belongings and the learning environment, and by developing fundamental skills for the use and care of manipulative materials.
*Community Service - These children begin to develop awareness of current events and the importance of understanding their role in the school and the global community by participating in the Heiffer Projects, providing Hurricane Relief, and by being active participants in our Schoolyard Habitat project.

Sensorial
Students in the Children's House Program use manipulatives to gather knowledge about their world through visual, tactile, auditory, olfactory, and gustatory discrimination.  The manipulative materials prepare the child for the continued development of the mathematical mind and lay the foundation for understanding complex, abstract mathematical concepts.

Writing
Students in the Children's House Program engage in tactile activities with the use of concrete, manipulative materials which enable them to develop fine and gross motor skills.  Activities that aid in the development of writing include, but are not limited to, tracing insets, push-pin exercises, sand tray, Sandpaper Numerals and Letters, chalkboard, playdough, self-portraits, creating picture stories, dictation to adults.
Manuscript Handwriting Instruction is presented utilizing the Handwriting Without Tears Program.

Reading
Students at this level develop pre-reading skills through concrete activities and the use of manipulative materials.  Pre-Reading skills that are addressed in the Children's House Program include, but are not limited to, patterning, nomenclature, matching, vocabulary enrichment, association, classifcation, action words, opposites, rhyming, and transfiguration.  Reading skills that are addressed in the Children's House Program include, but are not limited to, initial sounds, short vowel words, silent "e" words, cowel dipthongs, consonant digraphs and blends, multisyllabic words, sight words, and reading comprehension activities through the use of the Accelerated Reader Program.
Oral Expression - Children continue to develop a vocabulary to express their needs and opinions.  Oral expression activities include individual lessons, group presentations, songs, sharing, fingerplays, looking at and sharing books, and telling stories from own pictures.

Research
The students explore and investigate topics of interest utilizing concrete materials, sharing, Read Alouds, silent picture reading, and the library.

Mathematics
The Children's House Mathematics Curriculum includes concrete presentations of abstract concepts and addresses the following topics: one to one correspondence, numeral recognition, symbol to quantity association, patterning, spacial reasoning, calendar, decimal system and place value, mathematical vocabulary, skip counting, concrete introductions to the operations of addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division, graphing, measurement, time, money, greater than and less than, comparisons, problem solving, two dimensional geometric shapes and three dimensional solids, and an introduction to Fractions.

Life Science
Children develop scientific intelligence through hands-on experiences in developing an awareness of self, awareness and exploration of plants and animals through classification, the food chain, fitness, nutrition, living versus non-living, comparisons, nomenclature and identification of parts of plants and animals.

Physical Sciences
Children develop scientific intelligence through hands-on experiences in the scientific method, individual and group experiments, sharing, and simple machines.

Earth Sciences
Children develop scientific intelligence through hands-on experiences in land, air, and water activities, land and water forms, the solar system, ecology, the study of the atmosphere and weather, and geology.

History and the Humanities
The Student's concept of time and history revolves around their daily schedule.  Concepts such as yesterday, today, and tomorrow, days of the week, months of the year, birthday celebrations and holidays help the Children's House Student to develop an awareness of the passage of time.
The Humanities Curriculum includes the study of cultures around the world by focusing the Fundamental Needs of Humans.