Children’s House - KOOMAL
Our Children’s House feels more like a home than a school. The room is purposefully created to match the needs of each age group whilst allowing the children to flow through as they decide who and where and what to ‘work’ with.
Specially designed learning materials are displayed on open shelves, easily accessible to the children. The room includes low sinks accessible to the children, child-sized furniture, a cosy space for quiet reading, reachable shelves with work available for free choice, and child-sized kitchen utensils so the children can eat, prepare, and clean up their snack on their own. The staff gently guide the children to help maintain the organisation and cleanliness of this environment to keep it orderly and attractive and to help your child understand how to care for materials and clean up after themselves—useful life-long skills.
The Montessori Early Childhood Curriculum follows a 3-year sequence which your child will follow at their own pace and may often exceed the concepts taught in a mainstream school.
Your pre-kindy child (3 year olds) will be enthralled in the practical life activities designed to support the development of confidence, independence and fine and gross motor skills. The children learn daily-life skills such as doing up clothing, preparing snacks, setting the table, caring for plants and animals on occasion. They also learn appropriate social interactions such as saying please and thank you, being kind and helpful, listening without interrupting and resolving conflicts peacefully.
By three years old, your pre-kindy child has already learnt much about their world through their different senses and is beginning to name their experiences of colour, taste, smell, touch, sound and what they see. In the pre-kindy year, the children begin to classify their surroundings and create order through the medium of language. This lays the foundation for learning by developing the ability to classify, sort and discriminate – skills necessary in mathematics, geometry and language. This is all done through play-based learning.
In their kindy year (4yrs), your child continues laying foundations for life long learning. Through hands on activities, they will learn to identify numerals and match them to their quantity; build their vocabulary through the cultural studies and develop skills needed for writing and reading. The ability to write, a precursor to reading, is taught first. Using hands on materials, your child will begin to learn letter sound and how to use a pencil.
The pre-primary year (5yrs) is a wondrous amalgamation of all the skills and concepts your child has been steadily accumulating. The understanding of place value begins to fall in place and the base 10 system. Your child will be introduced to addition, subtraction, multiplication and division and will explore patterns in the numbering system. Using the Montessori exploratory approach, your child will gain a firm understanding of the meaning behind the maths facts and concepts.
The exploration of letter sounds continues, and the sounds are combined to make words; sentences will be built. Once these skills are acquired, your child will, in all likelihood, learn to read spontaneously.
Throughout the three years – pre-kindy, kindy and pre-primary, your child will be experiencing a wide range of learning areas including history, geography, science, art and music. You child will learn about their community and the world around them. They will discover similarities and differences among people and places which will help them develop an understanding and appreciation of the diversity of our world and a respect for all living things.
Pre-primary is the culmination of the Children’s House Programme. Your child should begin to exhibit the independence, critical thinking, collaboration and leadership they have been practising and exercising them independently as they prepare to transition into the primary programme.