Teaching Method

Education works towards a three-way objective: self-confidence, self-esteem, and autonomy.

1. 1. Working alone

To achieve these goals, the mood is organised so that children can act on their own:

• we provide original material, tailored to a child’s every need,
• the teaching team presents the material to children,
• activities are then carried out freely and individually. Children then take all the time they like to handle, think and observe…

2. Sufficiently long working spans

Over and above autonomy, material is designed to focus a child’s attention, to help him or her concentrate and build.

Children thus have all the time they need to repeat and complete an activity.

This activity will be made available to other children only after the first child has finished. This also teaches each child patience and respect for work achieved.
 

3. Age mix

Children’s Houses consist of children aged 3 to 6. The youngest can thus enjoy many more opportunities to interact with their “senior”, while the latter can test their newly acquired know-how and knowledge in their relations with younger children. 

4. Montessori material

The material provided to children is split into four fields: 

• Practical life

This consists of everyday objects or activities (buttoning up, unbuttoning, peeling, pouring water…).

These exercises, completely out of context, help them to perfect the movement, acquire the dexterity and the assurance they need to apply movements without fear of failure. They build self-confidence and autonomy.

• Sensory

Material with a series of materialised abstractions (big, small, green, smooth, rough…) that children are able to feel and sense (touch, sight…). They can then work on differentiation and comparison. We help children to arrange their perceptions of the outside world, in particular through classification and analysis.
Materials for geography, science, botany, music and designer art activities provide children with a solid foundation of knowledge and a beginning to their understanding of the world in which they live.

• Mathematics

Material designed especially to help children to experiment in a sensorial way with the concepts of numbers, quantities and operations in order to ease their way into the world of abstraction.
Many Montessori children leave their Children’s House with a real love of figures and mathematics.

• Language

Our school strives, once again, to teach language (reading and writing) through games designed to analyse sounds, associations of sounds and signs, and then sensory materials that help them to perfect their writing movements.

• Bread

Every morning, two children bake bread. They prepare the dough, knead it and leave it to rise. For the midday meal, these same children hand out the bread they have made and we all eat it together.

5. Bilingualism

Montessori’s Cool offers children two languages and two cultures, one English, one French.

Each educator talks and makes presentations in his or her native tongue. The two languages live together in the mood and children can absorb, discover or perfect the practice of a second language in their own time.