The Montessori primary classrooms are uniquely designed to help children learn independence and cooperation while exploring the world around them. Our primary classrooms are stocked with a wide variety of materials to help children learn skills in practical life, language, math, science and geography.
Pink Tower
The pink tower is a sensorial material used in the primary classes that consists of ten graduated wooden cubes. The child stacks the cubes in sequence to form a tower, observing an incremental decrease in size. The exercise teaches vocabulary, visual discrimination, and fine motor control.
Sandpaper Letters
The sandpaper letters are cut outs of lower case letters made from sandpaper that the child traces with his fingers. They are presented three at a time and are a direct preparation for reading and writing. The lessons teach fine motor skills, letter formation, letter recognition, and the association of phonetic sounds with the corresponding letter symbol.
Moveable Alphabet
The moveable alphabet consists of individual lowercase letters that are kept in individual compartments in a large box. Vowels and consonants are made of contrasting colors. The child is able to “write down” words as he or she determines the component sounds. Exercises begin with very simple 3-letter words and progress to longer words containing phonograms and letter combinations.
Puzzle Maps
This set of 8 puzzles maps the world’s continents and the United States is the introduction to geography in a Montessori classroom. As the children manipulate the pieces, they are learning to recognize the continents. Extensions to the work hone reading and writing skills.
Golden Beads
The golden beads are math materials that are used to teach in a concrete manner the basics of the decimal system–one bead represents a unit, 10 beads are wired together to represent one 10, ten 10’s are wired together to represent one hundred, and ten 100’s are wired together to represent one thousand. A variety of activities familiarize students with the names of the categories and the matching bead quantity.
Binomial Cube
The binomial cube is a sensorial activity in the primary classroom that uses a variety of cubes and prisms to present the binomial equation as a three dimensional puzzle activity.
Dressing Frames
The dressing frames are practical life activities that teach children care of self that leads the child to independence. The activities, snapping, zipping, buttons, also hone fine motor skills.
