Preschool
2024 Program overview:
2, 3 or 5 full days: 8.30am - 4.00pm
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5 mornings a week: 8.30am-12.00pm
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Breakfast Club: 8.10am-8.30am
The prepared Environment
In a Montessori Early Childhood classroom, highly trained teachers create a customised environment crafted to their unique abilities, interests, and learning style.
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This approach to learning is “hands-on.” Dr. Maria Montessori believed (and modern science has affirmed) that moving and learning are inseparable. In the prepared classroom, children work with specially designed manipulative materials that invite exploration and engage the senses in the process of learning.
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All learning activities planned and lessons presented support children in choosing meaningful and challenging work at their own interest and ability level. This child-directed engagement strengthens motivation, supports attention, and encourages responsibility.
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Uninterrupted blocks of work time (typically 2.5 - 3 hours in length) allow children to work at their own pace and fully immerse themselves in an activity without interruption. Your child’s work cycle involves selecting an activity, performing it for as long as it remains interesting, cleaning up the activity and retuning it to the shelf, and making another work choice. This cycle respects individual variations in the learning process, facilitates the development of coordination, concentration, independence, and a sense of order, while facilitating your child’s assimilation of information. This in addition to presentations and lessons offered by educators.
A Welcoming Space
A Montessori Early Childhood classroom feels more like a home than a school. You won’t see desks, nor will a teacher stand at the front of the room delivering a lesson to the whole class. Instead, you’ll see children happily working individually or in small groups, at tables or on the floor near small mats that delineate their own space.
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Specially designed learning materials are displayed on open shelves, easily accessible to the children. Classrooms also include low sinks accessible to the children, child-sized furniture, cozy spaces for quiet reading, reachable shelves with work available for free choice, and child-sized kitchen utensils so the students can eat, prepare, and clean up their snack on their own. Teachers gently guide students 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—skills you will be happy to observe carrying over in your home.
Before and Afternoon Care
In 2024, we will introduce a breakfast club to cater to families requiring an early morning drop off. Breakfast Club will run from 8.10am - 8.30am and children are offered toast and cereal.
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The afternoon program is more play based and involves activities such as games, role play, outdoor play & sport (we have a very generous sandpit and beautiful wooden climbing frame) sport, craft, gardening, yoga, cooking and much more.
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Afternoon care is included in the full day bookings and is also available for families who are booking 5 mornings. For kindergarten children, afternoon care is included in their full-time enrolment.
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