The unique education philosophy set out a century ago by Dr. Maria Montessori aims to develop the child’s innate desire to learn. Dr. Montessori recognized that a natural curiosity and a love of knowledge drive children.   

To educate the whole child Dr. Montessori felt the child must have the freedom to learn at his own pace and in his own individual manner.  The Directress or the guide directs the child’s energies into constructive learning channels, taking into account the differences in learning styles and pace. The environment is specially prepared to encourage directed, independent learning. The directresses guide the activity by giving knowledge in the form of presentations. They carefully observe and record the child’s efforts on a daily basis so that the child’s progress is immediately available in their file. The child is able to learn and acquire an ‘inner discipline’. This is the core of the Dr. Montessori educational philosophy.

“We are helping the child to help himself.”

Dr. Montessori observed that the child passes through definite periods of sensitivity for acquiring knowledge and skills. The Montessori curriculum integrates these sensitive periods, with the individual interests of the child to design a cumulative curriculum:

• Practical Life
  The Practical Life exercises relate directly to daily living tasks. They are activities a child sees being carried out every day in his home. From learning to put on his coat to peeling a carrot or polishing silver, the child gains independence and develops fine motor movement essential for
  future writing skills.
• Sensorial
  

  “The senses, being explorers of the world, open the way to knowledge”

  -Dr. M. Montessori.

  This group of activities helps in refining the child’s senses. Dr. Montessori designed these materials to isolate individual senses and to show the child how to pair and eventually grade the materials according to colour, taste, smell, touch and sound. Activities for all the senses begin with simple tasks and move toward materials that require more skill.
• Language
  In the Montessori Method of education, reading is taught by the ‘Phonetic’ method. ‘Phonetic’ means ‘by sound’ and the whole system for teaching reading is based on teaching the child the phonetic sound of each letter of the alphabet.
• Math
  The young child loves to count and does so as a rhyme. This is done in a similar manner as the phonetic sounds but only after some sound work has been done with the child. Once a child is comfortable with numbers and quantities of 1-10, she is introduced to the decimal system and begins to learn the four operations of addition, subtraction, multiplication and division. The Montessori Math materials are very extensive and always move from the concrete onto the abstract.     
• Geography
  Geography is an integral part of the curriculum and is incorporated into every aspect of the school. Dr. Montessori believed that the best way to introduce a concept was by first looking at the whole and then breaking it down into the integral parts. The globe is presented, then the land and water forms followed by the puzzle map of the Continents and then the individual continent maps. Climate, customs, language, music, dance and peoples are part of our geography studies.
  The child is introduced to science through observations and simple experiments; zoology, botany, Biology and Geology are incorporated into the Montessori curriculum.