The Montessori learning environment

The Montessori environment features five main areas: practical life, sensorial, mathematics, language, and culture. Each area includes specialised materials designed to teach specific skills or concepts. Through repeated use and practice, children build a strong foundation and can achieve mastery in many of these key areas.

Montessori educators present key lessons for each material, then children are invited to work independently with the materials to explore and learn.

Educators observe and document progress, intervening only where necessary, always mindful of developing independence in a child. New lessons are introduced when a child is ready for the next stage. Through opportunities in the long, uninterrupted work cycle for practice and repetition, children gain confidence and the ability to build upon their knowledge and skills.

Key areas of the learning environment

All areas of learning aim to bring order to the child’s impressions of the world.

Practical life: Focuses on fostering independence, social skills, co-ordination of movement. It features many home-like activities the child sees an adult do, such as food preparation, care of self and the environment. This area of learning forms the foundation of all later activities in Montessori education as it encourages concentration and the ability to sequence steps amongst other skills.

Sensorial: Invites children to explore through their senses many mathematical concepts such as weight, size, form, shape and the relationships between them. Sensorial activities offer the opportunity to classify and categorise the many impressions children have taken from the world, bringing order to chaos in their mind. Children explore pitch, volume, colour, taste and smell. Self-expression is incorporated into the Sensorial area through visual arts. Geographical concepts are also explored through puzzle maps and land and waterforms.

Mathematics: Is unique with materials and activities that isolate concepts and move from concrete to abstract and large to whole parts. It has a focus on a process of beginning with quantities that can be manipulated then written number symbols are introduced. Finally, the association of quantity and symbol are combined to explore counting & patterns, the four operations and fractions.

Language: Beginning with oral language, children play games incorporating movement to learn key functions of language. They are then introduced to the written symbol, again through games and hands-on learning. Writing comes before reading in Montessori learning. Children then progress to learning phonograms and grammar conventions simultaneously with reading.

Culture: Encompasses music, art and history.