The Montessori program for 2.5 to 6 years involves a series of activities that are sequential, manipulative, and sensorial. These activities take advantage of the sensitive periods of a child’s development and bridge the gap between concrete and abstract learning. The Casa program is ideally a three to four year learning cycle. The Casa environment includes five areas:

Practical Life
Practical Life exercises include skills for everyday living that assist the child to master motor functions and offer them the means to take care of themselves and their environment. These exercises are classified under headings of Preliminary Exercises; Care of the Environment; Care of Self; Grace and Courtesy, and Movement. They include such tasks as zipping, shoe polishing, buttoning, and scrubbing tables.

Sensorial
The Montessori sensorial materials help the child to heighten its senses and the perceptions they receive from them. These materials encourage investigation of visual, auditory, tactile, identification and discrimination.

The sensorial materials provide a solid foundation for mathematics, geometry, geography, history, botany, art and music. They have a built in control of error that allows for individual work and repetition. Also, the materials enable the child to work independently, unafraid of making mistakes, becoming comfortable with the fact that errors are essential to the process of learning. The exercises include Colour Boxes, Geometry Cabinet, Pink Tower, Sound Boxes and Fabric Boxes. Following these early exercises, academic materials are presented as the child’s interest develops.

Language Arts
Children have boundless capacity to expand and enrich their language and, as a natural consequence, the desire to read and write. Educators know that language is not something taught by another, but something created by the children themselves. The educator’s task is to merely facilitate the process. Through the use of Sandpaper Letters, a Movable Alphabet, and Metal Insets the children learn to write and, subsequently, through the use of phonetic sounds blended together, to read.

Mathematics
The Montessori mathematical materials give the children a concrete sensorial experience of the abstraction that is the essential element of mathematics, allowing them to store concepts so that later they will be able to deal with those exclusively in abstract terms. Children learn addition, multiplication, subtraction, and division, through materials appropriate to their development, thereby achieving an understanding on which to build a solid foundation for their future education.

Cultural
This area of the Montessori environment includes the care of plants and pets in the classroom; music; French; Spanish; basic science concepts; botany; zoology; geography; history; and art which all contribute to the child having a broader knowledge and awareness of the global environment. Through singing, finger plays, arts and crafts the child’s creativity is encouraged. An essential part of their learning is to have fun and be part of a community of friends.