This unique program was designed to give parents a mini-Montessori experience. Participants explored and created using materials from Infant Room sensorial activities to Upper Elementary advanced mathematics. By embarking on the Montessori “journey” themselves, parents grew to understand more fully how their children develop into passionate and perseverant learners.
Curricular Areas presented include:
- Infant Toddler Level– Increasing Independence, Grace and Courtesy, Care of Environment, Care of Self, Beginning Language Acquisition.
- Kindergarten and Primary– Focus-Building, Executive Function, Pre-writing Fine Motor, Social Skills (moving from parallel to cooperative play), Visual Precision (Pre-reading), Vocabulary and Labeling, Letter Recognition and Sounds, One-to-One Correspondence Counting, Language Acquisition, and Numeration up to 1,000.
- Lower Elementary– Grammar Lessons, Timelines of Life, Creation Story, Understanding of Place in the World and Universe, Self-Initiation and Innovation, Middle Mathematics, Learning How to Learn, and Community Service.
- Upper Elementary– Independent Responsibility for Academic Tasks, Ethics-Justice-Morality, World Community, Advanced Mathematics, Issues of Fairness, Increased Awareness of Self, Peer Learning, Entrepreneurship.
Significantly, these and other curricular topics were presented via “scaffolding” techniques. One of Montessori’s trademark characteristics, higher level skill acquisition depends directly upon the mastery of pre-requisite skills. Through “The Journey” parents experienced first-hand how their child’s education truly begins at the infant level. And that mastery of each step along the way is linear, cumulative, and integral.
