Our Curriculum

Our Curriculum is linked to Te Whāriki the New Zealand early childhood curriculum, this link takes you to the Te Whāriki document, parents have access to a more detailed document that links Te Whāriki to our own curriculum.

Our Montessori curriculum Includes:

Practical life activities: These activities help develop independence and confidence.  The preschool's environment provides the child with carefully prepared activities to develop real life skills.  These activities include  preparing morning tea for the class, baking, cleaning up after food activities, dusting, polishing, and dressing skills.

When shown how to do these activities children want to do them over and over again. By encouraging this instinctive repetition these activities build, among many things, concentration.

Sensorial Exercises: These help to clarify concepts of shape, colour, size, weight, serration and grading. They build a base of mathematical concepts and are essential early learning experiences.

Language activities: These introduce the child to a wealth of words and experiences through stories, songs and poems.   Other carefully prepared activities introduce children to the language of science and maths. Letters are taught phonetically and children taught this way quickly develop the skills to put together words and make stories. A series of activities introduces 'letter blends' and 'sight words' that need to be learnt (because a child can't sound them out to extract their meaning - like 'one' or 'we'). Using exercises that teach letter formation and orientation enables the child to build solid early reading and writing skills .

Maths activities: Numbers and counting are taught in a gradual and sequential way, taking the child from the concrete where they can handle the number five as a solid, tangible rod from one of the Montessori materials, to the abstract where they can understand the five in their mind and use it for simple equations. The decimal system is introduced in a hands on way which really helps the child in their future learning (in primary and high school, and beyond, when mathematical concepts become abstract). This foundation helps form a real-life understanding of fundamental concepts, such as the difference between a one and a thousand for example.

Geography: The world as a collection of continents is taught through song and jigsaw maps, we look at the animals and people from the continents and learn more about the customs and cultures of the human family.

History: We begin with the days of the week, the months of the year, the seasons, calendars and time.

Art: Art is available at all times.  Children are shown how to choose these activities from a resource based area.  They are also taught how to tidy up and prepare the space for the next child.

Zoology/Botany/Science: Plants, and their names and uses, animals and their environments, science experiments (both watched and those to experiment with) provide a wealth of experiences.

Music: Singing, poetry, music and dance is included in the programme.