The prepared environment

From 2 ½ years and up to 6 years, Montessori-Palau Montgrí has a 100 m2 classroom with a natural outdoor environment, equipped with materials tailored to the child, arranged in a specific and precise order, with a design that awakens their interest and sensitivity. This environment is similar to that of a home. The classrooms include all the Montessori Pedagogic material. The opportunities for movement within the classroom are aimed at refinement, which will help in acquiring the abstract concepts of knowledge of the environment and of all other areas of the curriculum.

The role of the adult

The role of the adult is to guide the child. In order to carry out this task with all the complexity that this entails, the first thing adults have to do is to train themselves, both from a technical and a personal point of view. Another role of the Guide is to design and prepare the most appropriate environment for the developmental stage and to create a link between the child and the environment and the child and the group, promoting initiative, autonomy, creativity and individual and social responsibility. Within this environment, every adult should act as a role model for the child, being aware of every detail as the child will imitate them. Through observation, the Guide will discover individual needs and interests, both cultural and psychological, taking human tendencies and the psychological characteristics of this age into account. The information collected helps them to plan the most appropriate presentations at any time and to which groups of children they will be given, in order to guide the child towards their full development.

The principal work of the child

The student builds neural connections in their brain through the choice of work and the performance and repetition of the materials presented and through their sensory exploration, which will allow them to express human tendencies for their self-construction, both psychic and physical. It is the stage of the creation of the person. It must be borne in mind that the child is in the stage of development of the self, which is why, in the first years, their work and the presentations are essentially individual, although the areas of language, mathematics and knowledge do have presentations made in small groups.

The curriculum and its extensions

At this stage, the curriculum, i.e. what children should learn, is based on areas designed by taking into consideration the psychological characteristics and sensitive periods of children from 2 ½ to six years old. At this stage we work on the Practical Life Area, the Sensory Area, the Language Area, the Language Extension Area, the Mathematics Area and the Personal, Emotional and Affective Development Area.

• The practical life area

This should be understood as the area of adaptation, of knowledge of structure and operation, in order to develop and perfect the tasks of daily life that will determine personal autonomy and initiative for the other areas. With the structure of the classroom, the practical life area allows children opportunities for social development and communication so that it influences grace and courtesy as well as a sense of community service and individual and social responsibility. This area also influences the development of the ability to overcome challenges and solve practical problems and is also indirectly aimed at preparing for reading, writing, logic, and mathematics. Part of artistic expression can also be considered practical life due to its aspects of caring for the person.

Physical activity program for neuro-sensory-psychomotor organization

The area of practical life, with regard to caring for the person, includes the area of physical activity or psychomotor skills that is oriented towards neuro-sensory development and movement. The goal is to build good brain organization through physical exercises in order to streamline neurological connections. This area is worked on daily and with small age-based groups.

• The sensory area

In terms of refinement of the senses, children at this age are in the sensitive period and, thus, students are provided with a series of sensory experiences that allow them to respond to this particular interest and ability. Through this work, the child can build their mental organization and mental images of abstract concepts that, on the one hand, will allow them to develop their ability to observe the environment and their ability for experimentation and scientific analysis, in addition to working on the mental development with which they will develop their intelligence; and, on the other hand, constitutes an indirect preparation for geometry, arithmetic and the development and precision of language.

• The language area

In addition to being a continuation of everything related to the improvement of communication, as children mature, their communicative interest expands towards writing and reading. Thus, in this cycle, children are initiated into these basic skills instrumental for their future learning. And in order to improve their oral and written communication, they are presented with the content of the grammar area such as the functions of words and sentence analysis.

Learning English is through an English-speaking assistant who communicates with the children using this language. This assistant accompanies the group in the dining room and at snack times and leads the physical education sessions and listening. Working with English begins with the same activities in which they work with their mother-tongue and focuses on oral work and enrichment of vocabulary. In our case, we use the vocabulary guide from the Cambridge Young Learners exams together with the Montessori nomenclature methodology. Working on classified nomenclatures is carried out in the three languages; Catalan, Spanish and English. Activities to enhance oral language in English will be carried out in following year.

• The extension of language area

An important part of the child's vocabulary will be specific to the knowledge areas. Thus, content and concepts from the areas of geology, botany, geography, and science in general are presented in order to bring the world closer to the child and open their mind to all fields of knowledge. In addition, other languages such as artistic, both plastic and musical language, are also found in this area. The child begins literacy with their mother tongue or, if this is not possible, with the language chosen by their parents. In the English language area, we work on preparing for global reading, enriching vocabulary and, this year, start stimulating oral language.

• The mathematics area

Although mathematics is considered a language, academically it is treated as a specific area. Children begin with geometry through the sensory area and here they begin with that which relates to numbering, the decimal system and the concepts of the four operations.

All this is done through practising with the materials in order to continue promoting initiative, the scientific method, the capacity for logical reasoning and the capacity for observation. They can also work on the memorization of operations based on mental calculation and with problems, until they reach a process of abstraction of the operations.

With Montessori Pedagogy, academic learning and the acquisition of cognitive skills are integrated with emotional learning; creating a work environment that allows the student to be prepared for their development. In addition, this work provides a notable expansion of the areas compared to the official curriculum for the 2nd cycle of Primary Education (3 to 6 years).

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