Roanoke Valley Montessori School

The core of the Montessori Primary Curriculum is made up of Practical Life, Sensorial, Language, Math, Science, Geography and Art.

Practical Life

This includes daily living tasks, such as pouring juice, polishing shoes, sweeping, and buttoning a shirt. To the child, these are meaningful activities that involve caring for himself, other people, and the environment. They also help the child concentrate, expand his attention span, and improve hand-eye coordination.

Sensorial

These materials isolate a defining quality, such as color, size, sound, texture, or shape. They help to develop the child's visual, auditory, and tactile senses. Some Montessori materials, such as the binomial cubes, are concrete representations of mathematical concepts that appear in later schooling.

Language

The language materials include objects and pictures to be named, matched, labeled, and classified to aid vocabulary development. Textured letters allow the child to feel and see the alphabet, while the moveable alphabet leads the child towards reading. Once the child begins to blend sounds to make words, a variety of materials are available, ranging from simple three-letter, short-vowel words to read, to materials designed to teach long-vowel sounds, phonograms, and parts of speech. A wide variety of reading materials are used to gain proficiency and a love of reading.

Math

Math is a concrete experience in the Montessori classroom. The children are constantly manipulating objects in their efforts to understand number concepts. The early materials are designed to teach the very basics, such as the quantity and symbols of the numbers one to ten. Spindle boxes allow the child to see what "nothing" or zero looks like. Moving toward the more advanced materials, bead bars teach concepts ranging from units, tens, hundreds, and thousands, to addition, multiplication, subtraction and division. These traditional materials are supplemented with teacher-made games and materials for learning a variety of simple concepts, such as time, money, and fractions.

Science

Science activities are nature-based, and include the study of vertebrate and invertebrate animals, a variety of plant types, and environments around the world that support this wide range of flora and fauna. Love and respect for all life are emphasized.

Geography

Children are given an introduction to physical and cultural geography through the use of wooden puzzle maps, activities with objects from other countries, and international celebrations and snacks throughout the year. Songs, stories and games are incorporated into daily routines as we "travel" the globe visiting a different continent each month.